SART, the name applied by the Turks to the Tajak aborigines of Trans-Oxiania. The Sart or Tajak from time immemorial have occupied the tract in Central Asia which has as boundaries Siberia, India, Persia, and China. The Tajak is Iranian. He is met with in largest numbers in the khanate of Bokhara and in Badakhshan, but many have settled in the towns of Khokand, Khiva, Chinese Tartary, and Afghanistan. The Tajak is of a good middle height, has a broad, powerful frame of bones, and especially wide shoulder-bones, but they diverge from the Iranian ; they have tbe Turanian wider forehead, thick cheeks, thick nose, and large mouth. The Tajak originally came from the sources of the Oxus, in the steppe of Pamir. The term is from Taj, a crown, the fire-worshipper's head-dress. But the Tajak does not so style himself, and regards the term as derogatory. The Tajak is covetous, unwarlike, and given to agriculture and trade ; fond of literary pursuits, and polished, and it is owing to their preponderance in Bokhara that that city has been raised to the position of the headquarters of Central Asiatic cvilisation, for there, from pre-Islaanic times, they have continued their previous exertions in mental culture, and, notwithstanding the oppressions which they have sustained from a foreign power, have civilised their conquerors. Most of the celebrities in the
field of religious knowledge and belles-lettres have been Tajaks, and at the present day the most conspicuous of the mullah and ishan arc Tajaks, and the chief men of the Bokhara and Khiva court are Tajak, or, as the Turks style the race, Sart. Vambery considers the Tajak and Sart identical, but he recognises that in their physiognomic peculiarities the Sart differs greatly from the Tajak, being more slender, with a larger face and a higher forehead ; but these changes Vambery attributes to frequent intermarriages between Sart. men and Persian slaves.- In Kliiva they number 20,000 families, all engaged in trade, industrial pursuits, and rearing silk-worms. They have fino beards, but are unwarlike, unacquainted with the tnanagement of horses or the use of arma—Collett, Khiva ; Cent. Asia; l'ambery.