Man from the Saka Kingdom of Khotan 7th-9th C. CE

"Saka, or Sakan, was a variety of Eastern Iranian languages, attested from the ancient Buddhist kingdoms of Khotan, Kashgar and Tumshuq in the Tarim Basin, in what is now southern Xinjiang, China. It is a Middle Iranian language. The two kingdoms differed in dialect, their speech known as Khotanese and Tumshuqese.

The Saka rulers of the western regions of the Indian subcontinent, such as the Indo-Scythians and Western Satraps, spoke practically the same language.

In the 11th century, it was remarked by Mahmud al-Kashgari that the people of Khotan still had their own language and script and did not know Turkic well. It is believed that the Tarim Basin became linguistically Turkified by the end of the 11th century [the Islamic Kara-Khanid conquest of Khotan].

Other than an inscription from Issyk kurgan that has been tentatively identified as Khotanese (although written in Kharosthi), all of the surviving documents originate from Khotan or Tumshuq. Khotanese is attested from over 2,300 texts preserved among the Dunhuang manuscripts, as opposed to just 15 texts in Tumshuqese. These were deciphered by Harold Walter Bailey. The earliest texts, from the fourth century, are mostly religious documents. There were several viharas in the Kingdom of Khotan and Buddhist translations are common at all periods of the documents. There are many reports to the royal court (called haṣḍa aurāsa) which are of historical importance, as well as private documents."

-taken from Wikipedia and Alphabet, A Key To The History Of Mankind by David Diringer

Source:

https://www.dandebat.dk/eng-dk-historie15.htm

Quote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saka_language

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.57042/page/n351/mode/2up