Task: Question Answering
Input (English): Context: The Saka or Saca  ;  "Sákai";   "*Sk",  "Si") was the term used in Persian and Sanskrit sources for the Scythians, a large group of Eastern Iranian nomadic tribes on the Eurasian Steppe. Modern scholars usually use the term Saka to refer to Iranians of the Eastern Steppe and the Tarim Basin. René Grousset wrote that they formed a particular branch of the "Scytho-Sarmatian family" originating from nomadic Iranian peoples of the northwestern steppe in Eurasia. They migrated into Sogdiana and Bactria in Central Asia and then to the northwest of the Indian subcontinent where they were known as the Indo-Scythians. In the Tarim Basin and Taklamakan desert region of Northwest China, they settled in Khotan and Kashgar which were at various times vassals to greater powers, such as the Han and Tang dynasties of Imperial China., Sandakhshatra , Sandaksatru or Sandakuru was a Cimmerian king in the late 7th century BC. According to the Assyrian inscriptions provided by Ashurbanipal , King of Assyria , he was the son of Tugdamme . These inscriptions show that Tugdamme was killed in battle but that Sandakhshatra survived and thus became the next King of the Saka , a Scythian tribe . It has been speculated that Sandakhshatra was the famed Cyaxares who helped in conquering Assyria ., Herodotus ("Hródotos") was a Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus in the Persian Empire (modern-day Bodrum, Turkey) and lived in the fifth century BC (484 425 BC), a contemporary of Socrates. He is widely referred to as "The Father of History" (first conferred by Cicero); he was the first historian known to have broken from Homeric tradition to treat historical subjects as a method of investigationspecifically, by collecting his materials systematically and critically, and then arranging them into a historiographic narrative. "The Histories" is the only work which he is known to have produced, a record of his "inquiry" (or "historía") on the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars, including a wealth of geographical and ethnographical information. Some of his stories were fanciful and others inaccurate; yet he states that he was reporting only what was told to him and was often correct in his information. Despite Herodotus' historical significance, little is known of his personal history., The Tarim Basin is an endorheic basin in northwest China occupying an area of about . Located in China's Xinjiang region, it is sometimes used synonymously to refer the southern half of the province, or Nanjiang. Its northern boundary is the Tian Shan mountain range and its southern boundary is the Kunlun Mountains on the edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. The Taklamakan Desert dominates much of the basin. The historical Uyghur name for the Tarim Basin is Altishahr (), which means "six cities" in Uyghur., The British Museum is dedicated to human history, art and culture, and is located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection, numbering some 8 million works, is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence and originates from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present., Aššur (Akkadian; 'shr; : shr : shr, Kurdish Asûr), also known as Ashur and Qal'at Sherqat, was an Assyrian city, capital of the Old Assyrian Empire (20251750 BC), Middle Assyrian Empire (13651050 BC), and for a time, the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911605 BC). The remains of the city are situated on the western bank of the Tigris River, north of the confluence with the tributary Little Zab River, in modern-day Iraq, more precisely in the Al-Shirqat District in the Saladin Governorate., An empire is defined as "an aggregate of nations or people ruled over by an emperor or other powerful sovereign or government, usually a territory of greater extent than a kingdom, as the former British Empire, French Empire, Brazilian Empire, Russian Empire, Ottoman Empire, Byzantine Empire or Roman Empire." An empire can be made solely of contiguous territories such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or of territories far remote from the homeland, such as a colonial empire., The Eurasian Steppe, also called the Great Steppe or the steppes, is the vast steppe ecoregion of Eurasia in the temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands biome. It stretches from Romania, Moldova through Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Xinjiang and Mongolia to Manchuria, with one major exclave located mostly in Hungary, the Puszta., Mesopotamia ("[land] between rivers"; from Ancient Armenian  (Mijagetq); "bild ar-rfidayn" "miyn rodn"; "Beth Nahrain" "land of rivers") is a name for the area of the TigrisEuphrates river system, in modern days roughly corresponding to most of Iraq plus Kuwait, the eastern parts of Syria, Southeastern Turkey, and regions along the Turkish-Syrian and IranIraq borders., Tugdamme (also Dugdammi and, in classical Greece, Lygdamis) was Cimmerian king of the mid-seventh century BC., The ancient Near East was the home of early civilizations within a region roughly corresponding to the modern Middle East: Mesopotamia (modern Iraq, southeast Turkey, southwest Iran, northeastern Syria and Kuwait), ancient Egypt, ancient Iran (Elam, Media, Parthia and Persia), Anatolia/Asia Minor and Armenian Highlands (Turkey's Eastern Anatolia Region, Armenia, northwestern Iran, southern Georgia, and western Azerbaijan), the Levant (modern Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and Jordan), Cyprus and the Arabian Peninsula. The ancient Near East is studied in the fields of Near Eastern archaeology and ancient history., Cyaxares ("Uvaxštra", , ; r. 625585 BC), the son of King Phraortes, and according to Herodotus was the third and most capable king of Media. According to Herodotus, Cyaxares, grandson of Deioces, had a far greater military reputation than his father or grandfather. He was the first to divide his troops into separate sections of spearmen, archers, and horsemen., Sanskrit (English pronunciation:; written in Devanagari script ; : or ', originally ', "refined speech") is the primary sacred language of Hinduism and "Mahyna" Buddhism, a philosophical language in Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism. It was also a literary language that was in use as a "lingua franca" in ancient and medieval South Asia. It is a standardised dialect of Old Indo-Aryan, originating as Vedic Sanskrit and tracing its linguistic ancestry back to Proto-Indo-Iranian and Proto-Indo-European. Today it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand. As one of the oldest Indo-European languages for which substantial written documentation exists, Sanskrit holds a prominent position in Indo-European studies., The Neo-Assyrian Empire was an Iron Age Mesopotamian empire, in existence between 911 and 612 BC. The Assyrians perfected early techniques of imperial rule, many of which became standard in later empires.
Following the conquests of Adad-nirari II in the late 10th century BC, Assyria emerged as the most powerful state in the known world at the time, coming to dominate the Ancient Near East, East Mediterranean, Asia Minor, Caucasus, and parts of the Arabian peninsula and North Africa, eclipsing and conquering rivals such as Babylonia, Elam, Persia, Urartu, Lydia, the Medes, Phrygians, Cimmerians, Israel, Judah, Phoenicia, Chaldea, Canaan, the Kushite Empire, the Arabs, and Egypt. 
The Neo-Assyrian Empire succeeded the Old Assyrian Empire (C.2025-1750 BC), and the Middle Assyrian Empire (1365-1050 BC) of the Late Bronze Age. During this period, Aramaic was also made an official language of the empire, alongside the Akkadian language., Near East is a geographical term that roughly encompasses Western Asia. Despite having varying definitions within different academic circles, the term was originally applied to the maximum extent of the Ottoman Empire. The term has fallen into disuse in English and has been replaced by the terms "Middle East" and "West Asia"., Sogdia (New Persian: , "soghd") or Sogdiana was the ancient Indo-European civilization of an Iranian people that at different times included territory located in present-day Tajikistan and Uzbekistan such as: Samarkand, Bukhara, Khujand, Panjikent and Shahrisabz. Sogdiana was also a province of the Achaemenid Empire, eighteenth in the list on the Behistun Inscription of Darius the Great (i. 16). In the Avesta, Sogdiana is listed as the second best land that the supreme deity Ahura Mazda had created. It comes second, after Airyanem Vaejah, "homeland of the Aryans", in the Zoroastrian book of Vendidad, indicating the importance of this region from ancient times. Sogdiana was conquered by the Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great in 328 BC and later formed part of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom and Sasanian Empire., Bactria or Bactriana was the name of a historical region in Central Asia. The English name Bactria is derived from the , a Hellenized version of the Bactrian endonym "". Analogous names include the Pashto and , Uzbek: , , , and . Bactria was located between the Hindu Kush mountain range and the Amu Darya river, covering the flat region that straddles modern-day Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan., Assyria was a major Mesopotamian East Semitic-speaking kingdom and empire of the ancient Near East. It existed as an independent state from perhaps as early as the 25th century BC in the form of the Assur city-state, until its lapse between 612 BC and 599 BC, spanning the Early to Middle Bronze Age through to the late Iron Age., A city-state is a sovereign state that consists of a city and its dependent territories. Historically, this included cities such as Rome, Athens, Carthage, and the Italian city-states during the Renaissancebut today only a handful of sovereign city-states exist, with some disagreement as to which are city-states. A great deal of consensus exists that the term properly applies to Singapore, Monaco, and Vatican City., Nineveh was an ancient Assyrian city of Upper Mesopotamia, located on the outskirts of Mosul in modern-day northern Iraq. It is on the eastern bank of the Tigris River, and was the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire., The Taklamakan Desert (Xiao'erjing:  ; ), also spelt "Taklimakan" and "Teklimakan", is a desert in southwest Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, northwest China. It is bounded by the Kunlun Mountains to the south, the Pamir Mountains and Tian Shan (ancient Mount Imeon) to the west and north, and the Gobi Desert to the east. , Ashurbanipal ('Ashur is the creator of an heir'; 668 BC  c. 627 BC), also spelled Assurbanipal or Ashshurbanipal, was an Assyrian king, the son of Esarhaddon and the last strong king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (934609 BC). He is famed for amassing a significant collection of cuneiform documents for his royal palace at Nineveh. This collection, known as the Library of Ashurbanipal, is now housed at the British Museum, which also holds the famous "Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal" set of Assyrian palace reliefs., Northwestern China (, Xbi) includes the autonomous regions of Xinjiang and Ningxia and the provinces of Shaanxi, Gansu, and Qinghai., Subject: sandakhshatra, Relation: country_of_citizenship, Options: (A) academic (B) achaemenid empire (C) afghanistan (D) armenia (E) assyria (F) athens (G) azerbaijan (H) babylonia (I) british (J) british empire (K) china (L) georgia (M) greece (N) india (O) iran (P) iraq (Q) kazakhstan (R) kuwait (S) london (T) mongolia (U) ottoman empire (V) persian empire (W) roman empire (X) romania (Y) russian empire (Z) singapore ([) tajikistan (\) tibet (]) turkey (^) uzbekistan
Output (English): iran