Subtitle: "A cautionary note on the application of limited linguistics studies to whole populations"
A prefatory note on "anthropology". In the early 90s, I was deeply involved in the first ancient DNA studies on the Tarim mummies* with Paolo Francalacci, an anthropologist at the University of Sassari. Sardinia. Paolo was deputed to work with me by the eminent population geneticist, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza of the Stanford medical school genetics department, who was unable to endure the rigors of the expedition to Eastern Central Asia.
[*Wikipedia article now strangely distorted for political reasons. Be skeptical of its claims, especially those based on recent DNA studies.]
After we had collected the tissue samples in the field, Paolo took them back to Sassari to extract and analyze the attenuated DNA. This involved amplification through PCR (polymerase chain reaction), a process that later gained great fame during the years of the coronavirus pandemic, inasmuch as it is an essential step in the detection and quantification of messenger RNA (mRNA). Indeed, two Penn scientists, Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó, were awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on mRNA technology, which was crucial in the development of COVID-19 injections.
This will be a long post because it brings together much newly accumulated historical, archeological, and linguistic research that has the potential to change our conception of the course of development of medieval Eurasian civilization.
We begin with a pathbreaking article by Neil Price:
Vikings on the Silk Roads:
The Norse ravaged much of Europe for centuries. They were also cosmopolitan explorers who followed trade winds into the Far East
Neil Price, Aeon (5/5/25)
This article has a significant amount of valuable information that did not make it into the recent blockbuster British Museum exhibition "Silk Roads" (9/26/24-2/23/25) and its accompanying catalog of the same title (British Museum, 2024), edited by Sue Brunning, Luk Yu-ping, Elisabeth R. O'Connell, and Tim Williams at the end of last year and beginning of this year. There was also a two-day international conference on "Contacts and exchanges across Afro-Eurasia, AD 500–1000" (12/5/24-12/6/24), at which I delivered the concluding remarks.
Price's article begins:
In the middle of the 9th century, in an office somewhere in the Jibāl region of what is now western Iran, a man is dictating to a scribe. It is the 840s of the Common Era, though the people in this eastern province of the great Caliphate of the ’Abbāsids – an Islamic superpower with its capital in Baghdad – live by the Hijri calendar. The man’s name is Abu ’l-Qāsim ʿUbayd Allāh b ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Khurradādhbih, and he is the director of posts and police for this region.
If we take stock of the sinographic cosmopolis at the end of first quarter of the 21st century, it is evident that it is increasingly moribund. Vietnam has jettisoned chữ Hán for the Latin alphabet; North Korea has switched exclusively to hangul; South Korea now uses very few hanja; the Japanese script currently consists of draconically limited kanji, many of which are simplified, often in ways that are different from the simplified characters adopted by the PRC, plus two types of syllabaries and roman letters; the PRC itself now uses radically simplified and limited characters and the Latin alphabet, not to mention that all of the hundreds of millions of students in China learn English, which is a primary index of success for rising in the world of education, and entering sinographs into computers and other digital devices is overwhelmingly accomplished through the alphabet (with resultant amnesia eroding the characters they do learn); while the ephemeral Sinoform scripts of Inner Asia (Tangut, Jurchen, Khitan) disappeared around a millennium ago; Sinitic Dungan speakers write their language in Cyrillic…. For those who are advocates of the sinographic script, naturally all of this would be cause for alarm.
This is the first sentence in the article Elon Musk in Santali alphabet (Ol Chiki). Yes, it's an alphabetic writing system, not an abugida. What makes the Santali alphabet really elusive is that it resembles the shapes of the undeciphered Indus Valley script. Soviet archaeologists once tried to decipher IVC seals using Santali alphabet. Sounds ridiculous, but it's a sad truth that Santali is a unique language with little to no academic attention having been paid to it.
The grouping of these sites as an "independent Bronze Age civilization with its own architecture and language", intermediate between Elam to the west and the Indus Valley civilization to the east, was first proposed by Yusef Majidzadeh, head of the archaeological excavation team in Jiroft (south central Iran). The hypothesis is based on a collection of artifacts that have been formally excavated and recovered from looters by Iranian authorities; accepted by many to have derived from the Jiroft area (as reported by online Iranian news services, beginning in 2001).
The late Irene Good (PhD University of Pennsylvania, 1999; Harvard University Peabody Museum, 2001; later Oxford University Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art) worked at a number of Jiroft sites in the years just after they were discovered, especially on the important textiles that were preserved there. Her investigations of the "palaeo-environmental perspective" on ancient textiles were instrumental in helping us understand the networks of trade, technology, and cultural transmission among Europe, MP, Iran, and IV. See "Selected readings" for a biographical note on Irene.
Jean Nota Bene, the biggest French YouTuber (millions of followers) on historical subjects, recently focused on the Kushans. He follows many of the same themes that we do on Language Log and Sino-Platonic Papers (including Greek-Indian-Chinese associations), so many readers of this post will be interested in what he has to say about the Kushan Empire (ca. 30–ca. 375 AD). Although Nota Bene speaks in French, I think readers will be able to glean a lot of valuable information on this subject. Plus his presentation is richly illustrated, so watch carefully and pause the video if you want to take a closer look.
"Cultural Nuances in Subtitling the Religious Discourse Marker Wallah in Jordanian Drama into English." Al Salem, Mohd Nour et al. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12, no. 1 (March 6, 2025). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04515-6.
The Indus Valley civilization, also called the Harappan civilization, is seen by experts as on a par with the better-known ones of Egypt, Mesopotamia and China.
One of the earliest, it flourished on the banks of the Indus and Saraswati Rivers during the Bronze Age. It had planned townships, water management and drainage systems, huge fortified walls and exquisite pottery and terra cotta artistry.
It's interesting precisely where they positioned the curse tablet:
A skeleton found during excavations beneath a historic hospital in Orléans, France,
has a curse tablet between its legs. (Image credit: Service Archéologie Orléans (SAVO))
Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-ninth issue: “Lawrence Scott Davis (1951–2024),” by Lothar von Falkenhausen.
Next year E. J. Brill will publish a book by the little-known but highly accomplished Sino-anthropologist L. Scott Davis, in which he pioneers a novel, anthropological interpretation of the Chinese classics. The book demonstrates how certain motifs and images in the Yijing (Classic of Changes), the Lunyu (Confucian Analects), and the Zuo zhuan (Zuo Tradition) are strategically deployed as structuring elements so as to meld these texts into a semantic continuum. Unfortunately, the author passed away this fall without being able to see his book in print; this obituary aims to make him and his life’s work better known to the scholarly community.
It is my pleasure to announce the publication of the following volume which has just appeared:
Victor H. Mair, ed. Tocharica et archaeologica : A Festschrift in Honor of J. P. Mallory (Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph No. 69) (September 1, 2024)
This volume of celebratory papers, assembled upon the retirement of J. P. Mallory from his two decades as editor of the Journal of Indo-European Studies, has been written by his colleagues in admiration and gratitude for his long service to the journal and to the field in general. The contents mirror the broad range of the honoree's own expertise and interest in Indo-European studies. Above all is his consuming passion for the history of the Tocharians and their language, a subject on which he has labored diligently throughout his career: Who were the Tocharians? Where did they come from? Where did they end up? With what other languages was their own tongue related? This consuming quest led him to delve deeply into the realms of linguistics, archeology, and cultural anthropology, all of which are represented in the papers collected in this volume. Indo-European studies has been much enriched by J. P. Mallory's dedication to the journal that he edited with such care and precision. This monograph reflects the esteem and respect in which the contributors, all specialists in related fields, hold the honoree, J. P. Mallory. Foreword; Victor H. Mair – Preface; Douglas Q. Adams – On the Significance of Some Iranian Loanwords in Tocharian; Donald Ringe – A New Argument from Old Principles: Tocharian A cmol ‘birth’ and Its Implications; Melanie Malzahn – Tocharian B ārkwi, A ārki ‘white’ Revisited; Brian D. Joseph – More on Albanian Negation; Václav Blažek – Hippologica Euroasiatica: Tocharian A lāk*; Adrian Poruciuc – Gothic hlaiw as a Loan Word in Slavic and Romanian; Victor H. Mair and Diana Shuheng Zhang – How to Ride Your Elephant: Sanskritic Dream Omens in Tocharian; Harald Haarmann – The Innovation of Wheel and Wagon: Transport Technology as a Multicultural Joint Venture of Pastoralists and Agriculturalists; Peter S. Wells – Ornate Drinking Vessels as Indices of Feasting in Bronze and Iron Age Europe; Alexandra Comşa – Some Pathological Conditions of the (Bronze Age) Tumular Ochre Bearers in Connection with Their Environment
In 1991, I began the initial stage of my international project for the investigation of the Bronze Age and Iron Age Tarim mummies by focusing on their genetics. The reason for my doing so was because that was just around the time that techniques for the study of ancient DNA were being developed by Svante Pääbo and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. I was fortunate in gaining the advice and support of Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, eminent population geneticist of Stanford University. Although I continued to carry out genetics research and was an author of the first paper on the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of the Tarim mummies*, later I became disenchanted by genomic studies, not just of humans, but particularly of humans because of ulterior motives. Due to their susceptibility to be mathematically and statistically manipulated for political purposes, genomic studies had become an ideological minefield. Consequently, I switched the emphasis of the project to other disciplines such as textiles**, metallurgy***, physical anthropology****, archeology (burial practices, material goods, etc.)*****, micro/macrohistory******, equestrian studies*******, and, of course, linguistics********.
