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We have entered a new chapter in the history of the so-called Silk Road.  What has happened?  For the first time in the history of the field of Silk Road Studies, Chinese archeologists have gone out into the field beyond their own political borders.  They are leading their own expeditions and carrying out their own excavations in other countries.  An American archeologist who has worked in the stans (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) for three decades and is out there exploring and excavating right now — always slowly and patiently — and who has close ties to the local archeologists, tells me that the region is crawling with Chinese archeologists who are working in support of Xi Jinping's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), for which see below.  As a result, they are now in a position to interpret their discoveries as they see fit, and that takes a radically different approach from what scholars have been saying, among other things, about an elusive people known as the Yuezhi for the last century and more.

"China Reaches Back in Time to Challenge the West. Way, Way Back:  The country’s archaeologists are striking out along the Silk Road to trace the reach of ancient Chinese civilization, disputing long-held beliefs", by Sha Hua, WSJ (7/29/24).

One of their flagship efforts is unfolding in Central Asia, a region where empires clashed and intersected for centuries, and where Western archaeologists have long dominated. 

Under clear blue skies in May, Chinese and Uzbek researchers gathered around a 10-foot-deep trench dug into a terrace overlooking the village of Chinor, along Uzbekistan’s Surxondaryo River. 

Inside the trench, a young Chinese archaeologist examined soil extracted with a tube-shaped spade as his Uzbek counterpart stood at the edge of the dig, explaining the team’s work to the village mayor. Scattered around them were 24 other dig sites, all ancient graves containing artifacts that challenged long-held assumptions about the region’s history.

The site, called Chinortepa, was discovered by a team under the direction of Wang Jianxin, a 71-year-old archaeologist based at Northwest University in the central Chinese city of Xi’an, the eastern starting point of the Silk Road. 

Wang had long argued that the international understanding of the Silk Road—a term popularized in the 19th century by a German explorer—was dominated by Western scholars who naturally tended to focus on exploring how the West had influenced other cultures along the route. 

“I want to add China’s voice to the field,” Wang said in an interview.  

The scholar has spent two decades studying the Yuezhi [月氏], a group of nomadic herders who had roamed the grasslands of present-day northwestern China during the first millennium B.C. After a major defeat at the hands of another nomadic tribe in the second century B.C., they fled west, eventually settling in Central Asia—the first people from the East to do so, according to historical records. 

Wang long wondered what happened to the Yuezhi after they left China, and he started exploring excavation possibilities in Central Asia as early as 2009. In 2013, three months after Xi announced the Belt and Road Initiative [BRI]*, Wang reached an agreement with Amridin Berdimurodov, then director of the Institute of Archaeology at Uzbekistan’s Academy of Sciences in Samarkand, to launch a joint study of ancient nomadic cultures in Central Asia. 

[*VHM:  Shortly after Xi became paramount leader in November, 2012; it is obvious how vitally important this massive trade project is in Xi's plans for global domination.]

Over the next decade, Wang’s team uncovered dozens of hitherto unknown nomadic settlements in Uzbekistan, stunning other archaeologists active in the region. 

Their success stemmed in part from Wang’s years of experience searching for traces of the Yuezhi in China, and his skill in using rock paintings to identify possible excavation sites.

There were many different nomadic cultures represented in the sites that Wang Jianxin and his colleagues have been uncovering — Iranian, Greek / Hellenic, Tocharian, Turkic, etc. — from different time periods.  They certainly cannot all be lumped together as Yuezhi.

Though Wang himself is immersed in the ancient past, his discoveries in Uzbekistan align well with Beijing’s present-day efforts to portray China as a benevolent player  in the region.

The Chinortepa site sits around 30 miles west of a mountain pass through which, roughly 2,000 years ago, the Yuezhi are believed to have arrived on the northern banks of the Oxus River, nowadays known as Amu Darya. 

At the time, the land was part of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, a far-flung eastern outpost of ancient Western civilization known for its Greek-style art and cities. According to the most commonly accepted version, a Yuezhi army of tens of thousands of horse-mounted archers easily defeated the fading kingdom, and eventually established the Kushan Empire, which grew powerful and wealthy by facilitating trade along the Silk Road between the Roman Empire to the west and the Chinese Han Empire to the east.

Wang and his team believe that the idea that the Yuezhi simply overran the land, and subjugated the local population and were the forefathers of the Kushans, is wrong.

The proof, Wang says, is in the ground. 

Tombs previously discovered near Kushan fortresses, cities and shrines were often aboveground vaults filled with disorderly piles of bones. Archaeologists say that suggests that the Kushans—like the local population before the arrival of the Yuezhi—practiced, as one of their burial forms, defleshing of the dead, whereby bodies of the deceased were left to rot or be devoured by animals before the bones were swept away or stored in mausoleums.

Those tombs are nothing like the Yuezhi graves around Chinortepa, where corpses were buried in underground pits with little chambers to their side.  

Wang takes that as evidence that the Yuezhi and the founders of the Kushan Empire weren’t the same people. Rather, he argued, the Kushans were descendants of the local population.

The graves challenge conventional wisdom in other ways. Where the Yuezhi preferred to bury their people at the foot of mountains, the graves near Chinor were on the plain. The offerings discovered inside were also fewer and smaller than those typically found in Yuezhi burial sites. 

Based on those differences, Wang’s team concluded that graves belonged to either local farmers who had been influenced by Yuezhi nomads or Yuezhi who had begun to integrate into farm life. 

According to Wang, that suggests the Yuezhi weren’t bloodthirsty colonizers but rather coexisted peacefully with the local population.

Not everybody subscribes to the narrative that the Chinese are putting forward:

The extent to which present-day politics hovers over China’s archaeological ambitions became clear during a Wall Street Journal reporter’s encounter with an Uzbek researcher at the ruins of an ancient Kushan city near Chinor.

“Tell the Chinese that they will not find any traces of the Chinese here,” he said.

…

Asked whether Beijing could use the Yuezhi to make territorial claims, Wang said the notion was absurd because the nomads are a historical people and no one serious would put forth that argument.

It's a generously long article of nearly seventeen hundred words and fifteen large, clear illustrations of the site and the artifacts recovered from it, with an ingenious semi-interactive map (I recommend that readers check out each of the overlays that scroll by the features to which attention is being drawn), but there is not a single word about the language(s) of the people(s) and the region.

While we may not be able to say with complete confidence what the language of the Yuezhi was like, we should not overlook this question altogether, since important issues of origins, migrations, ethnicity, and culture are linked to it, and many of these counter the Chinese narrative.

It has long been held that the Yuezhi may have spoken Tocharian, after Hittite the second oldest Indo-European (IE) language.  Tocharian was lost to science (human knowledge and awareness) for a millennium, but was rediscovered in Eastern Central Asia (ECA) — now called Xinjiang ("New Borders") Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) by the PRC / CCP government — only around the turn of the 20th century, making it the easternmost IE language.  Strangely, however, Tocharian has unmistakable affinities with northwestern European languages.

Whether the Yuezhi spoke Tocharian or not, Tocharian words were borrowed into Sinitic beginning already in BC times, and some Sinitic terms passed into Tocharian as well.  Here are lists of such cross-lingual words compiled by two Tocharian specialists:

Hannes Fellner, "In my view, the most secure early Tocharian-Chinese loanwords for now are":

– OC *lˤuʔ [MC dawX; 稻 dào] ⇒ PT *kləw [TB TA klu] ‘rice, paddy’

PT *mjətə ⇒ OC *mit > MC mjit > 蜜 mì ‘honey’

Douglas Adams, "Here are my picks for the most likely Tch loanwords in Chinese":

As Douglas Adams aptly says, the word for "honey" is the gold standard for Tocharian borrowing into Sinitic:

Possibly from Proto-Tocharian *ḿətə, from Proto-Indo-European *médʰu (“mead”). Cognate with Tocharian B mit (“honey”), English mead, German Met (“mead”), Swedish mjöd (“mead”), Sanskrit मधु (madhu, “honey”), Ancient Greek μέθυ (méthu, “wine”), Polish miód (“honey”), Russian мёд (mjod, “honey”), Old Church Slavonic медъ (medŭ, “honey”).

(Wiktionary)

The Sinitic word for "honey" (mì 蜜) occurs already in the celebrated anthology of southern poetry known as the Chu ci 楚辭 (Elegies of Chu; Songs of the South), attributed to the first Chinese poet known by name, Qu Yuan 屈原 (c. 340 BC–278 BC).  It is also in the works of the thinker Xunzi 荀子 (c. 310–c. after 238 BC).

Since Tocharian "honey" is in Sinitic by the first millennium BC, this shows how plugged into Transeurasian IE language dynamics East Asia was at such an early time.  As for material culture, to give just one example, glass and faience beads have been found widely distributed across East Asia already by around 800 BC.

So, who were the Yuezhi after all?

The Yuezhi (Chinese: 月氏; pinyin: Yuèzhī, Ròuzhī or Rùzhī; Wade–Giles: Yüeh⁴-chih¹, Jou⁴-chih¹ or Ju⁴-chih¹;) were an ancient people first described in Chinese histories as nomadic pastoralists living in an arid grassland area in the western part of the modern Chinese province of Gansu, during the 1st millennium BC. After a major defeat at the hands of the Xiongnu in 176 BC, the Yuezhi split into two groups migrating in different directions: the Greater Yuezhi (Dà Yuèzhī 大月氏) and Lesser Yuezhi (Xiǎo Yuèzhī 小月氏). This started a complex domino effect that radiated in all directions and, in the process, set the course of history for much of Asia for centuries to come.

The Greater Yuezhi initially migrated northwest into the Ili Valley (on the modern borders of China and Kazakhstan), where they reportedly displaced elements of the Sakas. They were driven from the Ili Valley by the Wusun and migrated southward to Sogdia and later settled in Bactria. The Greater Yuezhi have consequently often been identified with peoples mentioned in classical European sources as having overrun the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, like the Tókharoi (Greek Τοχάροι; Sanskrit Tukhāra) and Asii (or Asioi). [VHM:  see below on the Asii] During the 1st century BC, one of the five major Greater Yuezhi tribes in Bactria, the Kushanas (Chinese: 貴霜; pinyin: Guìshuāng), began to subsume the other tribes and neighbouring peoples. The subsequent Kushan Empire, at its peak in the 3rd century AD, stretched from Turfan in the Tarim Basin in the north to Pataliputra on the Gangetic plain of India in the south. The Kushanas played an important role in the development of trade on the Silk Road and the introduction of Buddhism to China.

The Lesser Yuezhi migrated southward to the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Some are reported to have settled among the Qiang people in Qinghai, and to have been involved in the Liang Province Rebellion (184–221 AD) against the Eastern Han dynasty. Another group of Yuezhi is said to have founded the city state of Cumuḍa (now known as Kumul and Hami) in the eastern Tarim. A fourth group of Lesser Yuezhi may have become part of the Jie people of Shanxi, who established the Later Zhao state of the 4th century AD (although this remains controversial).

Many scholars believe that the Yuezhi were an Indo-European people.  Although some scholars have associated them with artifacts of extinct cultures in the Tarim Basin, such as the Tarim mummies and texts recording the Tocharian languages, there is no evidence for any such link.  [VHM:  See this post and the many references herein.]

Three pre-Han texts mention peoples who appear to be the Yuezhi, albeit under slightly different names.

• • The philosophical tract Guanzi (73, 78, 80 and 81) mentions nomadic pastoralists known as the Yúzhī 禺氏 (Old Chinese: *ŋʷjo-kje) or Niúzhī 牛氏 (OC: *ŋʷjə-kje), who supplied jade to the Chinese. (The Guanzi is now generally believed to have been compiled around 26 BC, based on older texts, including some from the Qi state era of the 11th to 3rd centuries BC. Most scholars no longer attribute its primary authorship to Guan Zhong, a Qi official in the 7th century BC.) The export of jade from the Tarim Basin, since at least the late 2nd millennium BC, is well-documented archaeologically. For example, hundreds of jade pieces found in the Tomb of Fu Hao (c. 1200 BC) originated from the Khotan area, on the southern rim of the Tarim Basin. According to the Guanzi, the Yúzhī/Niúzhī, unlike the neighbouring Xiongnu, did not engage in conflict with nearby Chinese states.
  • The epic novel Tale of King Mu, Son of Heaven (early 4th century BC) also mentions a plain of Yúzhī 禺知 (OC: *ŋʷjo-kje) to the northwest of the Zhou lands. [VHM:  An important new publication on this early text will be announced in Language Log within a few days.]
  • Chapter 59 of the Yi Zhou Shu (probably dating from the 4th to 1st century BC) refers to a Yúzhī 禺氏 (OC: *ŋʷjo-kje) people living to the northwest of the Zhou domain and offering horses as tribute. A late supplement contains the name Yuèdī 月氐 (OC: *ŋʷjat-tij), which may be a misspelling of the name Yuèzhī 月氏 (OC: *ŋʷjat-kje) found in later texts.

In the 1st century BC, Sima Qian – widely regarded as the founder of Chinese historiography – describes how the Qin dynasty (221–206 BC) bought jade and highly valued military horses from a people that Sima Qian called the Wūzhī 烏氏 (OC: *ʔa-kje), led by a man named Luo. The Wūzhī traded these goods for Chinese silk, which they then sold on to other neighbours. This is probably the first reference to the Yuezhi as a lynchpin in trade on the Silk Road, which in the 3rd century BC began to link Chinese states to Central Asia and, eventually, the Middle East, the Mediterranean and Europe.

(Wikipedia)

VHM:  For a book-length scholarly history of the Yuezhi, see the recent work by Craig Benjamin listed in the "Selected Readings" below.

Asii

The Asii, Osii, Ossii, Asoi, Asioi, Asini or Aseni were an ancient Indo-European people of Central Asia, during the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE. Known only from Classical Greek and Roman sources, they were one of the peoples held to be responsible for the downfall of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom. In Greek Mythology they were the children of Iapetus and Asia.

Modern scholars have attempted to identify the Asii with other peoples known from European and Chinese sources including the: Yuezhi, Tocharians, Issedones/Wusun and/or Alans.

(source)

So, who were the Tocharians after all?

The Tocharians or Tokharians (US: /toʊˈkɛəriənˌ –ˈkɑːr-/ toh-KAIR-ee-ən, -⁠KAR-; UK: /tɒˈkɑːriən/ to-KAR-ee-ən) were speakers of the Tocharian languages, Indo-European languages known from around 7,600 documents from around AD 400 to 1200, found on the northern edge of the Tarim Basin (modern-day Xinjiang, China). The name "Tocharian" was given to these languages in the early 20th century by scholars who identified their speakers with a people known in ancient Greek sources as the Tókharoi (Latin: Tochari), who inhabited Bactria from the 2nd century BC. This identification is now generally considered erroneous, but the name "Tocharian" remains the most common term for the languages and their speakers. Their actual ethnic name is unknown, although they may have referred to themselves as the Agni, Kuči, and Krorän or as the Agniya and Kuchiya known from Sanskrit texts.

Agricultural communities first appeared in the oases of the northern Tarim circa 2000 BC. Some scholars have linked these communities to the Afanasievo culture found earlier (c. 3500–2500 BC) in Siberia, north of the Tarim or Central Asian BMAC culture. The earliest Tarim mummies date from c. 1800 BC, but it is unclear whether they are connected to the Tocharians of two millennia later.

By the 2nd century BC, these settlements had developed into city-states, overshadowed by nomadic peoples to the north and Chinese empires to the east. These cities, the largest of which was Kucha, also served as way stations on the branch of the Silk Road that ran along the northern edge of the Taklamakan desert.

For several centuries, the Tarim basin was ruled by the Xiongnu, the Han dynasty, the Tibetan Empire, and the Tang dynasty. From the 8th century AD, the Uyghurs – speakers of a Turkic language – settled in the region and founded the Kingdom of Qocho that ruled the Tarim Basin. The peoples of the Tarim city-states intermixed with the Uyghurs, whose Old Uyghur language spread through the region. The Tocharian languages are believed to have become extinct during the 9th century.

Around the beginning of the 20th century, archaeologists recovered a number of manuscripts from oases in the Tarim Basin written in two closely related but previously unknown Indo-European languages, which were easy to read because they used a close variation of the already deciphered Indian Middle-Brahmi script. These languages were designated in similar fashion by their geographical neighbours:

• • A Buddhist work in Old Turkic (Uighur), included a colophon stating that the text had been translated from Sanskrit via toxrï tyly (Tωγry tyly, "The language of the Togari").
  • Manichean texts in several languages of neighbouring regions used the expression "the land of the Four Toghar" (Toγar~Toχar, written Twγr) to designate the area "from Kucha and Karashar to Qocho and Beshbalik."

Friedrich W. K. Müller was the first to propose a characterization for the newly discovered languages. Müller called the languages "Tocharian" (German Tocharisch), linking this toxrï (Tωγry, "Togari") with the ethnonym Tókharoi (Ancient Greek: Τόχαροι) applied by Strabo to one of the "Scythian" tribes "from the country on the other side of the Iaxartes" that overran the Greco-Bactrian kingdom (present day Afghanistan) in the second half of the 2nd century BC. This term also appears in Indo-Iranian languages (Sanskrit Tushara/Tukhāra, Old Persian tuxāri-, Khotanese ttahvāra), and became the source of the term "Tokharistan" usually referring to 1st millennium Bactria, as well as the Takhar province of Afghanistan. The Tókharoi are often identified by modern scholars with the Yuezhi of Chinese historical accounts, who founded the Kushan Empire.

Müller's identification became a minority position among scholars when it turned out that the people of Tokharistan (Bactria) spoke Bactrian, an Eastern Iranian language, which is quite distinct from the Tocharian languages. Nevertheless, "Tocharian" remained the standard term for the languages of the Tarim Basin manuscripts and for the people who produced them. A few scholars argue that the Yuezhi were originally speakers of Tocharian who later adopted the Bactrian language.

The name of Kucha in Tocharian B was Kuśi, with adjectival form kuśiññe. The word may be derived from Proto-Indo-European *keuk "shining, white". The Tocharian B word akeññe may have referred to people of Agni, with a derivation meaning "borderers, marchers". One of the Tocharian A texts have ārśi-käntwā as a name for their own language, so that ārśi may have meant "Agnean", though "monk" is also possible.

Tocharian kings apparently gave themselves the title Ñäktemts soy (in Tocharian B), an equivalent of the title Devaputra ("Son of God") of the Kushans.

And what languages did the Tocharians speak?

The Tocharian languages are known from around 7600 documents dating from about 400 to 1200 AD, found at 30 sites in the northeast Tarim area. The manuscripts are written in two distinct, but closely related, Indo-European languages, conventionally known as Tocharian A and Tocharian B. According to glotto-chronological data, Tocharian languages are closest to Western Indo-European languages such as proto-Germanic or proto-Italian, and being devoid of satemization predate the evolution of eastern Indo-European languages.

Tocharian A (Agnean or East Tocharian) was found in the northeastern oases known to the Tocharians as Ārśi, later Agni (i.e. Chinese Yanqi; modern Karasahr) and Turpan (including Khocho or Qočo; known in Chinese as Gaochang). Some 500 manuscripts have been studied in detail, mostly coming from Buddhist monasteries. Many authors take this to imply that Tocharian A had become a purely literary and liturgical language by the time of the manuscripts, but it may be that the surviving documents are unrepresentative.

Tocharian B (Kuchean or West Tocharian) was found at all the Tocharian A sites and also in several sites further west, including Kuchi (later Kucha). It appears to have still been in use in daily life at that time. Over 3200 manuscripts have been studied in detail.

The languages had significant differences in phonology, morphology and vocabulary, making them mutually unintelligible "at least as much as modern Germanic or Romance languages". Tocharian A shows innovations in the vowels and nominal inflection, whereas Tocharian B has changes in the consonants and verbal inflection. Many of the differences in vocabulary between the languages concern Buddhist concepts, which may suggest that they were associated with different Buddhist traditions.

The differences indicate that they diverged from a common ancestor between 500 and 1000 years before the earliest documents, that is, sometime in the 1st millennium BC. Common Indo-European vocabulary retained in Tocharian includes words for herding, cattle, sheep, pigs, dogs, horses, textiles, farming, wheat, gold, silver, and wheeled vehicles.

Prakrit documents from 3rd century Krorän, Andir and Niya on the southeast edge of the Tarim Basin contain around 100 loanwords and 1000 proper names that cannot be traced to an Indic or Iranian source. Thomas Burrow suggested that they come from a variety of Tocharian, dubbed Tocharian C or Kroränian, which may have been spoken by at least some of the local populace. Burrow's theory is widely accepted, but the evidence is meagre and inconclusive, and some scholars favour alternative explanations.

(Wikipedia)

For fuller treatment, see Proto-Tocharian language and Tocharian languages

Many scholars identify the Yuezhi with the Tocharians.  Based on the historical and linguistic evidence cited above, the likelihood of that being so looms rather large.  The Chinese were borrowing IE lexical items already in the first millennium BC from a people (Tocharians) who in historical times (1st millennium AD) lived in Eastern Central Asia [ECA]) and whose language bore phonological and morphological resemblances to northwestern European peoples and whose culture (e.g., diagonal twill woolen plaids) bore resemblance to the same peoples at around the same time (roughly 1000 BC).

Those diagnostic linguistic and cultural traits did not reach the Tarim Basin by flying through the air or rising up out of the ground.  Somebody brought them to the Tarim Basin, which was one of the last places on earth to be inhabited by humans who came from somewhere, and the Sinitic speakers further east borrowed elements of their language and culture.

Selected readings

• "Tocharian Bilingualism and Language Death in the Old Turkic Context" (12/21/23) — with a lengthy bibliography divided into three sections:  origins and affinities; the language, the people, and their history; archeology and language
• Craig G. R. Benjamin, The Yuezhi: Origins, Migration and the Conquest of Northern Bactria (Louvain: Brepols, 2006).
• "Of jackal and hide and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (12/16/18)
• "The Wool Road of Northern Eurasia" (4/12/21) — with lengthy bibliography on archeology, linguistics, the horse, etc.
• "Horses, soma, riddles, magi, and animal style art in southern China" (11/11/19)
• Victor H. Mair, ed., The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia, 2 vols. (Washington D.C. and Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Man and the University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1998).
• J. P. Mallory and Victor H.Mair,The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West (London:  Thames & Hudson, 2000).

[h.t. Adrienne Mayor and John Tkacik; thanks to E. Btuce Brooks, Nicholas Morrow Williams, Julie Wei, Nick Tursi, and Zihan Guo]

August 4, 2024 @ 6:10 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and archeology, Language and history

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