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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.

In his office, he is compiling a report as part of his duties. As his job title implies, he oversees communications and security in the Jibāl region, reporting to officials in Baghdad. What he provides is an intelligence service: in essence, Ibn Khurradādhbih is what we would call a station chief, like those CIA officials who manage clandestine operations abroad. The report he’s working on is part of a much larger document that will one day be known as Kitāb al-Masālik wa l-mamālik (the ‘Book of Itineraries and Kingdoms’), a summary of exactly the kind of thing that governments usually want to know: who was visiting their territory, where they came from, where they were going, and why. This is what he says about a group of people known as the Rus’:

The Rūs … journey from the farthest reaches of the land of the Slavs to the eastern Mediterranean and there sell beaver and black fox pelts, as well as swords. The Byzantine ruler levies a 10 per cent duty on their merchandise. On their return they go by sea to Samkarsh [Taman], the city of the Jews, and from there make their way back to Slavic territory. They also follow another route, descending the river Tanais [the Volga], the river of the Saqāliba, and passing by Khamlīkh, the capital of the Khazars, where the ruler of the country levies a 10 per cent duty. There they embark upon the Caspian Sea, heading for a point they know … Sometimes they transport their merchandise on camel back from the city of Jurjān to Baghdad.

They also follow a land route. Merchants departing from Spain or France sail to southern al-Akçâ [Morocco] and then to Tanja [Tangier], from where they set off for Ifriqiyya [the North African coast] and then the Egyptian capital. From there they head towards Ramla, visit Damascus, Kufa, Baghdad and Basra, then cross the Ahwaz [north of the Persian Gulf], Fâris [Iran], Kirman, Sindh [southeast Pakistan], India, and finally arrive in al-Ṣīn [Turko-China]. Sometimes they take a route north of Rome, heading for Khamlīkh via the lands of the Saqāliba. Khamlīkh is the Khazar capital. They sail the Caspian Sea, make their way to Balkh, from there to Transoxiana, then to the yurts of the Toghuzghuz [the Uyghurs?], and from there to al-Ṣīn.

Etymology for al-Ṣīn:

From Middle Persian  (čīn, “China”), from Sanskrit चीन (cīna, “China”), itself usually derived from Old Chinese 秦 (*zin, “Qin”). It's one of the Arabic country names which require the definite article ال (al-). See “Names of China” at Wikipedia.
(Wiktionary)

Arabic Wikipedia has an article on: الصين

Price continues, and here he makes a gigantic contribution:

For many decades, the second paragraph of this rather dense text was thought to refer to a totally different group of merchants from those described in the first, for the simple reason that scholars just didn’t believe that the Rūs (or the Rus’, as the word is usually spelled today) really went so far east. And yet, the text is clear. The two sections run on from each other, and both refer to the same people. So why do Ibn Khurradādhbih’s observations about them matter today?

We used to think of the time of the vikings, the three long centuries from around 750 to 1050 CE, as an age of expansion, when the Scandinavian peoples burst out upon an unsuspecting world with fire and sword. Over the past 40 years or so, that picture has become much more nuanced, as we see the poets, traders and settlers alongside the stereotypical raiders (who were nonetheless real) that most people imagine when they think of the vikings. However, our view of these events has recently changed. We no longer see an outward impulse of intention and process, but a much more haphazard and varied diaspora of Norse peoples, in which individuals with their own motives and missions shift across the northern world.

In the following paragraphs, Price shows what the Norse diaspora was really like.  It was much more scattered and fissiparous than the irresistible juggernaut we usually imagine the Viking onslaught to be.  He speaks of one man's "journey deep into the rivers of Eurasia, only to die in the oasis of Khwarezm (in today’s Uzbekistan), but his companions would return to Scandinavia with the news."  Indeed, "[t]he ‘Norse’ voyages to North America would be crewed by people who included Icelanders, Greenlanders, a Turk, and two Scots. All these are taken from archaeological or textual sources, and serve as but a few examples of what the diaspora really meant."

Given the astonishing geographical range of their travels in Ibn Khurradādhbih's (820/825-913) account,

it is perhaps surprising to realise that, with some necessary caveats, Rus’ was the name used by the peoples of the east to refer to the vikings. The routes that they took, according to his report, exactly match with what scholars of our own time would come to call the Silk Roads.

The latter link is strongly recommended, for it corrects many a misapprehension about this epochal trade route.  So does the remainder of Price's article on the Vikings:

Like many other fields, the study of the Viking Age is undergoing a revisionist transformation, as we learn to be more cautious in our terminologies and wary of the assumptions that lie behind them. This begins with the ‘V-word’ itself. The Viking period is almost unique among historians’ artificial divisions of the past in being named after a minority with whom hardly anyone of the time would have readily identified, or arguably even recognised. The etymology of Old Norse víkingr is still debated, but it is generally agreed to have meant something close to ‘pirate’, someone who went in for maritime robbery with violence, though this is not quite the whole story. It was never used as a name for a people, and was essentially a job description. It was not necessarily negative either, nor even applied only to Scandinavians. It also clearly denoted an activity that could be taken up or left off at different times in a life, as well as an identity that could run in parallel with others. Most importantly, it would never have described the majority population, most of whom were farmers who never went anywhere or did much harm to anyone.

Many scholars now use vikings in lowercase to refer to the raiders themselves, adding an initial capital when talking about the time period. Many also employ a word such as Norse as an approximation for ‘everybody else over there in those days’. None of this is very satisfactory, but big-V vikings are almost impossible to shift from the public consciousness, and while there are problems with ‘Norse’ (it’s mainly a linguistic term, and Scandinavia was by no means a monoculture), it will do. During the Viking Age, most of their neighbours referred to them as ‘Northerners’, which is too Eurocentric a perspective to function today, but Norse comes close enough and has the virtue of being relatively specific.

And who were the Rus'?  For the etymology, we start with "Russia" and work backward:

[A] nation in Eastern Europe with a large possession in north Asia, 1530s, from Medieval Latin Russi "the people of Russia," from Rus, the native name of the people and the country (source of Arabic Rus, Medieval Greek Rhos), originally the name of a group of Swedish merchant/warriors who established themselves around Kiev 9c. and founded the original Russian principality; perhaps from Ruotsi, the Finnish name for "Sweden," from Old Norse Roþrslandi, "the land of rowing," old name of Roslagen, where the Finns first encountered the Swedes. This is from Old Norse roðr "steering oar," from Proto-Germanic *rothra- "rudder" (from PIE *rot-ro-, from root *ere- "to row").

Derivation from the IE root for "red," in reference to hair color, is considered less likely. Russian city-states were founded and ruled by Vikings and their descendants. The Russian form of the name, Rossiya, appears to be from Byzantine Greek Rhosia.

(etymonline)

According to Price, the identity of the Rus'

…was debated for many years, veering between extremes of Norse and Slavic influence, though it is now generally agreed that they were culturally Scandinavian but became more ethnically mixed over time. The name itself probably has associations with rowing, so the Rus’ were the ones who came in boats – an appropriate thing to call people whose presence on the river systems of eastern Europe became a regular fixture. They appear in the written record at about the same time as Ibn Khurradādhbih’s report, as traders and brokers, principally in what are now the Baltic states, Russia and Ukraine. Both women and men were part of the Rus’ communities, and there were merchants of both sexes. Arab geographers and travellers would write many accounts of the Rus’, including some astonishing eye-witness descriptions of funerals and other encounters. Consider this description of one such meeting, by Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān, who travelled to the Volga in 922 CE as an emissary of the ’Abbāsid Caliphate:

I also saw the Rūsiyyah [the Rus’]. They had come to trade and had disembarked at the Itil River [the Volga]. I have never seen bodies as nearly perfect as theirs. As tall as palm trees, fair, and reddish, they wear neither tunics nor caftans. Every man wears a cloak with which he covers half his body and leaves one arm uncovered. They carry swords, daggers, and axes, and always have them to hand. They use Frankish swords with broad, ridged blades. They are dark, from the tips of their toes right up to their necks – trees, pictures, and the like. Every woman wears a small box made of iron, brass, silver, or gold, depending on her husband’s financial worth and social standing, tied at her breasts. The box has a ring to which a knife is attached, also tied at her breasts. The women wear neck rings of gold and silver. When a man has amassed 10,000 dirhams*, he has a neck ring made for his wife. When he has amassed 20,000 dirhams, he has two neck rings made. For every subsequent 10,000, he gives a neck ring to his wife. This means a woman can wear many neck rings. The jewellery they prize the most is the dark ceramic beads they have aboard their boats and which they value very highly. They purchase beads for one dirham each and string them together as necklaces for their wives.

[VHM:  *a unit of currency used in the Arab world, ultimately from Ancient Greek δραχμή (drakhmḗ)]

The great rivers of the east, especially the Dnieper and Volga, were their highways, joined to the Baltic by a series of smaller passages and portages. We have long known of Rus’ links with Byzantium, the successor to the western Roman Empire. The markets of its capital, Constantinople (today’s Istanbul), were an economic magnet, rewarding the long and hazardous journey that took them to the Black Sea through the lands of the nomads of the western Steppe. The Rus’ also traded in the Caliphate, traversing the Caspian and continuing overland by camel to Baghdad. They brought with them products of the northern forests and the Arctic, and rare items such as birds of prey, which were astonishingly difficult to keep alive over a long trip, but worth a fortune to the right buyer. More than anything else, though, the Rus’ trafficked in enslaved people, who were taken in raids along the Baltic coast or further afield. In return, they brought back silks, spices, beads and other commodities, but the real fuel for the river trade was silver in the form of dirhams. These coins, each stamped with calligraphic declarations of faith, were the main currency of the Caliphate. They also flowed back to Scandinavia from as far away as Afghanistan.

After discussing the interactions of the Rus' with the Byzantine empire and the Mediterranean world, Price turns to the backflow of cultural artifacts from distant places to Scandinavia.  For example, fashions and weapons from the steppe were common at the Swedish island town of Birka.  He then introduces the famous figurine of the Buddha from the island of Helgö that I was privileged to see in London and that we have previously discussed on Language Log:

…a bronze figurine of the Buddha found at an early Viking Age site on a Swedish island. The figurine originally came from the Swat Valley in what is now Pakistan, but the Norse had given it a neck-ring and bracelet of leather, like the ones on their own idols and images of the gods. They ‘converted’ it to become a northern divinity. They must also have recognised that it was already a sacred object because the figure was found together with other items of Christian and Islamic religious significance. It was discovered at a place called Helgö, which means ‘Holy Island’, implying that the site was a sanctuary or shrine of some kind.

The importation to Scandinavia of foreign artifacts was by no means limited to Buddhist icons and Central Asian clothing:

Even scholars seem startled that more than 100,000 objects of Islamic origin have been excavated from Viking Age contexts in Scandinavia: these are, of course, the dirhams, and furthermore represent only a small fraction of the actual trade, which ran into the high millions. Each one bore an Arabic inscription praising Allah as the only god, usually with an indication of the caliph under whose control the coin had been made, and the location of the mint, which were scattered from Morocco to Afghanistan. It is very hard to imagine that nobody in the north ever wondered what the wavy signs on all those coins (and on some other objects, too) really meant. It must have been obvious that it was writing, and surely somebody understood that it was an exhortation to the divine – in other words, a religious text. Arabic was also inscribed on bronze weights, and it has long been clear that the Norse adopted the standard system of measurement used in the Caliphate. Archaeologists also find locally made weights in Scandinavia that have been given attempts at inscriptions that are just squiggly lines, clearly because ‘everyone knew’ that this is what proper weights should look like. Some scholars have even speculated that all this messaging was part of a (failed) Islamic mission to convert the Scandinavians. To be clear, there is no evidence that any of the Norse accepted the Muslim faith, other than a few who stayed in the Caliphate itself, but curiosity and receptiveness to other cultures were consistent features of their society.

Price rightly points out the abundant linkages between Scandinavia and the East:

Adding to this, material from much further east also occurs in the Norse homelands. This includes Gandharan coins from the same region as the Helgö Buddha; textiles and coins from the Tang; garnets from Sri Lanka and Rajasthan, imported as raw material and then intricately carved in the North as inlays on jewellery and weapon fittings; beads from Gujarat; cowries from the Persian Gulf, and much more. This flow of commodities demonstrably also has a long time-depth: a recent study has shown that even brass was being imported to Sweden from the eastern Mediterranean and Asia in the 5th and 6th centuries, as part of what the researchers call ‘a routinised trade’.

Many Norse exports were human, in the form of enslaved people. However, some more durable objects can be traced. For example, amber in high-status and royal tombs from Inner Mongolia and Unified Silla in Korea [VHM: see below] has been confirmed to be of Baltic origin. Similar objects may even have reached Japan at the same time. An ongoing research project at the University of East Anglia in the UK is exploring the peripheries of the Silk Roads, seeing clear connections from these regions of far eastern Asia to Scandinavia and eastern England. (In 2024, the British Museum also launched a major exhibition following a similar trajectory, in which the very first exhibit is the Helgö Buddha, and the Rus’ are a constant presence in the linear displays of interactions and cultural contacts.)

I am particularly pleased that Price highlights my favorite medieval shipwreck, the Belitung, which Erling Hoh and I emphasized in The True History of Tea:

We thus have good indicators from several geographical points of contact between Asia and the European North. The archaeological ‘missing link’ for this trade was discovered in 1998, when fishermen off Indonesia’s Belitung Island found an Arabian ship that had sunk around 830 CE. This dhow from the city of Muscat in present-day Oman had gone down on its way home from eastern China with a cargo of ceramics, spices and even gold. This and similar shipwrecks may give us the reality behind the maritime routes of the Rus’, as related by Ibn Khurradādhbih.

Price has much more to say about the rewriting of Viking history, especially to the east.  Interested readers can finish his essay on their own and explore other contributions on these new horizons from the Centre for the World in the Viking Age, established at Uppsala University in early 2024.

To close this post on the ties between east and west Eurasia, I will briefly touch on two other compelling themes:  1. Scythians, Sogdians, and other Iranian, steppe peoples in the medieval Korean peninsula, about as far east as you can go on continental East Asia, and 2. the whimsical queendom of Waqwaq / Wakwak, which I believe is linked to Japan.

Having just returned from an intensive ten-day study tour of Buddhist and Silk Road sites and museums on the Korean peninsula, I am overwhelmed by the preponderance of Persian / Iranian influences I encountered.  This is not something I would have expected for two reasons:  1. Korea is so far and isolated to the east, 2. it is barely talked about in scholarly circles outside of Korea that focus on the Silk Roads.

For decades, we have struggled to ascertain how words, concepts, motifs, and artifacts made their way across Eurasia, which they indubitably and empirically did — always looking for smoking guns, the peoples and texts that brought them.  Gradually, we are plugging the gaps between East and West:  Tocharians, Sogdians, Scythians, Greeks, Manicheans, Syrians, and so on.  And now, almost unbelievably, Vikings.

Proof of cultural connections from Sutton Hoo to Silla, with links along the way

In the following photograph, the artifact on the right is the famous Gyerim-ro dagger and sheath from Silla, Korea in the Gyeongju National Museum (detailed discussion below).  The object on the left is the not-so-well-known sword from a tomb at Lake Borovoe in Kazakhstan.  (from Park Cheun-soo [2024], p. 112)

The same type of weapons and sheaths are depicted in wall paintings at other sites in Central Asia from around the same time (early medieval period, starting in the 4th c. and lasting to about the 7th c.).

Similar dagger and sheath designs are visible in the Tocharian Kumtura Caves (top), and Kizil Cave no. 69 (bottom). (source)

And here's a gold shoulder-clasp inlaid with garnet cloisonné and glass from the Sutton Hoo ship-burial in Suffolk, dating to the late 6th c.-early 7th c. (ca. AD 560/70), in the British Museum.

(source)

The Gyerim-ro Dagger and Sheath (Korean: 경주 계림로 보검; Hanja: 慶州 鷄林路 寶劍) are ornately decorated treasures that were excavated from an ancient Korean tomb from the Silla Kingdom (57 BC – 935 AD) in 1973. They are understood to originate from the Black Sea area, testifying to the expansiveness of the Silk Road network in the ancient world.

The dagger and sheath are made up of gold, decorated with elaborate, colorful glass and garnet jewel inlays. The treasure is 14 1/8 in. (36 cm) in length and belongs to the Gyeongju National Museum of Korea. It is listed as Korea's Treasure No. 635.

The Gyerim-ro Dagger and Sheath were excavated from the Gyerim-ro Tomb No. 14 in 1973 in North Gyeongsang Province. The dagger is understood to have originated from Persia area of Central Asia sometime during the 5th century, coming to Korea through trade or as a diplomatic gift. This was determined by comparing the dagger and sheath to other items of similar constructor depiction (through wall paintings and fragments). The dagger has a decorative and functional head at the end of the handle and the sheath has two side appendages. These were used to attach the dagger to the carrier's belt, from which it hung horizontally.

A deeper understanding of this double-appendage suspension system supports the theory that the Hephthalite invasion of Central Asia brought with it an introduction of the two-point hanging system to (as seen in the Gyerim-ro dagger and sheath), which has since become recognizable as the Eastern Eurasian dagger and sword suspension systems that was carried on from Central Asia to China The two-point suspension system's arrival in China is likely a result of the Silk Road. Vast scholarship on the Silk Road informs that trade between Central Asia and East Asia was affluent and thriving during the 5th century, and thus the occurrence of a Persian area item in a Korean tomb should not come as a surprise.

(Wikipedia)

Another set of data points stretching physically and prominently across the whole of the Eurasian steppes are kurgans, burial tumuli, some of gigantic size.  Approximately a quarter of a century ago, I spent several weeks studying the earliest kurgans I know of, those in Crimea built by the Scythians in the 9th and following centuries BC. Already more than a decade before, I had encountered kurgans in Central Asia built by other steppe people such as the Wusun (2nd century BC to 5th century AD; see my etymological notes here [I connect them with "horse" terms).

What is extraordinary is that there are many kurgans in Korea, particularly in the Silla area and dating to Silla times (57 BC-935 AD).  Having read about such tumuli and seen photographs of them already 40-50 years ago, I was aware of their existence, but they were poorly studied at that time.  It was only when I saw them in person a couple of weeks ago that I realized how many of them there are and how closely tied to steppe precursors they are.  Especially around the city of Gyeongju (35°51′N 129°13′E), there are scores of burial tumuli, some in clusters of twenty or so, one of which I went inside, and others of them situated individually in the middle of deep woods.  Most are beautifully preserved and maintained.  Here I will focus on one that is so exquisite, so perfect, that it took my breath away.

That is the tomb of King Wonseong (Gwaereung Tomb).  Wonseong was the 38th king of the Silla Kingdom (r. 785-798).  According to the Samguk Sagi ("History of the Three Kingdoms" [1145]), the king was buried south of Bongdeoksa Temple.  Details of the construction of the tomb can be found on the Stele of Sungboksa Temple written by Choe Chi-wan.  Around the perfectly formed round mound of earth is a beautifully constructed stone fence featuring 12 Oriental zodiac images surrounded by stone railings.  Beholding the whole complex, I could not help but reflect that it belongs to the same family of tomb types as the world famous Great Stupa at Sanchi (3rd c. BC), except that the latter is covered with stone instead of grass, and on a much grander scale, with spectacular carved stone gates.

What struck me above all as I entered the precincts of the tomb of King Wonseong (Gwaereung Tomb) were the two rows of four stone statues lining the avenue leading to the tumulus, one on either side.  As one approaches the entrance to the tomb, one first encounters two facing military officials / guardians.  They are clearly of Central Asian derivation, with big noses, deep-set eyes, bushy full beard, muscular forearms, long swords, and so forth.  The local archeologists and historians call them "Sogdians".  Similar statues adorn other tumuli in the region, so this is not an isolated phenomenon.

N.B.:  The tomb of Sejong the Great (creator of the Hangul alphabet), more than six centuries after the tomb of King Wonseong described above, retains the same basic layout, as do hundreds of other royal kurgans throughout Korean history.

(source)

Other empirical evidence of trans-Eurasian interchange are beads (from the first millennium BC on across the length and breadth of what is now China), faience, Roman glass, fine metal work, and dozens of other material goods, not to mention distinctive artistic motifs, etc.

These precious artifacts (daggers, shoulder clasps, etc.) could not have flown across the entire expanse of Eurasia by themselves.  Human beings had to transport them and exchange them with other human beings.  In doing so, the human beings would necessarily have used language with each other.  That would have required translators and interpreters, people who knew more than one language, and so it has been since the beginning and multiplication of language.  Before the invention of writing, the linguistic exchange would only have been through interpretation.

To one extent or another, we are all interpreters, because each of us has our own, unique idiolect.  When we talk to each other, we have to make slight adjustments in order to be able to communicate effectively.

When I was in Belfast recently, people told me that they could tell what part of the city a person was from as soon as he / she said a few sentences.  In the Boston area, street names are pronounced differently depending on what part of the city a person is from (Quinsee or Quinzee?).

Some people are professional interpreters / translators, some are ad hoc interpreters / translators.  Not to worry, if you really want to make a deal with another individual / group, you'll figure out a way to communicate.

For one reason or another, somebody wanted to deliver those precious swords to somebody else, and so they (and often enough the words and the technology to produce them) travelled long distances across land and / or sea.  (Cf. the entries for akinakes in Wikipedia and Wiktionary.  The word as we have it is Greek [ἀκινάκης], but the weapon is fundamentally Scytho-Iranian.  See this lengthy, detailed post with contributions by Chau Wu, VHM, Elizabeth Barber, Pita Kelekna, and Francesco Brighenti, citing dozens of other ancient and modern scholars:  "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 7" [1/11/21], and other posts in this "precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions" series, which also investigates horse terminology and history.  Suffice it to say there is a multitude of material and visual evidence for the passage of this distinctive weapon from one end of Eurasia to the other.)

Let us stop claiming independent invention and chance correspondence for such detailed, complicated works of art and engineering.

Where / What was Waqwaq / Wakwak?

When he was a Ph.D. student at Penn in the 90s, the Yale Arabist Shawkat Toorawa often asked me if I knew anything about the land of Waqwaq / Wakwak and the magical tree that grew there and bore human females as fruit.  The reason he asked me about Waqwaq is because, according to Arab geographers, it was supposed to be in the east and that it was a country of women.  Right away, I thought of Japan because the earliest name for that country was Wa (Wakoku, close enough for an Arab geographer who might have heard it at 2nd or 3rd hand) and, indeed, it was ruled over by a woman (more on that below) and had powerful female chieftains, lending it distinct matriarchal characteristics.

Shawkat continued to do serious research on Waqwaq and to date has published three excellent papers on the subject (see "Selected readings" below).  In one of these papers, "What and Where on Earth Is Waqwaq?" (2023), p. 203, he called attention to the work of Michael Jan de Goeje (August 13, 1836 – May 17, 1909), a Dutch orientalist focusing on Arabia and Islam, especially their geography.  Amazingly, de Goeje ("Le Japon connu des Arabes", p. 299). had put forward Japan as the land intended by Waqwaq, despite the fact that other scholars had proposed practically all other island nations from the Indian Ocean to the Chinese Seas, though phonologically coming to it via Cantonese (Wo-kwok), instead of directly via Japanese Wakoku as I had.  De Goeje also thought that Ibn Khurradādhbih alluded to Japan as the location of Waqwaq (see Toorawa et al., "Wāḳwāḳ", EI-2, passim).  That is a welcome geographical alignment because it makes Waqwaq fit into the larger picture envisaged by Ibn Khurradādhbih described above.  Specifically, Ibn Khurradādhbih states that Waqwaq is east of China.

The legends and long distance historical and geographical writings of the Perso-Arabic authors like Ibn Khurradādhbih are balanced by a scientific paper about the queendom of Wa that Andrew Jones worked on for two decades and was published posthumously in 2023).  It is based on Chinese and Japanese sources, on archeological findings, and on the personal discoveries of the author, who was himself an experienced, lifelong sailor.

The earliest somewhat detailed account of the people inhabiting the islands of Japan was written in the third century by the Chinese official historian, Chén Shòu 陳壽 (233–297), as part of the Wèi 魏 dynasty (220–264) section (“Wèishū” 魏書) of his Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms (Sāngúozhì 三国志).  The account, known in Japanese as the “Wajinden” 倭人伝 (“Treatise on the People of Wa”; MSM “Wōrénzhuàn”), is only two thousand or so characters long and provides a tantalizing glimpse of the Japanese many centuries before they themselves started to record their version of history. (p. 7)

In Jones' paper, Wa 倭 (MSM wō) stands for the people inhabiting the Japanese archipelago before they themselves changed the name to Yamato (reading the same character 倭 as Yamato or using the character 和 and, much later, to Nihon 日本). (p. 3 n. 2)

The Wa people called themselves something that sounded like *ʔuɑi (wa-i), the pronunciation of 倭 around the time of “Wajinden”. (pp. 32-33)

Himiko (born ca. 170 AD-died 247/248 AD; reigned ca. 180 AD-247/248 AD) was a shamaness-queen of Yamatai-koku in Wakoku (倭国).

The medieval East Asian kingdom of Waqwaq, as known to Perso-Arabic geographers, lives on in the modern imagination.  There's a manga series about Waqwaq, and much legend surrounds it, but there is also a great deal of historical evidence concerning it.

To summarize, the East Asian island kingdom of Waqwaq is ruled by a woman and all the population are women.  They grow from the Waqwaq tree until they are ripe and drop to the ground, whereupon they cry "waqwaq".

——

Waqwaq!

Selected readings

• "Iranians in medieval Scotland" (12/4/24) — with a bountiful bibliography of works on Iranian peoples and cultures across Eurasia, including East Asia
• "Eurasian eureka" (9/12/16) — with rich bibliographical resources
• "The language of spices" (1/6/24)
• "The Helgö Buddha" (5/5/23)
• "Scythians between Russia and Ukraine" (3/23/24) — the kurgans and their cultural treasures
• "Sogdians on the Silk Road" (5/22/25)
• Park Cheun-soo, Director Kyungpook National University Museum, ed., Silla and Cultural Exchange between Eurasian Civilizations through the Silkroad (Gyeongju, the World's Sole International City Connecting the Ancient Steppe, Desert, and Maritime Silk Road Routes, 2024) — invaluable collection of artifacts from Afro-Eurasia,
• Choi Seon-ju, Director Gyeongju National Museum, ed. Ancient Korean Artifacts with Origins Abroad:  Diversity from Difference (Gyeongju, 2021).
• Chun Hongchul, Professor of Dunhuang and Silk Road Studies at Woosuk University, ed., Digital Humanities and the Crossroads of Civilization:  Innovation in Silk Road Studies in the AI Era (Jeonju [May 10, 2025).
• Andrew C. H. Jones, "The Way to Wa:  in the Age of Himiko", Sino-Platonic Papers, 336 (September, 2023), 1-56.
• C. Scott Littleton, "Were Some of the Xinjiang Mummies 'Epi-Scythians'? An Excursus in Trans-Eurasian Folklore and Mythology." In Victor H. Mair, The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia (Washington D.C. and Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Man and the University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1998), vol. 2, pp. 746-766. — with essential bibliography for the study of ancient and medieval trade routes and language transmission across Eurasia, with a focus on the beautiful ornamented dagger from the Gyerim-ro tomb in Silla
• Victor H. Mair, ed., Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World (Honolulu:  University of Hawaii Press, 2006).
• Victor H. Mair and Erling Hoh, The True History of Tea (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009)
• Shawkat M. Toorawa, "Wâq al-wâq: Fabulous, Fabular, Indian Ocean (?) Island(s) …", Emergences, 10.2 (2000), 387-402.
• _____, "What and Where on Earth Is Waqwaq?", Journal of Abbasid Studies, 10 (2023), 194-207.
• _____, "Wāḳwāḳ", in Encyclopaedia of Islam New Edition Online (EI-2 English), G.R. Tibbetts, Shawkat M. Toorawa, G. Ferrand, G.S.P. Freeman-Grenville (Shawkat M. Toorawa and F. Viré).
• M. J. de Goeje, "Le Japon connu des Arabes", Les Annales de l’Extrème-Orient, 5 (1882–83), 295–307.

[h.t. C. K. Wang; thanks to Chun Hongchul, Shawkat Toorawa, Song Yaoxue, Linda Chance, Sunny Jhutti; Jing Hu; Gertrud Fleming]

June 1, 2025 @ 3:45 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and archeology, Language and art, Language and history, Language and travel

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