agen Why Tocharians? 415 Why Tocharians? Edwin G. Pulleyblank University of British Columbia The Europoid mummies from Xinjiang can’t speak to us and they weren’t accompanied by any written material so why do we (some of us) think they were Tocharians? How do we even know that they spoke any kind of Indo-European language? In a Chinese source of the Tang period, probably dating from the seventh century, the Kirghiz, who were then living on the Upper Yenisei and were certainly Turkic speaking then as later, are described as “of large stature, fair 1 complexioned, with red hair and green eyes” (translated from the Tang Huiyao in Pulleyblank 1990). Some nineteenth century scholars did indeed assume that the blond Kirghiz must have originally come from Europe and later lost their original language but there is not a scrap of evidence to support such an assumption. Clearly blondness and speaking an Indo-European language didn’t necessarily go together in Central Asia in past ages any more than they do in Finland or India today. Nevertheless I agree with Victor Mair that there is a strong likelihood that many of the mummies from Xinjiang that he has brought to our attention are the corpses of Indo-European speakers and specifically of Tocharian speakers. Though the texts in the extinct Indo-European languages commonly known by that name date only from the Tang period (7th to 9th centuries), we have every reason to believe from Chinese historical sources that there had been continuity in the occupation of those locations at least from the time the Chinese first penetrated into the Tarim basin in the second century BCE. The major event that led to the Turkicization of Xinjiang was the collapse of the nomadic steppe empire of the Turkic- speaking Uighurs in the middle of the ninth century and the establishment of settled successor states in the oases of Gansu and Xinjiang. One precious piece of solid linguistic evidence that pushes the evidence for the existence of Tocharian languages in Xinjiang back several centuries is the fact that there are traces of a Tocharian substratum in the proper names Contained in the administrative records in Gandhari Prakrit Volume 23, Number 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 1995416 Edwin G. Pulleyblank that have been recovered from the state of Shanshan, with its capital at Loulan, in the third and fourth centuries (Burrow 1935—more on this below). What is still unclear is just how long before the Han penetration into the Western Regions there were Tocharian speakers in those parts. Chinese records can throw litde light on this question and the archaeological evidence is still very uncertain. In searching for a plausible answer one important question to decide is how to account for the fact that in its treatment of the Indo European palatals Tocharian does not belong the the satem branch of Indo-European, like the Iranian languages immediately to the west, but rather to the centum branch, like the Greek, Italic, Germanic and Celtic languages of Europe. When the Tocharian documents were first discovered, this was taken to mean that the Tocharians must have arrived in the oases of Xinjiang by a long migration from Europe across the intervening territory of the Balts, Slavs and Iranians belonging to the satem branch. Though, as Mair remarks, there are historically attested long-range migrations of nomads, such as the westward movement of the Yuezhi from the borders of China to Bactria (on which more below), the supposed migration of the Tocharians from Europe to Xinjiang through alien territory is hard to motivate and strains credulity. Though it seems that some Indo-Europeanists stick to the old idea, a much more plausible explanation is that the palatalization that gave rise to the so-called satem forms was an innovation in the more central dialects of Indo-European that did not spread to the peripheral dialects. This would mean that the Tocharians had always lain to the east of the Iranians. On this assumption Mallory’s suggestion (1989) that the proto-Tocharians can be identified with the Afanasievo culture that flourished in the Minusinsk Basin in the Upper Yenisei region of Siberia in the third millennium BCE and that they moved south into the Tarim Basin around the beginning of the second millennium when Afanasievo is replaced by Okunevo seems to make very good sense. He notes that the earliest neolithic remains from Xinjiang from about 4000 to 2000 BCE are shards of painted pottery that seem be an extension of the contemporary Yangshao neolithic in China. Arrival of the Tocharians from the north around 2000 BCE fits well with the dates that have been proposed for the mummies. It could also be related to the appearance about that time of the Qijia The Journal of Indo-European Studies Why Tocharians? 417 culture in Gansu and Qinghai with a more pastoral economy than the previous Yangshao neolithic and the first metallurgy in the Chinese sphere. The earlier proto-Sino-Tibetan inhabitants of Xinjiang would have been absorbed or pushed southward into the Tibetan uplands. The successors to the Indo- Europeans of the Afanasievo culture on the Upper Yenisei were probably the proto-Turkic peoples, Dingling (later Tiele from whom the Uighurs emerged), Jiankun (=Kirghiz) and Xinli (Syr), who according to Chinese records were living in that region and conquered by the Xiongnu at the beginning of the second century BCE. The southward movement of the Uighurs into Xinjiang can thus be seen as following in the footsteps of the Tocharians. We still have to tackle the question of whether Tocharian speakers were confined to the city states on the northern side of the Tarim Basin where their manuscripts have been found or whether, as has been claimed, there were also Tocharian speakers among the nomadic tribes to the north and east. In particular, what was the linguistic affiliation of the Yuezhi who according to Chinese historical records migrated from the borders of China to the banks of the Oxus and conquered Da Xia, that is, Bactria in what is now northern Afghanistan. As everyone agrees, the Yuezhi have somehow to be identified with the Tochari and other tribes who according to western sources were the nomadic conquerors of the Greek kingdom in Bactria and whose name survived in the name Tokharestan that was applied to that region in medieval times. If the Yuezhi-Tochari were Iranians as was argued by Laufer (1917) and is often asserted as if it were a known fact (see, for example, Denis Sinor in the article on ‘Soviet Central Asia’ in the 15th edition, 1990, of the Encyclopaedia Britannica), then the name Tocharian as applied to the languages of the Tarim basin is a gross misnomer, If they were Tocharian speakers, as others believe with equal confidence (see, for example A. K. Narain in The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (ed. Denis Sinor, 1990), then the name Tocharian for the languages is not inappropriate whatever the exact relationship may have been between the nomads and the oasis dwellers. There is also the compromise position which wipes out the problem by saying that, being nomads, the Yuezhi were probably very mixed and could have had both Iranian and Tocharian elements. Since the Yuezhi left no written records and the direct Volume 23, Number 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 199548 Edwin G. Pulleyblank evidence about their language in Chinese sources is exceedingly meager to say the least, a fully satisfying answer is scarcely possible. There are nevertheless things that can be said to weight the balance of probability on one side or the other and I think it is worthwhile pursuing the question, especially if one is interested in the question that Victor Mair raises about channels for early western influences on Chinese civilization. To get a proper background for approaching this question we need to consider two historical events, one internal to China and one external to it, that in the latter part of the first millennium BCE decisively changed the pattern of East Asian history for the next two thousand years. The internal event was the unification of the Chinese states and the establishment of the first centralized Chinese empire by Qin in the year 221 BCE. The external event was the arrival on the Chinese steppe frontier of the new military technique of mounted archery, first explicitly mentioned in Chinese sources under the year 307 BCE in connection with a debate at the court of the state of Zhao over the adoption of “Hu clothing”, that is, the trousers, jacket, belt and cap of the Hu nomads beyond the frontier who practiced this new and highly effective technique of warfare. Ithas been shown that the domestication of the horse goes back to at least the fourth millennium in the western steppe and it is claimed that from the beginning this must have included riding on the backs of horses as well as the use of the horse as a draft animal in place of oxen to pull wheeled vehicles. However, it is also clear that both in the west and in the east the use of the horse in warfare went through two successive stages. First was the use of horses to pull chariots with light spoked wheels which appears in Western Asia in the early part of the second millennium BCE and which had reached China at the latest by the latter part of the Shang dynasty, towards the end of the second millennium. Mounted archery, on the other hand, does not appear till roughly a thousand years later. In the west it appears with the Scythians who are first mentioned in Near Eastern sources around 800 BCE and whose way of life is described at length by the Greek historian Herodotus. It is the technique of mounted archery rather than the domestication of the horse and its use to pull wheeled vehicles that defines the classic nomadism that dominated the Eurasian steppe, and made possible the great steppe empires of the Xiongnu, the Turks and the. Mongols The Journal of Indo-European Studies Why Tocharians? 419 that terrorized the adjacent settled peoples in China, Western Asia and Europe. There are no written records and, it would seem, little in the way of archaeological finds so far to tell us how the technique of mounted archery spread eastward to the borders of China. There is, however, a suggestive analogy in the way in which the acquisition of horses by the Indians from the Spaniards in Mexico and its use in warfare transformed the Great Plains of North America from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries (Secoy 1953). It is very likely that the new technique spread fairly rapidly eastward across Eurasia more by imitation than by conquest. That is, the greatly enhanced mobility it provided forced neighbours either to submit or to adopt the technique themselves in self-defence. There is no need to imagine, as some have done, far-ranging Scythian or Cimmerian migrations to the borders of China. The mounted archers whom the Chinese first encountered on the Mongolian frontier north of Shanxi were called Hu. It was probably originally a specific ethnic name but it soon became a general term for inhabitants of the steppe who practised this technique and its associated way of life and was applied during the Han period (206 BCE to 220 CE) especially to the Xiongnu who then dominated the steppe. There is a strong likelihood that the original Hu were in fact the same as the Eastern Hu, so called in Han times to differentiate them from the Xiongnu. The Eastern Hu, later differentiated into Xianbei (= *Serbi) and Wuhuan (= *Awar) are identifiable through historical continuities with Mongolian speaking peoples of later times (Ligeti 1970, Pulleyblank 1983). The Xiongnu themselves emerge into history immediately after the unification of China by Qin. One of the first acts of the First Emperor of Qin was to drive the Xiongnu, who were then living south of the Yellow River in the Ordos region, north across the Yellow River into the outer steppe with the aim of securing his northern frontier. He is also famous for building the Great Wall. In fact the most northerly part, which at that time ran north of the great bend of the Yellow River, had already been built by Zhao as a barrier against the Hu. There is good reason to think that the Xiongnu were long-time inhabitants of the Ordos who, like the Mongolian Hu farther east, had only recently been converted to horse-rider nomadism. (Pulleyblank 1994). ‘Contrary to what is still a widely held presumption, it is Volume 23, Number 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 1995 |420 Edwin G. Pulleyblank highly unlikely that they spoke Turkic or Mongolian or any other Altaic language (Pulleyblank 1962). When they were driven northward into the outer steppe by the armies of Qin, the Xiongnu had to fight for living space with the existing inhabitants and it was in the course of this struggle that they established the first steppe empire of which we have record. Though there are marked similarities between the Xiongnu as described by Sima Qian, who wrote about them in Han times and the Scythians as described by Herodotus, no doubt reflecting the spread of the nomadic way of life from west to east, it is also clear that they owed a great deal in the political organization of their empire to the example of the new Chinese empire to the south. The Xiongnu ruler called himself Son of Heaven, using the same archaic title claimed by the Chinese emperors, and in his diplomatic dealings with China proposed to divide the sovereignty of the world between himself as overlord of the northern steppe lands and the Han emperor as overlord of the cultivated lands to the south. This and other elements of political organization based on Chinese models, such as the color symbolism of the four directions (or five, including yellow for the center), were passed on by the Xiongnu to the later steppe empires of the Turks and Mongols (Pritsak 1954, Pulleyblank, in press). A striking example of this is the Xiongnu word for ‘heaven’, transcribed by Chinese characters now pronounced chengli, which is certainly the same as Old Turkish tdngri, Mongolian tenggeri ‘heaven’ and which has been the mainstay of those who assume that the Xiongnu spoke an Altaic language. It has been shown, however, that the variability of the forms in both Turkic and Mongolian mark it as a loanword in both those language families (Pelliot 1944). (For other elements of titulature passed on from the Xiongnu to later steppe empires see Pulleyblank 1962.) _ The reason for stressing the creative role of the Xiongnu in setting the pattern for later steppe empires in the context of the present discussion is to warn against the easy assumption that one can extrapolate features of those later nomadic hordes back into prehistoric times. It is certainly true that in the course of their conquests the Xiongnu incorporated many different tribes of diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds and moved them about. The so-called Southern Xiongnu who were allowed to settle in parts of north China during Han times and who later rose in revolt and established short-lived The Journal of Indo-European Studies Why Tocharians? 421 kingdoms in the fourth century were ethnically very mixed and the same was true of later nomadic empires. This does not justify us in assuming that all nomadic groups were like that from the beginning, especially in prehistoric times before the pattern of periodic imperial unification of the steppe had been set by the Xiongnu. Another point that is worth stressing is the extent to which, as Thomas Barfield (1981) has shown, the Xiongnu and later steppe empires centered on Mongolia depended economically on the Chinese regimes to the south. While pastoral nomadism could provide a self-sufficient living at a subsistence level, it did not make it possible for a ruler to accumulate a surplus of goods that he could use to distribute among his subordinate chieftains in order to hold their allegiance. The Xiongnu rulers developed the technique of terrorizing the Chinese frontier in order to extract tribute, especially in the form of Chinese silk. Conversely, dependence on Chinese goods could become a source of weakness for nomad regimes and Chinese governments used this to develop techniques of playing one nomadic group off against another and of establishing client nomads on their frontier as a buffer against less easily controlled nomads farther out. Cycles of imperial unity and disunity within China and on the steppe in historical times were thus interrelated and we should be cautious about projecting the patterns of later ages back into prehistoric times when the preconditions for them did not exist. With these preliminaries out of the way, we can return to the specific question of the ethnic and linguistic composition of the Yuezhi, who after being defeated by the Xiongnu moved westward, overthrew the Hellenistic kingdom of Bactria and eventually established the Kushanian empire that dominated Afghanistan, Gandhara, Kashmir and other parts of western India from the first to the third century. According to the Chinese account, at the time they were conquered by the Xiongnu the Yuezhi lived in an area in Gansu between Dunhuang and the Qilian mountain range to the south. This is confirmed by the fact that that was still the location in Later Han times of the Little Yuezhi, the remnant left behind by the westward migration of the main body. If one wants to see them as Iranian, it implies a migration at some unspecified earlier time from western Central Asia to the borders of China, either bypassing the Tocharian settlements in the oases of the Tarim Volume 23, Number 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 1995422 Edwin G. Pulleyblank on the north, perhaps by a route north of the Tianshan range, or along the southern silk road from or through the known Iranian settlements in Kashgar and Khotan. One can hardly Tule out such possibilities a priori but, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the geographically simpler assumption is that the Yuezhi were ethnically and linguistically related to their close neighbors in Loulan, the first station west of Dunhuang on the southern branch of the silk road. We have already cited the evidence from the administrative documents in Gandhari Prakrit from the kingdom of Shanshan which had its capital at Loulan and included other centers on the southern silk road as far as the border with the Iranian city of Khotan that the native language there was a form of Tocharian. How Gandhari Prakrit came to be used as an administrative language in Shanshan is a puzzle. The most plausible explanation is that it was the legacy of a Kushanian occupation of Xinjiang of which there is no mention in contemporary Chinese sources but which is referred to in Buddhist legends of the exploits of Kanishka, greatest of the Kushanian rulers. I have proposed elsewhere (Pulleyblank 1968: 256-258) that the most likely period for such an occupation to have taken place without being noticed in the Chinese official histories was between 175 CE, the date of the last event recorded in the Hou Han shu (History of Later Han) that implies a Chinese presence in the Western Regions, and 202 CE, when an embassy arrived from Khotan presenting a trained elephant. It is relevant to note that from 184 onward China was in a state of civil war resulting from the revolt of the Yellow Turbans. A probably relevant circumstance is a revolt by the Little Yuezhi in Gansu and Qinghai, which also broke out in 184 and was not fully suppressed until 221 (Haloun 1949: 119-132). The coincidence in Uming suggests that this revolt may have been stimulated by the arrival from farther west of Kushanian troops who were in effect returning to the homeland from which their ancestors had departed nearly four hundred years before. Brough (1965), who also thinks the use of Prakrit in Shanshan must have been the legacy of the Kushans, does not commit himself to a definite date but thinks it can hardly have been earlier than 130. I think the silence of the Chinese sources on the subject can only be explained by placing more precise limits on the time. Brough emphasizes the role of Prakrit in the early transmission of Buddhism to China and draws attention to the The Journal of Indo-European Studies . Why Tocharians? 423 numerous Prakrit loanwords in Buddhist texts from other parts of Xinjiang. Finding evidence in the Prakrit documents from Shanshan that the local language there was of Tocharian type does not, of course, prove anything about the language of the Yuezhi themselves. Brough, appealing to accepted opinion, considered the Kushanians to be “of Iranian affinity” and spoke of their earlier history as “gleanings from the Chinese annals, and too sketchy in any case to be of much value”. I find this astonishingly dismissive. He even suggests that “the traditional story may, to a greater or lesser extent, be a theoretical construct, designed to explain the continuing presence of Yaeh-chih (distinguished as ‘lesser Yaeh-chih’) in regions to the east of the Pamir”. Chinese relations with the Great Yuezhi and Little Yuezhi, though intermittent, were matters of considerable importance at times when they were active and not matters for the idle imaginings of cloistered scholars. Brough’s view may reflect ignorance of the way in which Chinese official histories were written or rather compiled. It was not a matter of some individual scholar poring over earlier records and then making up his own story as a free composition. In most cases it was a matter of excerpting documents found in the archives by a method of scissors and paste. This imposes its own dangers and limitations that have to be taken into account when interpreting what has come down to us but does ensure that most of what we find there can be assumed to derive ultimately from contemporary documents rather than imaginative reconstruction of past events long after they happened. To suggest that the Chinese historians didn’t know what they were talking about when they connected the Great and Little Yuezhi is incredible. We are still, of course, faced with the problem that the Kushans did not use the language they brought with them from Central Asia, be it Iranian or Tocharian, in the administration of their empire or, as far as we can tell, in the propagation of Buddhism when this became their mission. One or two inscriptions in an Iranian language have been found in ba territory but its dialect position identifies it as the ine language of Bactria, not something imported from See t 7 not surprising in itself that the illiterate Yuezhi shoul sity given up their own language when they moved into the settle and literate territories that they conquered. The Norman Volume 23, Number 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 1995424 Edwin G. Pulleyblank conquerors of England used French both as their spoken language and French or Latin in their administration, not the Scandinavian tongue that their ancestors had spoken a few generations earlier when they invaded Normandy. It does, however, frustrate us in trying to discover what the Yuezhi language originally was. One thing that is clear is that evidence for the use of Iranian in the Kushan empire centered on Afghanistan gives no warrant for assuming that that was the original linguistic affinity of the Yuezhi when they were in Gansu. Failure to make this distinction vitiates Laufer’s arguments for identifying the Yuezhi as Iranians. An intriguing additional piece of information in the Later Han History's account of the part of the southern silk road between Loulan and Khotan, that is, the territory administered by Shanshan in the fourth century, is the mention of a country called Xiao Yuan, ‘Little Yuan’. The parallel with Xiao Yuezhi, Litdle Yuezhi, suggests that Little Yuan similarly meant a stay-at- home remnant in the original homeland of the dominant group in Dayuan, the name of one of the principal countries of Western Turkestan, with which China had dealings in the decades after Zhang Qian’s embassy. Unlike the first syllable in Da Yuezhi, Great Yuezhi, which clearly has its ordinary Chinese meaning, ‘great’, and is often omitted, the same syllable, da, in Dayuan is never otherwise dropped and must be taken to be part of the transcription. It looks therefore as if Xiao Yuan Teally stands for Xiao [Da]yuan, Little Dayuan, shortened because of the apparent contradiction if read in Chinese as ‘Little Great Yuan’. I have proposed (Pulleyblank 1962:90) to interpret Dayuan, Early Middle Chinese daj"-2uan or da’-2uan, as a Western Han dynasty transcription of *Taxwar = *Taxwar, which Henning (1938) proposed as the underlying original of Greek Tékharoi, Takharoi, Latin Tochari, Sanskrit Tukhara, Tusara, etc. There are some phonetic problems about the first syllable, which according to its rhyme class one would expect to have been pronounced something close to *das or *daf, ending in a dental or palatal sibilant at the relevant period. There is, however, a close parallel in Dayi, Early Middle Chinese dajh. 2jlajk, wanscribing an adjectival form in -ik of the named Daha-, Greek Daai, Dsai, an Iranian people in what was later known as Dihistan on the Caspian. Further support for this interpretation of the relation between Little [Da]yuan and Dayuan = *taxwar comes from a reference by the famous The Journal of Indo-European Studies Why Tocharians? 425 seventh century Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, Xuanzang, to a place called Old Duhuoluo, i.e. Old Tokharestan, in roughly the same place that the Later Han History places Little Yuan. If this interpretation is correct, it means that the Yuezhi were not alone in their westward migration but were accompanied by the Dayuan or *Taxwar and perhaps other related tribes. This, of course, fits in with the statements in Greek and Latin sources that refer to other tribes, including the Asii or Asiani and Sacaraucae or Sacaraulae, along with the Tochari as the conquerors of Bactria even if we cannot yet definitely identify Yuezhi among the names known in the west. I have suggested (1962:93-94) that Yuezhi, Early Middle Chinese nuat-tcia, might represent a Tocharian *Ywati. This could somehow underlie both Asii and another tribal name written Idtioi in the work of the Greek geographer Ptolemy on the assumption that the initial consonant was a front rounded semivowel [4] which was difficult to render adequately in both Greek and Chinese. A fuller discussion of the phonological problems involved must be left aside for the present. It is worth noting, however, that, although the Chinese records keep Dayuan and (Great) Yuezhi strictly apart, the Hanshu (History of [Western] Han) says that the capital of Dayuan was Gueishan which must surely be a variant of Gueishuang, the Chinese transcription of Kushan as the name of the dynasty, showing that this proper name was in use there as well as among the Yuezhi. | Linguistic evidence of connections between the Yuezhi and. other nomadic groups is also provided by the title xihou, Early Middle Chinese xip-xow, which must be the same as yavuga- found on the coins of the first Kushan ruler, Kujula kadphises, and as IAPGU in Greek script on coins of an unknown ruler in Afghanistan. The title was later borrowed into Old Turkish in the form yabgu. H. W. Bailey has suggested an Iranian etymology for yavugad (1958:136), but no such Iranian word as he proposes is actually attested. Xihou is the title of the five Yuezhi chieftains who were united by the Gueishuang xihou (Kushan yabgu) when he founded the Kushan empire. Itis also found among the Wusun and the Kangju. The Wusun were a nomad group who lay to the west of the Xiongnu after the departure of the Yuezhi and whom Zhang Qian persuaded the Han emperor to ty to enlist as an ally against the Xiongnu after the failure of his mission to persuade the Yuezhi to undertake Volume 23, Number 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 1995io Eduin G. Pulleyblank the same role. The county of Kangju was located i i of Tashkend on the Syr Darya or Noe in Former Hanon but by the time the Hanshu was completed Kangju h oi expanded its power south into Sogdiana, replacing Dae the Paramount power in the region and controlling five pet : kingdoms. By Tang times Kang guo, the country of ane, shortened from Kangju, meant Samarkand; Tashkend a known as Shi guo, Stone County, with the same meanin, ; Tashkend in Turkish combining Turkish tash ‘stone’ with Rant city’ borrowed from Sogdian kanth, As suggested to me b H. W. Bailey (see Pulleyblank 1962:247) Kangju, Early Middle Chinese khan-ki3, can probably identified with Tocharian A kank- ‘stone’. Though referred to in the histories of the Western Han period, the Shiji and Hanshu, as if it were a settled country, it seems likely that, like Yuezhi and Dayuan, Kangju was actually the name of a nomadic people who had mowed West into Iranian territory under Pressure from the Xiongnu. There is evidence that the name Kangju was already known in Han China before the time of Zhang Qian which may imply that they were then located closer to China (Pulleyblank 1966: Ler ets the Southern Xiongnu who moved into China in ‘4an times were a group called Qian, ju, also ki i and distinguished from the sce at by eases characteristics. The short-lived dynasty of Later Zhao (319-350) was founded by Shi Le, a man of Jie (=Qiangqu) extraction. Qiangqu, | Early Middle Chinese kl ian-gid, must be another transcription of the non-Chinese name underlying Kangju. It can hardly be a coincidence that Shi Le’s Chinese surname, Shi fe is the same as the later Chinese name for Tashkend. mo may have been a fraction of the Kangju who, paras oO! ae west, were Incorporated into the Xiongnu sil . or : ey may have been captured at a later date by the i en ie eg known to have been involved in the affairs of as a a = ice region around the beginning of the ___ The use of the title xihou among the Wusun provides a teBuistic link between these nomads end the other puatsely an a speaking nomads, Yuezhi and Kangju, who used this ase He id be contradicted if we accepted Victor Mair’s peopleoe te re name Wusun can be etymologized as ‘horse ie he basis of @ comparison with Sanskrit Asvin or asva)’mare’ which would imply that they belonged The Journal of Indo-European Studies Why Tocharians? 497 to a satem branch of Indo-European. However, while this may seem attractive as an inspired guess, there is no independent evidence that the name Wusun has anything to do with horses and the linguistic equation of the transcription is not as good as it might appear at first sight. Sanskrit and Lithuanian forms are geographically too remote. We should expect an Iranian form to resemble Avestan aspd ‘mare’, Sogdian ‘sp, or Ossetic afsé, yafsd, with [p] or [£] instead of [v] or [w], or to resemble Old Persian asa-, Khotanese af§a-, aa-, with no labial element after the sibilant (Bailey 1979). Much has been made of the Iranian loanwords in Tocharian as attested in documents of the Tang period. There seems to be no great difficulty in explaining Bactrian loanwords, given what we know of the probable Kushanian influence in the Tarim Basin. Even traces of Ossetic influence may not be impossible to explain. The Ossetes of the Caucasus are supposed to be a remnant of the nomadic Alans. These are mentioned in the Later Han History, where they are said to have changed their name, formerly Yancai, and to be a dependency of Kangju. Yancai is mentioned, obviously from hearsay, in Zhang Qian’s report in the Shiji as a nomadic country some 2000 li northwest of Kangju, i.e. Tashkend, and this is repeated without change in the Hanshu. Clearly they were out of range of the Chinese through the whole of the Western Han period but, if Kangju, in its aggressive expansion, had incorporated them under its rule, and if the Kangju people were, as I think, Tocharian speakers, they could have provided a channel for some stray loanwords from their Iranian subjects to the Tocharians of the Tarim basin. One should also mention the Tocharian loanwords in Chinese of which there are at least two. One is the well-known mi ‘honey’, Early Middle Chinese mjit, which has long been recognized as a loanword from Tocharian B mit (see especially Conrady 1925). Unfortunately I know nothing about the history of apiculture in China but it would seem not to be very ancient. The word mi does occur a few times in texts of the third century BCE, however, which shows that it must have come into China before the imperial period, giving indirect evidence of trade relations at least as far west as Xinjiang even though no textual evidence has survived describing it. The other is the word shizi ‘lion’ which first appears after the opening up of the west by Zhang Qian. It has been thought Volume 23, Number 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 1995ee eee eee eee 428 Edwin G, Pulleyblank that the second syllable is a noun forming suffix and that the word was borrowed from Persian sér. This was even taken as evidence for reconstrucing final *r in word in the rhyme class to which shi belongs. The time is, however, much too early for zi to be a noun suffix and, in any case, even in later Chinese it would be unusual for a loanword to supplied with such a suffix at its first appearance. If we treat the second syllable as part of the transcription it becomes si-tsi’ in Early Middle Chinese, implying something like *s5j-c5? in Western Han. Taking the final glottal stop as a way of representing a foreign -k, this is close to Tocharian B secake ‘lion’ (cf.A sifék). A Tocharian source for the Chinese word can be regarded as virtually certain (see Pulleyblank 1962:109, 128, 226). There is, admittedly still no ‘smoking gun’, but I think the simplest hypothesis to account for the known facts is that the Tocharian speaking inhabitants of the oases on the north side of the Tarim Basin were in place long before the time when the Tocharian manuscripts were produced, that Tocharian speaking territory included other settled peoples along the southern branch of the Silk Road as far as eastern border of Khotan and that there were also Tocharian speaking nomads to the north and, in the case of the Yuezhi, to the east of these settlements, stretching into Gansu beyond Dunhuang. On the other side, there seems to be nothing but pure conjecture to suggest that there was any significant Iranian element among the peoples of those parts before the general mixing up that followed the establishment of the Qin-Han empire in China and the Xiongnu empire on the steppe. Bibliography Bailey, H.W. 1958 ‘Languages of the Saka’. In B. Spuler, ed. Handbuch der Orientalistik. Erste Alteilung: Der nahe und mittlere Osten. Vierter Band: Iranistik. Erster Abschnitt: Linguistik. Leiden-K6ln: E. J. Brill. 1979 Dictionary of Khotan Saka. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Barfield, Thomas J. 1981 ‘The Hsiung-nu imperial conf a pee i poly et Tiyimperial confederacy: Organization and Foreign Brough, John 1965 ‘Comments on third-centu: Shi i Buddhism’. BSOAS 28; 382-012 eee The Journal of Indo-European Studies Why Tocharians? Burrow, Thomas 1935 ‘Tokharian elements in the Kharosthi documents from Chinese Turkestan.’ Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 667-675 Conrady, August a 1925 ‘Alte westdstliche Kulturworter.’ Beitrdge iiber die Verhandlungen der Sachsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig. Phil.-hist. Kl. 77 Band. 3 Heft:1-19. Haloun, Gustav 1937 ‘Zur Ue-tsi-Frage’, ZDMG 17-318 1949 ‘The Liang-Chou Rebellion’, Asia Major n.s. 1: 119-131 Henning, W. B. i 1938 ‘Argi and the “Tokharians™, BSOAS9: 545-571 Laufer, Berthold i 1917 The Language of the Yiiechi or IndoScythians, Chicago: RR. Donnelley & Sons. (14 pp., 50 copies printed for the author) Ligeti, Louis a 1970 ‘Le Tabghatch, un dialecte de la langue sien-pi,’ in L. Ligeti, ed. Mongolian Studies. Amsterdam: Gruner. pp-265-308 Mallory, J. P. 1989. 5 search of the Indo-Europeans. London: Thames and Hudson Narain, A. K : ; 1990 ‘Indo-Europeans in Inner Asia.’ In D. Sinor, ed. The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 177-205 Pelliot, Paul 1944 ‘Tangrim > tarim,’ Toung-pao 37: 165-185 Pritsak, O. : , 1954. “Orientierung und Farbsymbolik: zu der Farbenbezeichnugen in den altaischen Vélkernamen”, Saeculum 5:376-383. Reprinted in Pritsak 1981 : ; 1981 Studies in Medieval Eurasian History. London: Variorum Reprints leyblank, Edwin G. aaa athe consonantal system of Old Chinese,” AM9:58144, 206265. 1966 ‘Chinese and Indo-Europeans,’ JRAS, 9:39. : 1968 ‘Chinese evidence for the date of Kaniska, in ALL. Basham, ed., Papers on the date of Kaniska, Leiden: Brill. 247-58 a 1983. ‘The Chinese and their neighbours in prehistoric and early histo times,’ in D. N. Keightley, ed. The Origins of Chinese Civilization. pp.41l-66, Berkeley: University of California Press| 1990 ‘The name of the Kirghiz’, Central Asiatic Journal 34: 98-1 Volume 23, Number 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 1 995ce 430 Edwin G. Pulleyblank 1994 ‘JiHu 4 81: indigenous inhabitants of Shaanbei and Western Shanxi,’ In Opuscula Attaica: Essays presented in honor of Henry Schwan. ed, by Edward H. Kaplan. Bellingham: Western Washinton University. pp.499-531 in press. ‘Hsiung-nu’, and ‘The Nomads in China and Central Asia in post- Han times.’ In Philologiae Turcicae Fundamenta, vol.3. Secoy, Frank Raymond 1953 Changing military pattems on the Great Plains (17th through early 19th | centuries). Locust Valley, New York: JJ. Augustin | Sinor, Denis 1990 ‘Soviet Central Asia’. In Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition. Chicago. Vol. 28: 1079-1088 The Journal of Indo-European Studies