Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (78 page)

APPENDIX B

Ancient Central Eurasian Ethnonyms

The reading or interpretation of the names of many ancient Central Eurasian peoples is controversial, and as a result the identification of the peoples themselves is often disputed. The problem affects both little-known nations and some of the most famous empires. This appendix is devoted to the discussion of some of these problematic names.

Ch’iang ~
*Kl
ā
nk-
‘The Charioteers’

The name of the Ch’iang
NMan
qiâng,
the main foreign enemies of the Shang Chinese, has been said to be either a transcription of a foreign name or a native Chinese word meaning ‘shepherd’. The latter explanation
¹
does not accord with Chinese usage because the word
ch’iang
is never used as a common noun meaning ‘shepherd’; it always refers to a more or less specific foreign people. It seems likely, therefore, based on the very early date of their intrusion—as well as their skill with war chariots, and the fact that Tibeto-Burman words for ‘horse’ are mostly late borrowings from Chinese
²
—that the early Ch’iang were Indo-European speakers, not Tibeto-Burmans as generally believed.
³
Their name, Ch’iang
NMan
qiâng
from MChi *k
^h
iaη (Pul. 251) from OChi *klaη,
⁴
may also have an Indo-European etymology: the word
kl
ā
nk-
in Tokharian means ‘to ride, go by wagon’,
⁵
as in ‘to ride off to hunt from a chariot’, so Ch’iang could actually mean ‘charioteer’.

The Chiang
NMan
jiâng
(from OChi *klaη) are generally believed to be related to or the same as the Ch’iang
originally. The latter name may have been tabooed in the Chou period, or else written
Chiang (with the ‘woman’ radical), because the people so named were the original maternal clan of the Chou Dynasty.
⁶

Wu-Sun ~
*A
ś
vin
‘The Cavaliers’

Wu-sun is the modern Mandarin Chinese pronunciation of
, which according to the usual current Old Chinese reconstruction is from Middle Chinese *ͻswən (Pul. 325, 297) from Old Chinese *âswin. However, Old Chinese syllable-initial *s- seems to have become Middle Chinese *Χ- (Beckwith 2006c). If the reconstruction is correct, the s here should have become Middle Chinese *Χ- too. What then could be the source of the s in the modern reading Wu-sun? In cases where a good number of Chinese words are derived from the same root—such as
NMan
sân
‘three’, from Middle Chinese *sam (Pul. 271) and the many words for things that come in threes (or that are written with characters intended to suggest that the underlying word rhymes with a ‘three’ word)—as Sagart (1999: 150) remarks, “It seems impossible to suppose a root initial s- here.” In the case of
NMan sân, the Early Old Chinese ancestor began with something other than *s, most likely the cluster *tr- or an affricate (Sagart 1999: 148–152). The s in Wu-sun should have come from something like *s but somehow different. Because it is necessary to take into consideration many other factors, the possibilities in the present instance may be narrowed down to a few, of which *ś[c] is the most likely. This would make the underlying name *Aświn, a perfect transcription of Old Indic
a
ś
vin
‘the horsemen’, the name of twin equestrian gods. The Wu-sun people were markedly Europoid in appearance
⁷
and could well have been Old Indic speakers.

The name K’un-mu ~ K’un-mo
NMan
kûnmù
~
kûnmò
from MChi or *kwəͻnmak (Pul. 179, 220, 218) is certainly the word or title for the *Aśvin king, not a personal name, as is clear from the
Han shu
account of the Wu-sun kingdom,
⁸
where it is also written K’un-mi
NMan
kûnmí,
from Middle Chinese *kwənmji (Pul. 179, 212). Despite the traditional reading ‘K’un-mo’, with the second syllable taken as NMan
mò
from MChi *mak, the second reading obviously accords better with the alternative form
NMan
kûnmí
and is therefore to be preferred. The first syllable should have been *k
^w
in (or perhaps *k
^w
il ~ *k
^w
ir or *k
^w
ēr etc.) in Han period Old Chinese, possibly transcribing a foreign *kin/*kēn (perhaps *kil/*kēl ~ *kir/*kēr) or *kon (perhaps *kol ~ *kor). As for the second syllable,
NMan
mù
~
mò
from MChi *mͻ or *mak (Pul. 220), the phonetic is
rì
‘sun’, which may be reconstructed as dialectal Late Old Chinese *ñ(r)ēk ~ *mīk (Central dialect *ñīč, becoming *ñīt) from Early Old Chinese *mē(r)(e)k. According to the current reconstruction the Middle Chinese reading *mͻ must be from a Late Old Chinese *mâh or *meh, from *meks. The alternate form,
NMan mí, from Middle Chinese *mjiə/mji (Pul. 212), reflects Late Old Chinese *mē. In Han times, however, theoretical Early Middle Chinese *m- often had the value *
^m
b- and is used to transcribe foreign *b-, as is the case in attested (“Late”) Middle Chinese as well. The Chinese transcriptions thus represent a foreign syllable *mē ~ *bē or possibly *meh ~ *beh. In view of the Old Indic etymology of the ethnonym *Aśvin, an Old Indic etymology for the title of the king would seem to be indicated too.