Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (82 page)

1.
Although it is customary among specialists in Antiquity and the Middle Ages to speak of major near-contemporaneous historical works as “primary” sources, they are in fact almost all secondary works, compilations or literary compositions written by ancient or medieval authors and thus already shaped by the writers’ perceptions and agendas; they are primary only in the sense that they are the earliest (sometimes the only) sources available on the subject. This is true even of the Chinese
shih-lu
or ‘veritable records’, the Old Turkic inscriptions, and so on. The same applies to modern histories of the Modern period, of course, though in this case historians do have massive amounts of primary source material at hand. In order to write this book, it has been necessary for me to rely in large part on secondary works, regardless of the period in question. This may seem more obvious to Modernists than to others, but there is in fact no chronological difference in my approach to the sources, which has been dictated by the large scale of the work. I have however gone into some questions in detail—for example, ancient ethnonyms and modern art—and in such cases have referred to primary materials to the extent necessary or possible, for example, inscriptions, manuscripts, or studies citing them in the former case, and works of art and art theoretical writings in the latter case.

2.
I do not suggest that anyone repeat the received view, but a history of Central Eurasia written in the editorial-bibliographic approach, provided with citations of every significant relevant article and book, would be a great contribution to the field. An example of such a work, though of more limited geographical, chronological, ethnolinguistic, and topical scope, is Sinor (1963). I strongly encourage anyone interested in writing such a work to do so. It would of course have to be a series of encyclopedic volumes that would probably require many years, or decades, to finish. The Unesco volumes,
History of Civilizations of Central Asia
(Dani et al. 1992–2005), should have constituted such a work, but unfortunately the articles in them are uneven in quality and objectivity, there is no concept of Central Eurasia (their “Central Asia”), and their bibliographic coverage is generally minimal.

3.
The numerous conflicting definitions and usages of “Central Eurasia", “Inner Asia,” “Central Asia,” and other terms used for the region as a whole or various subdivisions of it, have been treated by many writers; a full academic discussion would take a good-sized book. Here it is important to note that Central Eurasia
includes
Central Asia. In contemporary terminology, which is a relic of the Soviet period, Kazakhstan is considered a Central Asian state, but in fact it is not, even now,
culturally
or
ecologically
Central Asian, and neither is much of Turkmenistan and most of Kirghizstan. (Nevertheless, in
chapters 11
and
12
I have followed current usage in order to avoid confusion.) Along with Mongolia and some countries retained by Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union—notably the Kalmyk and Tuvin republics—these regions constitute the modern continuation of the premodern nomadic steppe zone. While pastoralism is still practiced there, traditional nomadism seems largely to have disappeared.

4.
It has earlier been claimed that Hittite myths are completely non-Indo-European in nature (i.e., they were borrowed, not inherited). However, Mazoyer (2003) has shown that the Hittites, who adopted the name and cult of the Hatti god Telipinu, adapted him to their own Central Eurasian storm god myth, adding his nation-founding character. According to Mazoyer (2003: 27), H. Gonnet (1990) “a eu la mérite pour la première fois d’attirer l’attention sur la fonction de fondateur de Télipinu.” Telipinu fled from his temple in his home city (which was not Hattuša) because of the neglect of his cult by the last rulers of the Hatti, the non-Indo-European people whose kingdom was taken over by the Hittites (Mazoyer 2003: 27, 111–120, 149–150, 193–196). His career as a nation founder is similar to the foundation stories of Apollo, Cadmus, and Romulus (Mazoyer 2003: 156–158). It is also close to the story of Hou Chi ‘Lord Millet’, god of grain and founder of the Chou Dynasty in China, and the story of *TümeN, god of the ripe ear of grain and founder of the Puyo, Koguryo, and Paekche kingdoms in southern Manchuria and Korea.

5.
The founding hero often seems to be an agricultural fertility god too (cf. the Puyo-Koguryo story). The combination of hero and fertility god in the person of the founder is widely thought to reflect the historical melding of two distinct peoples, but it is notable that the “sacral” Frankish kings embodied the same combination, which is in that connection thought to be a retention from antiquity.

6.
The story given here is a conflation of the origin myths given by Herodotus (Godley 1972: 202–213). In one version this is Heracles, the son of Zeus. In the other version the father is named Targitáus, the son of Zeus and a daughter of the Dnieper River. In the version involving the horse theft, the hero is Hercules, and he sleeps with a creature who lives in a cave and is half woman (above) and half snake (below). The female ancestor would seem necessarily to be Hestia—in Scythian
Tabiti
—their main goddess. In the reply of the Scythian ruler to Darius during the Persian invasion of Scythia, the Scythian says, “for my masters, I hold them to be Zeus my forefather and Hestia queen of the Scythians, and none other” (Godley 1972: 328–329; cf. Rawlinson 1992: 347). Elsewhere Herodotus remarks, “The only gods whom they propitiate by worship are these: Hestia in especial, and secondly Zeus and Earth, whom they deem to be the wife of Zeus; after these, Apollo, and the Heavenly Aphrodite, and Heracles, and Ares. All the Scythians worship these as gods; the Scythians called Royal sacrifice also to Poseidon. In the Scythian tongue Hestia is called Tabiti: Zeus (in my judgment most rightly so called) Papaeus [’the all-father’ (Godley 1972: 257 n. 3)]; Earth is Api, Apollo Goetosyrus, the Heavenly Aphrodite Argimpasa, and Poseidon Thagimasadas” (Godley 1972: 256–259; cf. Legrand 1949: 82); Rawlinson (1992: 347) has “Thamimasadas” evidently after Abicht (1886: 54 n. 5), “… Denn im Zend ist Teme = mare, mazdâo = deus.”

7.
His Hsiung-nu title is written in Chinese
traditionally read NMan
shànyú
or
chányú
(Pul. 48). Neither modern reading has much to do with the Old Chinese pronunciation of the characters, which must have been something like *Dar-γa (earlier) or *Dan-γa (later). The former suggests the well-known medieval Turkic and Mongolic title Daruyači, for a high-ranking official with various functions. It might well go back to the Hsiung-nu, though the latter could of course have borrowed the title themselves.

8.
The name Mo-tun
NMan
mòdùn
is in MChi *mәk (Pul. 217–218) -*twәn
³
(Pul. 84). It has not been identified, but as some have suggested, the Old Chinese pronunciation appears to represent a foreign *baytur, a relative of the later-attested Central Eurasian culture word
baγatur
‘hero’. The etymology of the word is unknown, though the first syllable is very likely the Iranian word *baγ ‘god, lord’, an element in many later Central Eurasian titles. Mo-tun is presented as the founder hero in the story given in the Chinese sources, but he was actually the son of the founder (*Tumen). He was skilled with horses and the bow, the king (*Tumen) and his favored son attempted to use a stratagem to have him murdered, the prince was warned in time and miraculously escaped, he acquired a personal bodyguard of courageous warriors, and finally he attacked and killed the evil king and established a righteous and prosperous kingdom.

9.
The version in the
Shih chi
(Watson 1961, II: 161; cf. Di Cosmo 2002a: 176, no Chinese source cited), according to which he was sent to the Wu-sun, is quite unlikely, because the sources generally say the enemies of the Hsiung-nu in that direction were the Yüeh-chih, and it was due to the Hsiung-nu defeat of the Yüeh-chih that the latter moved west of the Wu-sun, whose ruler later attacked them in revenge for the attack by them that killed his father, as related in the next story.

10.
Old Turkic
tümen
‘ten thousand; myriarchy (a unit of ten thousand men)’ has sometimes been identified with the name *Tumen (q.v. note 21). Both the name of the Old Turkic empire’s founder, *Tumïn, and the word
tümen
are certainly borrowings from another language, because by form they cannot be inherited native Turkic words. The Old Turkic numeral
tümen
is certainly the same word as West Tokharian
t(
_u
)m
ā
ne
‘ten thousand, a myriad’, East Tokharian
tm
ām ‘id.’, and the unknown source of Modern Persian
tumân
‘ten thousand’ (Adams 1999: 301). Generally overlooked is Chinese
NMan
wàn
‘ten thousand’ from MChi *man (Pul. 318 *muan
³
), attested as
fiban
(Tak. 370–371), from *man. The origin of all these words and the directions in which they were loaned remain uncertain. The Chinese word is attested in Chou Dynasty inscriptions, but it is not necessarily the ultimate source. Its character
(a rebus; graphically it represents an insect) is the phonetic not only in the character
NMan
mài
‘step, march’, supposedly from OChi *mrāć (Sta. 574) ~ *mrats (Bax. 775), and
NMan
chài
‘scorpion’ from putative OChi *srhāć (Sta. 574) ~ *hrjats (Bax. 749), but also
NMan
lì
‘severe’ from OChi *rać (Sta. 573) ~ *C-rjats (Bax. 773). The reconstruction of the syllable coda for the latter three series is particularly questionable, and the reconstructions of the onsets are not much better.