The Incredible Shrinking Yuezhi Homeland-- Cramming into Gansu!
For the past week, I've read so many "recent" PDFs my eyes are watering. And I'm shocked. According to present scholarship, the original territory of the Yuezhi has diminished to a ghost of its former self. How this happened, I'm not sure. Possibly, or probably, good old-fashioned authorities like Sulimirski have been dismissed in favor of newer interpretations... such as those by Dr. Craig Benjamin. Sulimirski wrote about the "Arimaspians" forty-six years ago, academically back in the ice-age. He described the Arimaspian homeland precisely where the Yuezhi were located according to recent studies by Taishan Yu. Evidently, Yu's accurate work has also been passed over in favor of Benjamin. Here's a broad synopsis of the modern view of the Yuezhi (Mark A. Riddle, Sino-Platonic Papers, 214, Sept. 2011):
"The Yuezhi had lived since time immemorial on the periphery of China proper, astride the Gansu Corridor and in the Tarim Basin. They were for centuries the source of Chinese jade and were very likely involved in the transmission to China from Central and Western Asia of metallurgy, the horse-drawn chariot, wheat and barley cultivation, etc., while trading Chinese silk to the West. When the Chinese reluctantly abandoned the war chariot and adopted cavalry tactics in 307 BC., they also adopted the Yuezhi costume: trousers with leather belt, buckle and hook, and a scabbard slide."
Riddle certainly gives the Yuezhi credit, more or less claiming they brought China out of the stone age. I can partially agree with most of Riddle's claim, but not with their location-- "astride the Gansu Corridor and in the Tarim Basin." You couldn't find enough water in the Tarim Basin to keep a hundred horses alive, not to mention thousands. The basin was a near desert, inhabited by a modest, Tocharian-speaking, sedentary group now known as the "Tarim Mummies." This "contracted" view is all too common; and from it we hear the Yuezhi were also "Tocharian speakers" (guilt by mistaken association). With this scenario, the Yuezhi tossed out their Tocharian tongue when they switched to Bactrian as the official court language of the Kushan Kingdom, and then continued speaking Northeastern Indo-Iranian as the Alans, finally recorded as such in Ossetic. What a crock; but this is what we see in goofy interpretations of a Yuezhi "Tocharian" ethnos.
Where are modern scholars getting this stuff from? I'm not sure but it seems like Tadeusz Sulimirski and Taishan Yu take a far back seat to Professor Benjamin. In 2003, Craig Benjamin wrote The Yuezhi: Origin, Migration and the Conquest of Northern Bactria as his doctorial thesis. Then in 2007, it was published in paperback. I don't have a copy since the price is $65 plus shipping, a lot to shell out for a paperback that sounds flawed. Here are some examples from the Table of Contents:
Chap. 1: Identification of the Yuezhi as Tocharian Speakers
Chap. 2: The Yuezhi in the Gansu: 220-162 BCE
V. Evidence for the Yuezhi: the "Podboy" Tomb
VI. Conclusion: The Yuezhi in the Gansu
Wow! The Yuezhi were Tocharian Speakers. Dr. Benjamin must have contacted the spirit of a Yuezhi chieftain through a Ouija board. Then, we have the "The Yuezhi in the Gansu: 220-162 BCE," or roughly 15 years after they migrated west toward Saka territory. Finally, Dr. Benjamin nails home the Yuezhi in the Gansu. This hypothesis has been constructed from excavations in Haladun cemetery in the Gansu. Out of 18 graves, 15 were podboi styled... and these have been inflated to an entire culture under the assumption the Yuezhi population strictly used podboi burials and nothing else.
I'll tell you, the Gansu must have been crowded by low-end paupers. Originally, the Yuezhi had their own population plus 36 additional tribal states in their confederation. That's a lot of people... and where did they fit their hundreds of thousands of horses, cattle, and sheep? All in the Gansu Corridor?
What was the original population of the Yuezhi confederation? We have a clue, but only after they migrated to Sogdiana. The envoy Zhang Qian arrived back in China with a few disparate figures, depending on the source. According to the Shiji (Chap. 123), in 129 BC the Yuezhi had "100,00 persons able to bear arms." In the Hanshu, the number was "100,000 or 200,000 trained bowmen." Obviously, the Chinese were unsure of the Yuezhi population; and these numbers reflect the Yuezhi when they were 1/37th of their former self.
So, the modern "Benjaminic Theory" of Yuezhi crammed into the Gansu would look similar to New York City at rush hour-- people and horses nose-to-nose.
What happened to common sense?-- and the sane observations by Sulimirski and Yu? The territorial extent of the Yuezhi shrank from a well-known pre-Qin record of "from Gansu to as far as the north of Hetao in the east and the eastern end of the Altai mountains in the west." (Yu, p. 48, Sino-Platonic Papers, No. 80, July 1998) And while Taishan Yu was almost on the money, we find archaeological evidence of elite Yuezhi graves in the Altai, but they also occupied both sides of the mountain chain, not just in Mongolia and China but in the extreme eastern corner of Kazakhstan. This massive geographical range-- recorded in 645 BC as "the vast plains of the Yuezhi"-- is 10 times larger than Dr. Benjamin's Gansu. Most important, it fits a steppe population of one-half million to a million people... and five livestock for every individual.
A map of the Altai kurgans from Sulimirski, 1970. We've looked at Pazyryk, then Ukok (just southeast of Pazyryk but not shown because the necropolis wasn't yet discovered). But glance at the west side-- more areas, all excavated in the formative years of Soviet archaeology, all Yuezhi elite-- Katanda, Bashadar, Shibe, Tuekta, and Bilsk. The mounds at Berel have recently been "rediscovered" by the Kazakhs.
I'll end this post by mentioning podboi graves. They were simple warrior inhumations of the catacomb type, also favored below the Urals by a contemporaneous Sarmatian culture. However, podbois are one of three styles of tombs used by the Yuezhi condederation, and we can't dismiss the "log-cabin" pit graves as not being Yuezhi. Also, I wonder, where did Dr. Benjamin perceive the "royal" Yuezhi tombs were? Or maybe the Yuezhi royalties were just "ordinary folks" tossed into convenient catacombs, no horse, no fineries, and no gold buckles. Maybe, Yuezhi leaders were Democrats or Socialists and wanted "no frills" graves.
I don't get current popular thinking; and I wonder how the present crop of Western historians and archaeologists could explain the Total Absence of royal burials in the Gansu... and why nobody has considered looking elsewhere in the broad expanse of Yuezhi territory of Chinese-documented Reality.
And lastly, am I too critical of a scenario I haven't actually read? Is there sound reason for Professor Benjamin's "Gansu" proposition arriving in current PDFs like a plague? You tell me.
For the past week, I've read so many "recent" PDFs my eyes are watering. And I'm shocked. According to present scholarship, the original territory of the Yuezhi has diminished to a ghost of its former self. How this happened, I'm not sure. Possibly, or probably, good old-fashioned authorities like Sulimirski have been dismissed in favor of newer interpretations... such as those by Dr. Craig Benjamin. Sulimirski wrote about the "Arimaspians" forty-six years ago, academically back in the ice-age. He described the Arimaspian homeland precisely where the Yuezhi were located according to recent studies by Taishan Yu. Evidently, Yu's accurate work has also been passed over in favor of Benjamin. Here's a broad synopsis of the modern view of the Yuezhi (Mark A. Riddle, Sino-Platonic Papers, 214, Sept. 2011):
"The Yuezhi had lived since time immemorial on the periphery of China proper, astride the Gansu Corridor and in the Tarim Basin. They were for centuries the source of Chinese jade and were very likely involved in the transmission to China from Central and Western Asia of metallurgy, the horse-drawn chariot, wheat and barley cultivation, etc., while trading Chinese silk to the West. When the Chinese reluctantly abandoned the war chariot and adopted cavalry tactics in 307 BC., they also adopted the Yuezhi costume: trousers with leather belt, buckle and hook, and a scabbard slide."
Riddle certainly gives the Yuezhi credit, more or less claiming they brought China out of the stone age. I can partially agree with most of Riddle's claim, but not with their location-- "astride the Gansu Corridor and in the Tarim Basin." You couldn't find enough water in the Tarim Basin to keep a hundred horses alive, not to mention thousands. The basin was a near desert, inhabited by a modest, Tocharian-speaking, sedentary group now known as the "Tarim Mummies." This "contracted" view is all too common; and from it we hear the Yuezhi were also "Tocharian speakers" (guilt by mistaken association). With this scenario, the Yuezhi tossed out their Tocharian tongue when they switched to Bactrian as the official court language of the Kushan Kingdom, and then continued speaking Northeastern Indo-Iranian as the Alans, finally recorded as such in Ossetic. What a crock; but this is what we see in goofy interpretations of a Yuezhi "Tocharian" ethnos.
Where are modern scholars getting this stuff from? I'm not sure but it seems like Tadeusz Sulimirski and Taishan Yu take a far back seat to Professor Benjamin. In 2003, Craig Benjamin wrote The Yuezhi: Origin, Migration and the Conquest of Northern Bactria as his doctorial thesis. Then in 2007, it was published in paperback. I don't have a copy since the price is $65 plus shipping, a lot to shell out for a paperback that sounds flawed. Here are some examples from the Table of Contents:
Chap. 1: Identification of the Yuezhi as Tocharian Speakers
Chap. 2: The Yuezhi in the Gansu: 220-162 BCE
V. Evidence for the Yuezhi: the "Podboy" Tomb
VI. Conclusion: The Yuezhi in the Gansu
Wow! The Yuezhi were Tocharian Speakers. Dr. Benjamin must have contacted the spirit of a Yuezhi chieftain through a Ouija board. Then, we have the "The Yuezhi in the Gansu: 220-162 BCE," or roughly 15 years after they migrated west toward Saka territory. Finally, Dr. Benjamin nails home the Yuezhi in the Gansu. This hypothesis has been constructed from excavations in Haladun cemetery in the Gansu. Out of 18 graves, 15 were podboi styled... and these have been inflated to an entire culture under the assumption the Yuezhi population strictly used podboi burials and nothing else.
I'll tell you, the Gansu must have been crowded by low-end paupers. Originally, the Yuezhi had their own population plus 36 additional tribal states in their confederation. That's a lot of people... and where did they fit their hundreds of thousands of horses, cattle, and sheep? All in the Gansu Corridor?
What was the original population of the Yuezhi confederation? We have a clue, but only after they migrated to Sogdiana. The envoy Zhang Qian arrived back in China with a few disparate figures, depending on the source. According to the Shiji (Chap. 123), in 129 BC the Yuezhi had "100,00 persons able to bear arms." In the Hanshu, the number was "100,000 or 200,000 trained bowmen." Obviously, the Chinese were unsure of the Yuezhi population; and these numbers reflect the Yuezhi when they were 1/37th of their former self.
So, the modern "Benjaminic Theory" of Yuezhi crammed into the Gansu would look similar to New York City at rush hour-- people and horses nose-to-nose.
What happened to common sense?-- and the sane observations by Sulimirski and Yu? The territorial extent of the Yuezhi shrank from a well-known pre-Qin record of "from Gansu to as far as the north of Hetao in the east and the eastern end of the Altai mountains in the west." (Yu, p. 48, Sino-Platonic Papers, No. 80, July 1998) And while Taishan Yu was almost on the money, we find archaeological evidence of elite Yuezhi graves in the Altai, but they also occupied both sides of the mountain chain, not just in Mongolia and China but in the extreme eastern corner of Kazakhstan. This massive geographical range-- recorded in 645 BC as "the vast plains of the Yuezhi"-- is 10 times larger than Dr. Benjamin's Gansu. Most important, it fits a steppe population of one-half million to a million people... and five livestock for every individual.
A map of the Altai kurgans from Sulimirski, 1970. We've looked at Pazyryk, then Ukok (just southeast of Pazyryk but not shown because the necropolis wasn't yet discovered). But glance at the west side-- more areas, all excavated in the formative years of Soviet archaeology, all Yuezhi elite-- Katanda, Bashadar, Shibe, Tuekta, and Bilsk. The mounds at Berel have recently been "rediscovered" by the Kazakhs.
I'll end this post by mentioning podboi graves. They were simple warrior inhumations of the catacomb type, also favored below the Urals by a contemporaneous Sarmatian culture. However, podbois are one of three styles of tombs used by the Yuezhi condederation, and we can't dismiss the "log-cabin" pit graves as not being Yuezhi. Also, I wonder, where did Dr. Benjamin perceive the "royal" Yuezhi tombs were? Or maybe the Yuezhi royalties were just "ordinary folks" tossed into convenient catacombs, no horse, no fineries, and no gold buckles. Maybe, Yuezhi leaders were Democrats or Socialists and wanted "no frills" graves.
I don't get current popular thinking; and I wonder how the present crop of Western historians and archaeologists could explain the Total Absence of royal burials in the Gansu... and why nobody has considered looking elsewhere in the broad expanse of Yuezhi territory of Chinese-documented Reality.
And lastly, am I too critical of a scenario I haven't actually read? Is there sound reason for Professor Benjamin's "Gansu" proposition arriving in current PDFs like a plague? You tell me.
Alan J. Campbell
member of Legio III Cyrenaica and the Uncouth Barbarians
Author of:
The Demon's Door Bolt (2011)
Forging the Blade (2012)
"It's good to be king. Even when you're dead!"
Old Yuezhi/Pazyrk proverb
member of Legio III Cyrenaica and the Uncouth Barbarians
Author of:
The Demon's Door Bolt (2011)
Forging the Blade (2012)
"It's good to be king. Even when you're dead!"
Old Yuezhi/Pazyrk proverb
