Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (14 page)

The introduction of the chariot and comitatus burial in China can only be due to the appearance of a Central Eurasian people there. “Anyang chariot burials thus seem to indicate a substantial interaction with northern neighbors beginning about 1200 B.C.: not an invasion, but not a border incident either. The mere capture of enemy chariots and horses would not have brought the skills required to use, maintain, and reproduce them…. The clearly marked advent of the chariot is a clue to an episode of cultural contact that deserves more attention than it has received.”
⁶⁸
Because all other known examples of chariot warriors at that time were Indo-Europeans, most of whom belonged to Group B, the newcomers must have been Indo-Europeans. Considering the intruders’ significant impact on the culture of the Yellow River valley, they must have had a powerful linguistic impact also, one not limited to the words for the newly imported artifacts and practices. So far, their language has not yet been identified more specifically, but it is quite possible that it represents an otherwise unknown branch of Indo-European.
⁶⁹

The Chou Conquest of Shang China

The story of Hou Chi ‘Lord Millet’, the divine founder of the Chou Dynasty, is a typical Central Eurasian foundation myth, closely paralleled by the Roman myth, the Wu-sun (*Aśvin) myth, and the Puyo-Koguryo myth. How could the origin of the most revered Chinese dynasty be represented by such an alien foundation myth?

It might seem surprising that the Chou, the ideal model of a dynasty throughout Chinese history, is traditionally considered by Chinese scholars to have been non-Chinese in origin. This view is not so surprising upon examination of the data on which it is based. The Chou came from what was at the time the western frontier of the Chinese culture area. The mother of Hou Chi, Chiang Yüan, was by name a member of the Chiang clan. The Chiang are generally accepted to have been a non-Chinese people related to or more likely identical to the Ch’iang, who were the main foreign enemies of the Shang Dynasty.
⁷⁰
The Ch’iang were evidently skilled chariot warriors in the Shang period, and were therefore necessarily well acquainted with horses and wheels. But it has been shown that the Tibeto-Burman words for ‘horse’, though ultimately Indo-European in origin, were borrowed from Old Chinese, not from Indo-European directly,
⁷¹
and the same appears to be true for the Tibetan word for ‘wheel’.
⁷²
For this and other reasons it is probable that the early Ch’iang were not Tibeto-Burman speakers (as widely believed), but Indo-Europeans, and Chiang Yüan belonged to a clan that was Indo-European in origin. The Central Eurasian myth about her and her son, the ancestor of the Chou line, is thus not surprising after all.

Yet the literary language of the Chou, preserved mainly in the Bronze Inscriptions (texts inscribed on ritual bronze vessels), is clearly the continuation of the Shang language of the Oracle Bone Inscriptions, and both are certainly ancestral to modern Chinese. In the traditional view, which still dominates the view of Sinological linguists, there is no room for any significant foreign influence on the development of Chinese.
⁷³
Yet this cannot be correct. The mounting evidence against the isolationist position, especially from archaeology, indicates that the intrusive Indo-European people who brought the chariot had a powerful influence on Shang culture and may even have been responsible for the foundation of the Shang Dynasty (ca. 1570–1045
BC
) itself. The Shang realm occupied only a rather small area in the Yellow River valley in what is now northern and eastern Honan (Henan), southeastern Shansi (Shanxi), and western Shantung (Shandong);
⁷⁴
such a state could easily have been dominated by an aggressive Indo-European people armed with war chariots. Although there is no direct evidence for or against any such political event, the existence of the intrusive chariot warriors, and their influence on Chinese material culture, cannot be denied.

The appearance of chariot warriors in East Asia coincides approximately with their appearance in Greece (Europe), Mesopotamia (the Near East, Southwest Asia), and northwestern India (South Asia).
⁷⁵
In all of the non-East Asian cases, the chariot warrior people spoke an Indo-European language and had Central Eurasian culture. In the East Asian case the chariot warriors appear to have had the same Central Eurasian culture as the Indo-Europeans in the other regions of Eurasia. They should therefore have spoken an Indo-European language.

Linguistically, there are only two possible outcomes of this Indo-European intrusion. The Early Old Chinese language of the Oracle Bone Inscriptions is either a non-Indo-European language with an intrusive Indo-European element or an Indo-European language with an intrusive non-Indo-European element.
⁷⁶
In both scenarios, the language of the Bronze Inscriptions, Classical Chinese, and the modern Chinese languages and dialects are clear continuations of Early Old Chinese, the language of the Oracle Bone Inscriptions, which was therefore already “Chinese.” Recent linguistic research on Early Old Chinese supports the presence of numerous Indo-European elements that are clearly related to Proto-Indo-European already in the Shang period Oracle Bone Inscriptions. Their identification with a particular
branch
of Indo-European remains uncertain. However, it is possible that the language was close to Proto-Indo-European itself.

According to one current theory,
⁷⁷
the most likely scenario is that a small group of Indo-European chariot warriors entered the pre-Chinese culture zone in the central Yellow River valley as mercenaries. They stayed and intermarried with the local people, with the result that either their language became creolized by the local language, exactly as happened to the other Indo-European daughter languages, or the local language was creolized or otherwise significantly influenced by Indo-European (as happened to the Indo-European
maryannu
of Mitanni). In either case, the Indo-European language material in the resulting language, Early Old Chinese, derives from generic late Proto-Indo-European, from a known Indo-European daughter language, or from an already in de pen dent Indo-European daughter language that is otherwise unknown.

It has recently been argued that the widely believed theory of a genetic relationship between Chinese and Tibeto-Burman—the so-called Sino-Tibetan theory—seems to be based on a shared Indo-European lexical inheritance.
⁷⁸
Some of this material demonstrably entered Tibeto-Burman as loanwords via Chinese. For example, the words for ‘horse’, ‘wheel’, ‘iron’, and other things known to have been introduced into East Asia after the early second millennium
BC
, have been treated as Sino-Tibetan words, yet the things themselves, and thus the words for them, could not have been known many thousands of years earlier, at the time of the hypothetical Proto-Sino-Tibetan language, and their phonological shape reflects Old Chinese influence. Nevertheless, although some of the Indo-European element in Tibeto-Burman seems clearly to have entered via Chinese, in many other instances chronological considerations make such a pathway difficult, if not impossible. The most likely solution is that the Indo-European intrusion produced a creole not only with the pre-Chinese of the Yellow River valley but also with at least some of the pre-Tibeto-Burmans further to the southwest in the presumed home of Proto-Tibeto-Burman.
⁷⁹

Only further linguistic research will establish whether Early Old Chinese is a minimally maintained Indo-European language or a minimally maintained local East Asian language. Whichever way it turns out, it is certain that Indo-European speakers and their language had a strong influence on what became China and also, directly or indirectly, on the Tibeto-Burman peoples.
⁸⁰

The Iranian Conquest of Central Eurasia

The early history of the Iranian domination of the Central Eurasian steppe zone as well as southern Central Asia (now Afghanistan), Iran, and Mesopotamia is extremely obscure. Proto-Indo-Iranian, the speakers of which have been archaeologically identified with the Andronovo culture, broke up into Proto-Indic and Proto-Iranian no later than the physical separation of Group B from the other Indo-European dialects. Old Indic, a Group B language, had thus become distinct from Proto-Iranian proper
⁸¹
no later than the time of the migration of the Indic speakers southward in connection with the breakup of Group B, which event must be dated to about 1600
BC
. If the Iranian defeat of the Indians happened at this time, it is unclear why they took so long to pursue their presumed enemies to the south.

Iranian speakers did eventually replace Indic speakers in Iran. There is no further direct evidence of Indic in the area of Iran and the Near East after the end of the Bronze Age around the twelfth century
BC
. The earliest historical and linguistic evidence also unequivocally supports the archaeological evidence that the early peoples of the Central Eurasian steppe zone and the riverine agricultural regions of Central Asia were Iranian speakers.

Archaeologists are now generally agreed that the Andronovo culture of the Central Steppe region in the second millennium
BC
is to be equated with the Indo-Iranians. However, no matter how pastorally oriented these people’s culture probably was, they were not nomads. They lived in permanent houses, not on wagons or in tents as the earliest nomads are known to have done. The division into Indic and Iranian took place no later than the sixteenth century
BC
, long before the development of mounted nomadism, which was an achievement of the steppe-dwelling Iranians who grew out of the Andronovo culture.
⁸²
However, the entire Central Eurasian steppe had become an Iranian culture zone before the first mention of Iranians in historical sources: the Persians in 835
BC
and the Medes in the eighth century
BC
.
⁸³
Central Eurasian Iranians are first mentioned in the seventh century
BC
, when Greek and ancient Near Eastern sources record that the Iranian-speaking Medes were subjugated by the Scythians for a time in the seventh century
BC
and that the Scythians moved into the Western Steppe from the east, an event confirmed by archaeology.
⁸⁴

The Horse and Chariot and the Indo-Europeans

The earliest archaeologically discovered chariot remains have been found in Central Eurasia, at the Sintashta site in the southern Ural-Volga steppe zone dated to circa 2000
BC
.
⁸⁵
The earliest historically known occurrences of chariots actually being used in war date to the mid-seventeenth century
BC
, when the Hittites under Hattusili I (r. ca. 1650–1620
BC
) used them in the process of establishing their kingdom in Anatolia.
⁸⁶
The
maryannu,
the Old Indic-speaking charioteers of the Mitanni, the Hittites’ neighbors to the east and south, were experts in the training of chariot horses. The contemporaneous Mycenaean Greeks, the Hittites’ neighbors to the west and the second Indo-European people to develop a written language, also used war chariots in their conquests. So did the Old Indic speakers who invaded northwestern India, apparently at about this time. These historical events are not coincidental.