Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (19 page)

At the eastern end of the steppe zone, in what is now Mongolia, former Inner Mongolia, and the eastern Tarim Basin, the nomadic-dominant form of the Central Eurasian Culture Complex became an established life-style between the eighth and seventh centuries
BC
,
⁴⁴
chronologically parallel to its establishment in the Western Steppe. Archaeologists have established a solid chronology, confirmed by dendrochronology, for the spread of this Early Iron Age culture across the steppe zone of Central Eurasia from the Western Steppe north of the Black Sea to the eastern Altai region of the Mongolian Plateau.
⁴⁵
Archaeology has also confirmed the conclusions of philologists and historians on the ethnolinguistic identity of the early peoples of the Eastern Steppe zone. The dominant people in the western part of it, from the Altai of western Mongolia
⁴⁶
south through the Kroraina area around the Lop Nor to the Ch’i-lien Mountains, the northern outliers of the Tibetan Plateau, were Caucasoid in race; those in the northern region seem to have spoken North Iranian “Saka” languages or dialects, while those in the Kroraina area spoke Tokharian languages or dialects. The dominant peoples in the eastern part, including the central and eastern Mongolian Plateau, Inner Mongolia, and southwestern Manchuria, were racially Mongoloid peoples who spoke unknown languages.
⁴⁷
The Chinese sources mention that the cities near the northern frontier of the Chinese cultural zone were involved in trade with the foreign peoples.

The Chinese invaded the Ti in the late seventh and early sixth centuries, but little more is known about them until the end of the Warring States period, when King Wu-ling (r. 325–299
BC
) of the northern state of Chao ordered his people to adopt nomadic-style clothing and customs and to practice horsemanship.
⁴⁸
He defeated the Central Eurasian peoples known as the Lin Hu
⁴⁹
and Loufan and built a great wall from Tai at the foot of the Yin Shan (the mountain range on the north side of the great bend of the Yellow River) to Kao-ch’üeh, where he built the commanderies of Yün-chung, Yen-men, and Tai.
⁵⁰
After defeating Chung-shan in 295
BC
, Chao enclosed the entire great bend of the Yellow River in a ring of fortifications. The kingdom thus substantially expanded its territory and established control over the southern part of the Eastern Steppe, including the Ordos, the best pasturelands in the region.

Sometime shortly before the state of Ch’in conquered the last of the post-Chou Dynasty warring kingdoms and unified the Central States under the Ch’in Dynasty in 221
BC
, the people who ruled the Eastern Steppe, including the Ordos, were known as the Hsiung-nu. The Ch’in general Meng T’ien attacked and crushed them in 215
BC
, and the First Emperor of Ch’in built the Great Wall. He conscripted hundreds of thousands of Chinese, who linked together the many old walls built against each other and against their neighbors by the Chao, other Chinese, and non-Chinese. The wall and line of fortifications stretched from Lin-t’ao in Kansu to Liaotung and enclosed the entire Yellow River valley, including the former Hsiung-nu homeland. The Hsiung-nu, under their first known leader and apparent founder, T’ou-man (*TumeN), fled north beyond the frontier into the Mongolian Plateau.
⁵¹
It is likely that his son, Mo-tun, rose to power in 209
BC
as a consequence of this devastating defeat.
⁵²

The Hsiung-nu have often been identified with the Huns of Europe, despite the gap of several centuries between the periods in which the two flourished and the lack of any known direct connection.
⁵³
Although some clever arguments have been made, mostly based on the apparent similarity of the names,
⁵⁴
one of the basic problems is that their name, which is now pronounced Hsiung-nu in modern Mandarin Chinese, from Middle Chinese *Хoŋn℧ or *Х
^j
0ŋn℧,
⁵⁵
must have been pronounced quite differently at the time the Chinese on the northern frontier first learned of this people and transcribed their name. Among other possibilities, the name could correspond to a form of the name of the Northern Iranians,
⁵⁶
eastern forms of which—
Saka, Sakla,
and so forth—are recorded in several guises in Chinese
⁵⁷
accounts about a century younger
⁵⁸
than the first references to the Hsiung-nu. Whatever the Hsiung-nu ended up becoming by the fall of the Hsiung-nu Empire, it is probable that they either learned the Iranian nomadic model by serving for a time as subjects of an Iranian steppe zone people, as in the First Story model (the most likely scenario), or they included an Iranian component when they started out, and like many other peoples in Central Eurasia, such as the Tibetans, are known by a foreign name applied by others to them.
⁵⁹

The Ch’in conquest was short-lived. The Ch’in Dynasty collapsed shortly after the death of the First Emperor, and during the following civil war in China the conscripts who had been sent to the frontier abandoned their posts and returned home. The Hsiung-nu then returned to their homeland in the Ordos.

Chinese knowledge of the Eastern Steppe greatly increased during the following Han Dynasty, especially under the reign of Emperor Wu (r. 140–87
BC
), who is responsible for the tong-lasting expansion of the Chinese Empire into Central Eurasia.

Intellectual Development in Classical Antiquity

In the fifth and fourth centuries
BC
, at the same time as the emergence of the Silk Road and the early nomad states of Central Eurasia, the peripheral city-state cultures of High Antiquity reached their apogee and produced the classic philosophical and other literary works in the ancient Greek, Indic, and Chinese languages. Socrates (469–399
BC
), Plato (427–347
BC
), and Aristotle (384–322
BC
) were—very roughly—the contemporaries of Gautama Buddha (perhaps fl. ca. 500
BC
), Pāini (perhaps fifth century
BC
),
⁶⁰
and Kauṭilya (fl. ca. 321–296
BC
)
⁶¹
as well as Confucius (ca. 550–480
BC
),
⁶²
Lao-tzu (perhaps late fifth century
BC
), and Chuang Tzu (fourth century
BC
).
⁶³
The idea of any cross-fertilization among these three cultures has generally been dismissed out of hand by historians, largely because it has been extremely difficult to demonstrate many
specific
borrowings back and forth. Nevertheless, there are some, and it must furthermore be considered odd if such distant areas as East Asia and the Aegean—in which the people evidently knew little more about each other at the time than their predecessors had a millennium earlier when they acquired literacy—should suddenly have started arguing not only about their actual governments but about
government
in general, asking questions about their existence, and talking about logic and looking into the way the human mind works. Surely the contrast with the previous millennium is striking. That was a period when questions were asked about uncertainties such as whether the king’s wife would conceive or not, whether the gods would look down with favor upon the sacrifices offered to them, or whether the next kingdom could be safely attacked or not. The asking of questions
about the questions themselves
was new, and it is difficult to find the precedents or motivation for the development in each case.

The three areas had some political features in common—notably, each culture was shared among a large number of small states, none of which could completely dominate the others. They also shared, indirectly, the effects of the increase in world trade brought about by the development of the nomadic empires. Growth of commerce virtually always entails growth of a commercial class and the spread of foreign ideas. As noted above, it has not yet been demonstrated that there was any significant direct intellectual relationship between early China and early Greece (or India). This is not surprising, because there seems not to have been any direct connection of any kind between those two cultures, and it is quite possible that none will ever be found. Yet the question must be asked: how did the philosophical period of Classical Antiquity happen? It would seem extremely unlikely that three distant cultures should virtually simultaneously have developed similar intellectual interests and have come up with similar answers in some instances. If a positive solution to this problem is conceivable, it must involve Central Eurasia.

The only means of contact among those three cultures at that time in history was overland. As shown throughout this book, however, Central Eurasia was not simply a conduit for goods to and from East Asia and Western Europe. It was an economy and world of its own, with many subregions, nations, states, and cultures. Confucius is said to have remarked that if a ruler has lost knowledge of good government, he should “study it among the foreign peoples of the four directions.”
⁶⁴
Alexander the Great’s conquest and colonization of Bactria in the fourth century
BC
introduced Greek culture, including Greek philosophy, into the heart of Central Asia. A recent careful study has shown that specific elements derived from the Greek philosophical tradition first appear in Chinese literature shortly after Alexander’s conquest.
⁶⁵

Early Classical Greece, India, and China were at the time still merely small appendages outside the vast territory of Central Eurasian culture, which bordered on all three of them. In the sixth and early fifth centuries
BC
, more or less the entire northern steppe zone, and much of the southern, Central Asian zone, was Iranian-speaking. There were at least two important philosophers or religious thinkers from early Central Eurasia. Anacharsis the Scythian had a Greek mother and spoke and wrote Greek. According to Diogenes Laertius, in the 47th Olympiad (591–588
BC
) he traveled to Greece, where he became well known for his abstemiousness and pithy remarks.
⁶⁶
He was counted as one of the Seven Sages of Antiquity by the Greeks and is considered to be one of the early Cynics.
⁶⁷
The famous Demosthenes, grandson of a rich Scythian woman, was often accused of being a
barbarian.
⁶⁸
Zoroaster, the founder of Zorastrianism, is widely believed to have come from the area of Khwarizmia, though some other Central Eurasian region inhabited by pastoral Iranians is perhaps just as likely. His dates are unknown, but he could well have been a contemporary of Confucius and Buddha.
⁶⁹
Were there others? Did the Classical philosophers of the peripheral cultures reflect not only their own ideas but those of the philosophers of Central Eurasian Indo-Iranian peoples? According to one ancient Chinese text, Confucius believed the Central Eurasians had the answers, and some of the Greeks seem to have had similar opinions. Is there any basis for such opinions? Do the social and religious ideas of Central Eurasians, including the importance of friendship and the beliefs behind the comitatus, imply philosophical positions or interests, such as the quest for happiness, or the perfect state?

The Nomadic Form of the Central Eurasian Culture Complex

The rise, flourishing, and disappearance of the famous transcontinental commercial system known collectively as the Silk Road chronologically parallels, exactly, the rise of the Scythians, the flourishing of the independent Central Eurasian empires, and the destruction of the Junghars. In that two-millennium-long period, most of Central Eurasia proper was dominated by nomad-warrior-ruled states that depended primarily on trade in order to accumulate wealth, as attested by ancient and medieval sources in the languages surrounding Central Eurasia.