Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (72 page)

Both sides were human, and until very recent times war was an accepted, normal part of life. Peace happened too, locally, but on a continent-wide scale it was extremely rare, if it ever existed at all.
⁸³
For Central Eurasians from Proto-Indo-European times on, attacking neighbors who had unjustly stolen one’s cattle—whether recently or at any time in the past—was heroic, and as the preceding quotation and many others like it from both East and West show, the peripheral peoples thought it was heroic too.

Successful warlike behavior is what defines a hero throughout history in every Eurasian society, with very rare exceptions. If a Greek is a hero because he killed his enemies, why should a Central Eurasian not be a hero for the very same reason? Or, rather, why should either of them be heroes? Moreover, the existence of vendetta in most Eurasian cultures ensured that there was never any shortage of enemies who could be raided without any moral twinges. Because most of the long history of mutual raiding between Central Eurasian peoples and peripheral peoples actually took place in former Central Eurasian territory which had been seized by the latter from the former, it is hard not to see the Central Eurasians’ point of view. The peripheral peoples’ anger at the Central Eurasians for fighting back when attacked is also understandable, as is their use of terms of opprobrium for them—in the Graeco-Roman-speaking world,
or
barbari
‘barbarians’,
⁸⁴
and in the Chinese-speaking world
lŭ
‘captives’ or other generic pejorative words that were used for Chinese as well as for foreigners.
⁸⁵
But none of this should mislead us today.

It is also undoubtedly true that the Scythians and other Central Eurasians were as fierce as possible in war and encouraged the peripheral peoples’ fear of them, as did the ancient Germanic and Hunnic peoples and the medieval Mongols. Tacitus remarks about one of the Suebi peoples in the northeast:

One is, however, forced to ask why it seems to have been overlooked that the peripheral peoples, principally the Greeks and Romans, the Persians, and the Chinese, were also fierce and, indeed, much more cruel and barbaric to each other and to foreign peoples than were the foreigners they called
barbarians,
as even a cursory glance at the incredibly gruesome history of the Roman Empire, for example, not to forget the gruesome histories of the Persians and Chinese right down to the present day, quickly reveals. Moreover, the peripheral empires were usually much more successful at warfare than the Central Eurasians, despite occasional spectacular Central Eurasian successes, and the peripheral peoples certainly made their Central Eurasian enemies fear them, despite all the bravado on both sides. The pretense of fierceness put on by Central Eurasians is not really borne out by their actual history. It is difficult to imagine the Chinese allowing a known Hsiung-nu spy to live in China, marry, and have children and not kill him outright; yet the Hsiung-nu twice allowed a known Chinese spy, Chang Ch’ien, to enter Hsiung-nu territory and stay there in precisely this way. With few exceptions Central Eurasians were truly fierce only when a polity that had submitted rebelled and murdered its new overlords’ representatives, or a city that was besieged in time of war refused to surrender peacefully.
⁸⁷

Yet Roman conquests are still celebrated, while Hun conquests are condemned. Roman victories over the Huns were good, but Hun victories over the Romans were bad. In the case of the Huns, as with other Central Eurasians, from the time we have detailed historical accounts of them rather than vague, stereotype-filled references to little-known distant aliens, virtually all of the attacks against the Romans, east or west, are explicitly known to have been in retaliation for Roman incursions, treaty violations, or other offenses. When the Huns were victorious, the Romans were sometimes forced to sue for peace and pay indemnities. Exactly the same thing happened between the Hsiung-nu and the Chinese in eastern Eurasia. But this should not induce anyone today into believing that the Romans or Persians or Chinese, of all people, were simply innocent victims of
barbarians.

The idea that Central Eurasians, as people, were naturally powerful, or unusually violent, or specially skilled at war—characteristics of
barbarians—
is unsupported by history, archaeology, or anthropology. Central Eurasians were urban and rural, strong and weak, fierce and gentle, abstainers and drinkers, lovers and haters, good, bad, and everything in between,
⁸⁸
exactly as all other known people on earth.

The Nonexistence of Barbarians in Eastern Eurasia

It is clear that the ancient and medieval European idea that certain peoples were
barbarians
and Central Eurasia was the home of
barbarians
continues to be accepted by modern historians, whether explicitly or not, though there has been a slight shift in the meaning of the word
barbarian
in modern times. It has also come to be the most widespread mistranslation for a large number of terms for foreigners in Classical Chinese, none of which have anything to do with the idea of the
barbarian.
It is remarkable that this relic of the ancient Greeks’ encounter with foreign nations—especially the Persians (whom they admired and copied, despite the many wars with them)
⁸⁹
—continues to dominate historians’ views of Central Eurasians down to the present day.

Some contemporary historians, embarrassed by the obviously offensive semantics of the word and its relatives, put the term in quotes. But this does not fix the error. Use of the term by ancient, medieval, or modern writers tells us only about those who use it, and it does not tell us anything good. The situation would therefore seem to be bad enough already, but in reality it is even worse. East Asianists, in particular, have become attached to the use of “barbarian”—now regularly in quote marks—and very many are loath to abandon it.

It must be understood that neither the name
barbarian
nor the idea behind it is applicable to the peoples to whom it has been applied either historically or in modern times. The entire construct is, appropriately enough, best summed up by popular European and American fiction and film treatments such as
Conan the Barbarian.
In actual fact, no nation has ever been known to have viewed its own people as barbarians. This includes even the kingdoms of Western Europe in the period after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Those new states are still commonly referred to by modern historians as “the barbarian kingdoms,” but though the writers of those times refer sometimes to members of
other
ethnic groups as
barbarians,
they never use the term in reference to themselves. This point alone ought to be decisive. Nevertheless, although it has become generally recognized that
barbarian
is a pejorative term and should not be used, most specialists in East Asian history continue to use it. This is a much more serious problem than it appears at first sight and calls for a closer look.

No one would deny that premodern Chinese apparently disliked foreigners in general and looked down on them as having an inferior culture. It is thus not surprising that the Chinese often used characters with negative meaning to write the names of some of the many foreign peoples and categories of foreigners they knew—though it must be emphasized that, as far as we know, all of the names are actually phonetic transcriptions of foreign names in origin. None of this is problematic. The problems are as follows.

There are
many
words used by the Chinese to refer to
many
foreign peoples and categories of peoples—perhaps two dozen in common use over the course of Chinese history. None of them are completely generic. Although one can etymologize some of the characters, the original meaning of most of the names is actually, “transcription of the foreign name X of foreigner Y,” pure and simple (as evidenced in part by the variant transcriptions seen of some “foreigner” words). The fact that the Chinese did not
like
foreigner Y and occasionally picked a transcriptional character with negative meaning (in Chinese) to write the sound of his ethnonym, is irrelevant.
⁹⁰
Moreover, as noted above, most Central Eurasians, or at least those about whom we know enough to say what they thought, intensely disliked the Chinese and looked down on their culture. That is, the Hsiung-nu, the Turks, the Mongols, and so on generally despised the Chinese right back. This is well attested in the historical literature.

The English form of the European culture word under discussion is
barbarian.
It has the adjective form
barbaric,
among other derived forms. It is true that the original meaning of the original Greek word βάρβαρoÁ
bárbaros
in early Greek is believed to be simply someone who could not speak Greek (or could not speak it correctly),
⁹¹
from which we get the derived word
barbarism.
But about two and a half millennia ago the Greeks became involved in wars with the Persians and the meaning of the word βάρβαρoÁ changed. The Greeks considered not only that those particular foreigners—the Persians—could not speak Greek but that they were strong and militarily skilled, they were fierce and sometimes cruel to their enemies, and they had a culture of their own, though in the eyes of the Greeks it was not as refined as Greek culture. This particular complex of ideas eventually became fused to this one particular linguistic form, the root
barbar-,
such that in order to express that same idea every European language has had to borrow the word itself and nativize it. The spread of the word and concept began with the Romans, who applied it to people who did not speak Greek or Latin, who were militarily adept, who were fierce or cruel to their enemies, and who had a non-Graeco-Roman culture. The spread of the complex has continued down to modern times.

The Chinese, however, have still not yet borrowed Greek
barbar-.
There is also no single native Chinese word for ‘foreigner’, no matter how pejorative, which includes the complex of the notions ‘inability to speak Chinese’, ‘militarily skilled’, ‘fierce/cruel to enemies’, and ‘non-Chinese in culture’. There is nothing remotely close to it in Chinese even today. Until the Chinese borrow the word
barbarian
or one of its relatives, or make up a new word that explicitly includes the same basic ideas, they cannot express the idea of the ‘barbarian’ in Chinese. The usual modern Mandarin Chinese translation of the word is
y
ĕ
mánrén,
which actually means ‘wild man, savage’.
⁹²
That is very definitely not the same thing as ‘barbarian’. The English words ‘wild man’, ‘savage’, and ‘barbarian’ all have very different meanings. In short, it is impossible to translate the word
barbarian
into Chinese because the concept does not exist in Chinese. It should also be noted that, from at least the Romans onward, foreigners referred to as
barbarians
have often been glorified in the West, especially those foreigners who were defeated heroes. This aspect of glorification continues in the meaning of the word today, as in the uses of it in fiction and cinema. The fictional character Conan the Barbarian actually comes quite close to summing up the idea of what a
barbarian
is. Until very recently, at least, this idea too was completely missing in Chinese.