Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (83 page)

11.
Di Cosmo (2002a: 176, 176 n. 50) notes that Mo-tun had created “an absolutely loyal bodyguard” and concludes, “Despite the legendary and romanticized elements in the account reported by Ssu-ma Ch’ien, to the extent that we accept the historical existence of Modun, we cannot exclude that his rise to power was achieved through the creation of an efficient bodyguard and the slaying of his own father.” To this may be added the
Shih chi
comment on the burial of the Shan-yü: “When a ruler dies, the ministers and concubines who were favored by him and who are obliged to follow him in death often number in the hundreds or even thousands” (Watson 1961, II: 164). Either this account mixes up the comitatus burial with the burial of others (wives, slaves, etc.)—not surprisingly, because the Chinese observers were undoubtedly unfamiliar with the comitatus at the time—or the Hsiung-nu did in fact mix the two together in their royal burials. For a note on Mo-tun and the training of his comitatus as psychological conditioning, see Krueger (1961b).

12.
In the Roman story the bird is a woodpecker, but the bird in the Wu-sun story is specifically said to be a crow. This could be a Chinese invention designed to explain the ethnonym Wu-sun, the transcription of which in Chinese characters literally means ‘crow grandson’; it is certainly a phonetic transcription in origin. On the other hand, the woodpecker in the Romulus and Remus story is significant because it is sacred to the god of war, Mars, who is the boys’ father in Plutarch’s version of the story. It would seem to be a less likely bird than the crow, which often seems to have heavenly connections. At any rate, the essential motif is certainly a bird; whether it can be narrowed down more than that is unclear.

13.
*Saklai
NMan
su
ǒ
lí
from Late OChi *saklai, a later form of the original name of the Scythians, Sogdians, and Sakas, q.v.
appendix B
. In Beckwith (2004a: 31–32) I unfortunately followed other scholars’ erroneous emendation of the texts. The initial character found in most texts,
NMan
su
ǒ (MChi *sak)—or in some cases
NMan
tuó
(MChi *tak)—is a phonetic transcription unconnected to the putatively “correct” *Ko (in Sino-Korean reading), which gives *Koryǒ, and nonsense, for both the Koguryǒ (= Koryǒ) and the Puyo myths. Although it is my fault for having trusted the “editions” I used, unfortunately there are no true critical editions (with critical apparatus, etc.) of those texts, or indeed of any Chinese texts, with a single exception (Thompson 1979), as far as I know. Critical editions of texts in Greek and Latin, as well as in Arabic and other medieval Western languages, have been produced since the nineteenth century, but as pointed out by Thompson (1979: xvii), Sinologists, whether Chinese or non-Chinese, mostly do not even know what a critical edition is, and those who think they do know are adamantly opposed to them. Until this sorry state of affairs changes, Chinese texts will continue to be unreliable, and Sinology will remain in this respect a backward field.

14.
In some versions the prince is born as a human child. In others he is born as an egg, and the king tries unsuccessfully to destroy the egg, but gives up. The prince subsequently hatches from the egg. I previously stated my belief that the egg version is earlier (Beckwith 2004a: 29), but I now think that two stories have been blended together. The basic story is in any case Central Eurasian in origin—the prince is a warrior hero descended from the sky god. The story is very close to several other versions, and particularly to the Chinese myth of Hou Chi ‘Lord Millet’, who is born as a human child. The egg birth detail seems to be an intrusive East Asian or Northeast Asian motif. It is reflected in the Japanese folktale of the hero Momotarô ‘Peach Boy’, who hatches from a large peach floating in a river; it is in many respects close to the Tüme
N
story. In later medieval Korean versions of the story, which are evidently based on oral tradition, the bad king is a frog surnamed Kim ‘gold’. Though this detail is not found in the brief ancient versions, it seems likely to be genuine. It could be that the birth story represents not only the results of a conflation of two different stories, one of which is more “southern,” but the mixture of two different peoples, of which one people’s story had a frog ancestor with a hero son born as an egg. However, there is no mention of a frog in any of the early versions.

15.
The texts say that the name means ‘shoots well’ in Koguryo. The correctness of the gloss for the second syllable (’good, excellent’) is confirmed by other Koguryo data, indicating its correctness for the other syllable, but in view of the repeated occurrence of the same name for the same historical function it is clear that at least two of the peoples who have this name in their national origin stories borrowed it from someone else. The gloss here suggests it could be a folk etymology designed to explain a problematic name, so it is possible that the
name
*Tüme
N
is not Puyo-Koguryoic in origin. On the other hand, the now generally accepted etymology of the name Scythian as a development from Northern Iranian *Skuδa ‘shooter, archer’, and the attested form of the name of the original home of the Puyo-Koguryo people “in the north,” *Saklai, a form of the name of the Scythians (see
appendix B
), suggests that the name ‘Good Archer’ may be a Puyo-Koguryo translation of the name *Sakla- ‘Archer’. This problem deserves further attention.

16. Today
Alligator sinensis
is a rare, extremely endangered animal, found only in the lower Yangtze River area of Anhui Province, but in Antiquity it was found in the Yellow River basin (Ho 1999). Tomb 10 from the neolithic Dawenkou (Ta-wen-k’ou) Culture (ca. 4300–2500
BC
) in Shantung contained eighty-four alligator bones, the vast majority of bones in the tomb; the other bones consisted of two deer teeth, two pig heads, and fifteen pig bones (
http://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/archae/2dwkmain.htm
). A bronze in the shape of an alligator was found in Shilou, Shanxi in 1959. It is 41.5 centimeters long and dates to the late Shang period (Gyllensvärd 1974: 48–49).

17.
T’u-men
NMan
tŭmén
< MChi *thumәn (Pul. 312, 211 *t
^h
o
²
-mәn
¹
) is written
Bumïn
in the Old Turkic inscriptions from the Orkhon. Modern scholars nearly all believe this to be the correct form. For example, Rybatzki (2000: 206–208, 218) argues that
Bumïn
is a loan from Indo-Iranian (Old Persian
bûmî
‘earth, land’ Sogdian
ßwm
‘world’, Old Indic
bhûmi
‘earth, ground, soil, land’). This would mean the Chinese form would have to be a semi-calque translation, but this is unlikely in the extreme. Klyashtornyi and Livshits (1972) claim to have read the name
Bumïn
in the Sogdian inscription from Bugut (ca. 582, making it the earliest dated source on imperial Türk history), but this is contradicted by the recent study of the inscription by Yoshida and Moriyasu (1999), who see no such name. My own examination of the inscription concurs with Yoshida and Moriyasu’s on this point. The chronological precedence of the Chinese form and the simple, clear, everyday characters used to transcribe the name in Chinese; the improbability of the Chinese form transcribing a Turkic taboo form (i.e., Tumïn as an avoidance form of an original Bumïn); the extreme unlikelihood of a Central Eurasian empire founder having a name that meant ‘earth, world’ or the like (as well as, for Turkic, the oddity of supplying a missing final -n); and, especially, the recurrence of the same name for the empire founder in the foundation stories of the Hsiung-nu and Koguryo, who also share other cultural elements with the Turks, most notably the ancestral cave, all indicate that the Old Turkic name was Tumïn, not *Bumïn. The reason for the erroneous form “Bumïn” in the Old Turkic inscriptions is unknown. It could have been a taboo avoidance of the founder’s name or perhaps a scribal mistake that was repeated from one inscription to another, a real possibility because the texts consist in large part of verbatim repetitions of each other. See further Beckwith (2005b).

18.
The Avars’ Chinese name, variously written Jou-jan, Ju-ju, Juan-juan (or Rouran, etc.), has not yet been identified with an otherwise known ethnonym, and their language has also not been identified. As for the controversy over the identification of the Jou-jan with the Avars, the Byzantine Greeks called the new arrivals from the east ’‘Aβα ‘Avars’ from their first contact with them, and the Türk knew them as their former overlords—they were annoyed with the Avars for retaining the title
kaghan
‘emperor’ even after the Türk victory. In his discussion of the “pseudo-Avar” problem, Pohl (1988: 34) rightly notes that the Avars certainly contained peoples belonging to several different ethnolinguistic groups, so that attempts to identify them with one or another specific eastern people are misguided. However, a key point, the significance of which seems not to have been fully appreciated, is that the Avars bore the title
kaghan.
The title is not known to have been used outside of the Eastern Steppe and North China before the Türk defeat of the Avars and pursuit of them across Eurasia, so the Avar ruling clan must be equatable with the Jou-jan ruling clan or one or more legitimate heirs of it. As they are the leaders of the people who settled in Pannonia and became famous in Western sources as Avars, I have referred to them as Avars throughout. On the controversy, see Dobrovits (2004). Careful study of the Jou-jan names in the Chinese sources could shed light on the ethnolinguistic affinities of the Jou-jan; until that is done, speculation on the subject is premature.

19.
The Sasanid comitatus and its members are referred to under several names, the most important of which are
gyânawspâr
(New Persian
jânsipâr)
‘those who sacrifice their lives’ and
adiyârân
(or
adyâwarân
or
yârân;
New Persian
ayyârân)
‘friends, helpers, assistants’. They were an elite corps of fierce mounted warriors, highly skilled archers and swordsmen who were distinguished by their closeness to their ruler and by golden articles of adornment—bracelets, belts, and earrings are especially mentioned—that marked their rank. These strong, valorous, warlike men were the friends of their lord who sat near him in the royal hall during banquets and audiences. The Persian comitatus was “a community of free warriors who, through a ceremonial oath, voluntarily took upon themselves to remain faithful to a lord and constitute his subordinates and followers. To belong to this group was an advantage and brought with it prestige and dignity; on the other hand the increase in numbers would increase the prestige of the lord. The necessary condition for the formation of such a group was the fame of the lord as a successful warrior, probably also his noble descent, and a rich material base. The lord and his men formed a well-equipped, ever war-ready elite-group among the mass of free warriors capable of bearing arms” (Zakeri 1995: 87). This description is practically the definition of the classical comitatus. However, de la Vaissière (2005a: 143–144) states categorically that the Sasanids did not have
châkars
or
ghulâms.
Literally speaking, he is right—the references cited by Zakeri in support of their existence
under those names
in Sasanid times are anachronistic, and Zakeri’s discussion sometimes leaves much to be desired. Nevertheless, the evidence from contemporaneous sources on the Sasanids, and before them the Achaemenids, is certainly there, and it is quite clear: the Persians most certainly did have the comitatus. That means they did have the warriors who were members of this elite guard corps, so the relevant source references, despite their unreliability in some respects, are correct in referring to the existence of comitatus
members
in the Sasanid realm, even if they incorrectly use the later non-Persian terms
châkar
or
ghulâm
for them instead of
gyânawspâr, adiyâr,
and so on.