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The Yuezhi were an ancient people first described in China histories as nomadic pastoralists living in an arid grassland area in the western part of the modern Chinese province of Gansu, during the 1st millennium BC. After a major defeat at the hands of the Xiongnu in 176 BC, the Yuezhi split into two groups migrating in different directions: the Greater Yuezhi and Lesser Yuezhi. This started a complex domino effect that radiated in all directions and, in the process, set the course of history for much of Asia for centuries to come.
The Greater Yuezhi initially migrated northwest into the Ili River (on the modern borders of China and Kazakhstan), where they reportedly displaced elements of the Sakas. They were driven from the Ili Valley by the Wusun and migrated southward to Sogdia and later settled in Bactria. The Greater Yuezhi have consequently often been identified with peoples mentioned in classical European sources as having overrun the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, like the Tukhara and Asii. During the 1st century BC, one of the five major Greater Yuezhi tribes in Bactria, the Kushanas, began to subsume the other tribes and neighbouring peoples. The subsequent Kushan Empire, at its peak in the 3rd century AD, stretched from Turfan in the Tarim Basin in the north to Pataliputra on the Gangetic plain of India in the south. The Kushanas played an important role in the development of trade on the Silk Road and the introduction of Buddhism to China.
The Lesser Yuezhi migrated southward to the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Some are reported to have settled among the Qiang people in Qinghai, and to have been involved in the Liang Province Rebellion (184–221 AD) against the Eastern Han dynasty. Another group of Yuezhi is said to have founded the city state of Cumuḍa (now known as Kumul and Hami City) in the eastern Tarim. A fourth group of Lesser Yuezhi may have become part of the Jie people of Shanxi, who established the Later Zhao state of the 4th century AD (although this remains controversial).
Many scholars believe that the Yuezhi were an Indo-European people. "We must identify them Tocharians with the Yueh-chih of the Chinese sources... Consensus of scholarly opinion identifies the Yueh-chih with the Tokharians... The Indo-European ethnic origin of the Yuehchih = Tokharians is generally accepted... Yueh-chih = Tokharian people... Yueh-chih = Tokharians..." "They are, by almost unanimous opinion, Indo-Europeans, probably the most oriental of those who occupied the steppes." Although some scholars have associated them with artifacts of extinct cultures in the Tarim Basin, such as the Tarim mummies and texts recording the Tocharian languages, there is no evidence for any such link.
In the 1st century BC, Sima Qian – widely regarded as the founder of Chinese historiography – describes how the Qin dynasty (221–206 BC) bought jade and highly valued military from a people that Sima Qian called the Wūzhī, led by a man named Luo. The Wūzhī traded these goods for Chinese silk, which they then sold on to other neighbours. This is probably the first reference to the Yuezhi as a lynchpin in trade on the Silk Road, which in the 3rd century BC began to link Chinese states to Central Asia and, eventually, the Middle East, the Mediterranean and Europe.
Both texts use the name Yuèzhī, composed of characters meaning "moon" and "clan" respectively. Several different of this Chinese language name have appeared in print. The Iranologist H. W. Bailey preferred Üe-ṭşi.H. W. Bailey, Indo-Scythian Studies: Being Khotanese Texts (vol. 7). Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 6–7, 16, 101, 116, 121, 133. Another modern Chinese pronunciation of the name is Ròuzhī, based on the thesis that the character in the name is a scribal error for ; however Thierry considers this thesis "thoroughly wrong".
The area between the [[Qilian Mountains]] and [[Dunhuang]] lies in the western part of the modern Chinese province of [[Gansu]], but no archaeological remains of the Yuezhi have yet been found in this area. Some scholars have argued that "Dunhuang" should be [[Dunhong]], a mountain in the [[Tian Shan]], and that Qilian should be interpreted as a name for the Tian Shan. They have thus placed the original homeland of the Yuezhi 1,000 km further northwest in the grasslands to the north of the Tian Shan (in the northern part of modern [[Xinjiang]]). Other authors suggest that the area identified by Sima Qian was merely the core area of an empire encompassing the western part of the Mongolian plain, the upper reaches of the [[Yellow River]], the [[Tarim Basin]] and possibly much of central Asia, including the [[Altai Mountains]], the site of the [[Pazyryk burials]] of the [[Ukok Plateau]].
By the late 3rd century BCE the Yuezhi appear to have often been in conflict with the Xiongnu and the Wusun – another neighbouring people, who had originally lived together alongside the Yuezhi, in the region between Dunhuang and Qilian Mountain. (The only surviving accounts of these interactions were evidently obtained later from non-Yuezhi sources – as shown by the fact that they did not record the personal names of individual Yuezhi, including their leaders.) Gradually the Xiongnu grew stronger, and began to challenge the Yuezhi militarily. There were at least four wars between the two peoples, according to Chinese accounts. The first war broke out during the reign of the Xiongnu monarch Touman (who died in 209 BCE). After Touman had sent his eldest son, Modu Chanyu, to the Yuezhi as a hostage, Touman made a surprise attack on the Yuezhi. Despite attempts by the Yuezhi to kill him, Modu stole a horse and managed to escape to his country. It appears that the Xiongnu did not prevail in this first war; Modu subsequently killed his father and became ruler of the Xiongnu. The second war took place in the seventh year of Modu's reign (203 BCE), when the Xiongnu seized a large area of the territory originally belonging to the Yuezhi, and their dominance began to fade. In a third war, probably before or in 176 BCE, one of Modu's subordinate tribal chiefs led an invasion of Yuezhi territory in the Gansu region, and inflicted a crushing defeat on the Yuezhi. Modu boasted in a letter (174 BC) to the Han emperor, that due to "the excellence of his fighting men, and the strength of his horses, he has succeeded in wiping out the Yuezhi, slaughtering or forcing to submission every number of the tribe." ( Shiji 123.)
The wife of the murdered king became the new monarch of the Greater Yuezhi.Book of Han, vol. 61 (1998). 9780941694636, The Institute for the Study of Man in collaboration with The University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications. . ISBN 9780941694636 Shortly afterward (173 BCE), the Wusun were reportedly attacked by the Yuezhi, who sought slaves and pasture lands. The Yuezhi killed the Wusun kunmo (monarch), named Nandoumi, and took his territory. The son of Nandoumi, known only by the title kunmo, fled to the Xiongnu and was brought up by their monarch – probably Modu and/or his son, Laoshang Chanyu (who reigned 174–166 BCE). Laoshang later reportedly killed a king of the Yuezhi and, in accordance with nomadic traditions "made a skull cup out of his skull." ( Shiji 123.)
The so-called Greater or Great Yuezhi began migrating north-west in about 165 BC,Chavannes (1907) "Les pays d'occident d'après le Heou Han chou". T'oung pao, ser.2:8, p. 189, n. 1 first settling in the Ili valley, immediately north of the Tian Shan mountains, where they defeated the Saka (Sakas): "The Yuezhi attacked the king of the Sai who moved a considerable distance to the south and the Yuezhi then occupied his lands" ( Book of Han 61 4B). This was "the first historically recorded movement of peoples originating in the high plateaus of Asia."
In 132 BC the Wusun, in alliance with the Xiongnu and out of revenge from an earlier conflict, again managed to dislodge the Yuezhi from the Ili Valley, forcing them to move south-west. The Yuezhi passed through the neighbouring urban civilization of Dayuan (in Ferghana) and settled on the northern bank of the Oxus, in the region of northern Bactria, or Transoxiana (modern Tajikistan and Uzbekistan).
Zhang Qian also reported:
In a sweeping analysis of the physical types and cultures of Central Asia, Zhang Qian reports:
Zhang Qian also described the remnants of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom on the other side of the Oxus River (Chinese Gui) as a number of autonomous city-states under Yuezhi suzerainty:
The Book of the Later Han (5th century CE) also records the visit of Yuezhi envoys to the Chinese capital in 2 BC, who gave oral teachings on Buddhist sutras to a student, suggesting that some Yuezhi already followed the Buddhist faith during the 1st century BC (Baldev Kumar 1973).
Chapter 88 of the Book of the Later Han relies on a report of Ban Yong, based on the campaigns of his father Ban Chao in the late 1st century AD. It reports that one of the five tribes of the Yuezhi, the Guishuang, had managed to take control of the tribal confederation:
A later Chinese annotation in Zhang Shoujie's Shiji (quoting Wan Zhen 萬震 in Nánzhōuzhì 南州志 "Strange, a now-lost 3rd-century text from the Eastern Wu), describes the Kushans as living in the same general area north of India, in cities of Greco-Roman style, and with sophisticated handicraft. The quotes are dubious, as Wan Zhen probably never visited the Yuezhi kingdom through the Silk Road, though he might have gathered his information from the trading ports in the coastal south.Yu Taishan (2nd Edition 2003). A Comprehensive History of Western Regions. Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou Guji Press. Chinese sources continued to use the name Yuezhi and seldom used the Kushan (or Guishuang) as a generic term:
The Kushana spoke Bactrian, an Eastern Iranian language.
Writing in the 1st century BC, the Roman historian Pompeius Trogus attributed the destruction of the Greco-Bactrian state to the Sacaraucae and the Asiani "kings of the Tochari". Both Pompeius and the Roman historian Justin (2nd century AD) record that the Parthian king Artabanus I was mortally wounded in a war against the Tochari in 124 BC. Several relationships between these tribes and those named in Chinese sources have been proposed, but remain contentious.
After they settled in Bactria, the Yuezhi became Hellenisation to some degree – as shown by their adoption of the Greek alphabet and by some remaining coins, minted in the style of the Greco-Bactrian kings, with the text in Greek.
As they had done in Bactria with their copying of Greco-Bactrian coinage, the Yuezhi copied the coinage of King Hermaeus on a vast scale, up to around 40 AD, when the design blends into the coinage of the Kushan Empire king Kujula Kadphises. Such coins may provide the earliest known names of Yuezhi yabgu (a minor royal title, similar to prince), namely Sapadbizes and/or Agesiles, who both lived in or about 20 BC.
The Kushanas expanded to the east during the 1st century AD. The first Kushan emperor, Kujula Kadphises, ostensibly associated himself with King Hermaeus on his coins.
The Kushanas integrated Buddhism into a pantheon of many deities and became great promoters of Mahayana Buddhism, and their interactions with Greek civilization helped the culture and Greco-Buddhism flourish.
During the 1st and 2nd centuries, the Kushan Empire expanded militarily to the north and occupied parts of the Tarim Basin, putting them at the center of the lucrative Central Asian commerce with the Roman Empire. The Kushanas collaborated militarily with the Chinese against their mutual enemies. This included a campaign with the Chinese general Ban Chao against the Sogdians in 84 CE, when the latter were trying to support a revolt by the king of Kashgar. In around AD 85, the Kushanas also assisted the Chinese in an attack on Turpan, east of the Tarim Basin.
Following the military support provided to the Han, the Kushan emperor requested a marriage alliance with a Han dynasty princess and sent gifts to the Chinese court in expectation that this would occur. After the Han court refused, a Kushan army 70,000 strong marched on Ban Chao in 86 AD. The army was apparently exhausted by the time it reached its objective and was defeated by the Chinese force. The Kushanas retreated and later paid tribute to the Chinese emperor Han He (89–106).
In about 120 AD, Kushan troops installed Chenpan—a prince who had been sent as a hostage to them and had become a favorite of the Kushan Emperor—on the throne of Kashgar, thus expanding their power and influence in the Tarim Basin. There they introduced the Brahmi script, the Indian Prakrit language for administration, and Greco-Buddhist art, which developed into Serindian art.
Following this territorial expansion, the Kushanas introduced Buddhism to northern and northeastern Asia, by both direct missionary efforts and the translation of Buddhist scriptures into Chinese. Major Kushan missionaries and translators included Lokaksema (born ) and Dharmaraksa (), both of whom were influential translators of the Mahayana sutras into Chinese. They went to China and established translation bureaus, thereby being at the center of the Silk Road transmission of Buddhism.
In the Records of the Three Kingdoms (chap. 3), it was recorded that in 229 AD, "The king of the Da Yuezhi Kushanas, Bodiao 波調 (Vasudeva I), sent his envoy to present tribute, and His Majesty (Emperor Cao Rui) granted him the title of King of the Da Yuezhi Intimate with the Cao Wei (Ch: 親魏大月氏王, Qīn Wèi Dà Yuèzhī Wáng)."
Soon afterwards, the military power of the Kushanas began to decline. The rival Sasanian Empire of Persia extended its dominion into Bactria during the reign of Ardashir I around 230 CE. The Sasanians also occupied neighboring Sogdia by 260 AD and made it into a .Mark J. Dresden (1981), "Introductory Note," in Guitty Azarpay, Sogdian Painting: the Pictorial Epic in Oriental Art, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, p. 5, .
During the course of the 3rd and 4th centuries, the Kushan Empire was divided and conquered by the Sasanians, the Hephthalite tribes from the north, and the Gupta Empire and Yaudheya empires from India.
Some of the Lesser Yuezhi settled among the Qiang people of Huangzhong, Qinghai, according to archaeologist Sophia-Katrin Psarras.Sophia-Karin Psarras, Han Material Culture, New York, Cambridge University Press, pp. 31, 297. Yuezhi and Qiang were said to be among members of the Auxiliary of Loyal Barbarians From Huangzhong that mutinied against the Han dynasty, in the Liangzhou Rebellion (184–221 CE). The Lushuihu people, who founded the Northern Liang dynasty (397–439), have been theorized by modern researchers to be descendants of the Lesser Yuezhi that intermingled with the Qiang.
Elements of the Lesser Yuezhi are said to have been part of the Jie people, who originated from Yushe County in Shanxi. Other theories link the Jie more strongly to the Xiongnu, Kangju, or the Tocharian-speaking peoples of the Tarim. Led by Shi Le (Emperor Ming of Later Zhao), the Jie people established the Later Zhao dynasty (319–351). The Jie populations were later massacred by Ran Min of the short-lived Ran Wei dynasty during the Ran Wei–Later Zhao war.
In Tibet, the Gar or mGar – a clan name associated with blacksmiths - may have been descended from the Lesser Yuezhi who resettled in Qiang in 162 BC.
A Chinese monk named Gao Juhui, who traveled from Kaifeng to Khotan in or about 938 CE, mentioned a people known in Chinese as Zhongyun (仲雲; Wade–Giles Tchong-yun), describing them as descendants of the Lesser Yuezhi.Ouyang Xiu & Xin Wudai Shi, 1974, New Annals of the Five Dynasties, Beijing, Zhonghua Publishing House, p. 918 – cited by: Eurasian History, 2008–09, The Yuezhi and Dunhuang （月氏与敦煌） (18 March 2017). The Zhongyun were the founders of the city state of Cumuḍa (also Cimuda or Cunuda), south of Lop Nur in the eastern Tarim. (Following the subsequent settlement of Uyghur language-speaking people in the area, Cumuḍa became known as Čungul, Xungul and Kumul. Under subsequent Han Chinese influence, it became known as Hami City.)
Before the middle of the 1st millennium, the Xiao Yuezhi had ceased to be identifiable by that name and appear to have been subsumed by other ethnicities, including Tibetan people, Uyghur people and Han Chinese.
Mallory and Mair suggest that the Yuezhi and Wusun were among the nomadic peoples, at least some of whom spoke Iranian languages, who moved into northern Xinjiang from the Central Asian steppe in the 2nd millennium BC.
Scholars such as Edwin Pulleyblank, Josef Markwart, and László Torday, suggest that the name Iatioi—a Central Asian people mentioned by Ptolemy in Geography (AD 150)—may also be an attempt to render Yuezhi.
There has been only limited scholarly support for a theory developed by W. B. Henning, who proposed that the Yuezhi were descended from the Gutian people (or Gutians) and an associated, but little known tribe known as the Tukri, who were native to the Zagros Mountains (modern Iran and Iraq), during the mid-3rd millennium BC. In addition to phonological similarities between these names and *ŋʷjat-kje and Tukhāra, Henning pointed out that the Guti could have migrated from the Zagros Mountains to Gansu,Henning, W.B. (1978) "The first Indo-Europeans in history" by the time that the Yuezhi entered the historical record in China, during the 1st millennium BC. However, the only material evidence presented by Henning, namely similar ceramic ware, is generally considered to be far from conclusive.
Proposed links with the Aorsi, Asii, Getae, Goths, Gushi culture, Jats, Massagetae, and other groups have also gathered little support.
Müller then proposed to connect the name "Toγari" (Togar/Tokar) to the Tókharoi people of Tokharistan (themselves associated with the Yuezhi) described in early Greek histories. He thus referred to the newly discovered languages as "Tocharian", which became the common name for both the languages of the Tarim manuscripts and the people who produced them. Most historians have been rejecting the identification of the Tocharians of the Tarim with the Tókharoi of Bactria, mainly because they are not known to have spoken any languages other than Bactrian, a quite dissimilar Eastern Iranian language. Other scholars suggest that the Yuezhi/Kushans may previously have spoken Tocharian before shifting to Bactrian on their arrival in Bactria, an example of an invading or colonising elite language shift (as also seen for the Greco-Bactrians, the Tokhara Yabghus or the Arabs upon their successive settlements in Bactria)., p. 5, footnote 16, as well as pp. 380–383 in appendix B, but also see : "He equates the Tokharians with the Yuezhi, and the Wusun with the Asvins, as if these are established facts, and refers to his arguments in appendix B. But these identifications remain controversial, rather than established, for most scholars." However, while Tocharian contains some loanwords from Bactrian, there are no traces of Tocharian in Bactrian.
Another possible endonym of the Yuezhi was put forward by H. W. Bailey, who claimed that they were referred to, in 9th and 10th century Saka language Iranian texts, as the Gara. According to Bailey, the Tu Gara ("Great Gara") were the Great Yuezhi. This is consistent with the Ancient Greek Τόχαροι Tokharoi (Latinised Tochari) in reference to the faction of the Kushans that conquered Bactria, as well as the Tibetan language name Gar (or mGar), for the members of the Lesser Yuezhi who settled in the Tibetan Empire.
Hakan Aydemir, assistant professor at Istanbul Medeniyet University, reconstructs the ethnonym * Arki ~ * Yarki which underlay Chinese transcriptions 月氏 and 月支 as well as various other foreign transcriptions and Tocharian A ethnonym Ārśi. Aydemir suggests that * Arki ~ * Yarki is etymologically Indo-European. "based on various toponymic evidence, * Arki and * Yarki seem to be the oldest reconstructable forms. However, it is for the time being not quite clear which one is the primary form. In order to know this, we first need to know the etymology of the name. Without doing so, it would be difficult to determine the primary form. This, however, must be left to the specialists in Indo-European linguistics."
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