Yuezhi - Origins

Origins

The first known references to the Yuezhi are contained in the Yizhoushu (逸周書), Guanzi 管子(Guanzi Essays: 73: 78: 80: 81) and Tale of King Mu, Son of Heaven. The dates of the most common version of this book are disputed, however, and it may date to as late as the 1st century BCE. The book described the Yuzhi 禺氏, or Niuzhi 牛氏, as a people from the northwest who supplied jade to the Chinese. The supply of jade from the Tarim Basin from ancient times is indeed well documented archaeologically: "It is well known that ancient Chinese rulers had a strong attachment to jade. All of the jade items excavated from the tomb of Fuhao (妇好) of the Shang dynasty, more than 750 pieces, were from Khotan in modern Xinjiang. As early as the mid-first millennium BCE the Yuezhi engaged in the jade trade, of which the major consumers were the rulers of agricultural China." (Liu (2001), pp. 267–268). The suffix Di or Zhi (Chinese:氐) was generally used to describe the Di people, called "Western barbarians", in Han Dynasty-era Chinese annals.

According to former USSR scholar Zuev, there was a queen among the large Yuezhi confederation who added to her possessions the lands of the Tochar (Pinyin: Daxia) on the headwaters of the Huanghe c. 3rd century BCE. According to Zuev, the Chinese chronicles began referring to the queen's tribe as the Great Yuezhi (Da Yuezhi) and to the Tochars as the Lesser Yuezhi (Pinyin: Xiao Yuezhi). Together, they were simply called Yuezhi. In the 5th century CE, scholar, translator and monk Kumarajiva, while translating texts into Chinese, used the name Yuezhi to translate Tochar. In the middle of the 2nd century BCE, the Yuezhi conquered Bactria, and the Ancient Greek authors inform us that the conquerors of Bactria were the Asii and Tochari tribes. In the Chinese chronicles Bactria then began to be called the country of Daxia, i.e., Tocharistan, and the language of Bactria/Tocharistan began to be called Tocharian.

The Yuezhi are also documented in detail in Chinese historical accounts, in particular the 2nd-1st century BCE Records of the Great Historian, or Shiji, by Sima Qian. According to these accounts:

"The Yuezhi originally lived in the area between the Qilian or Heavenly Mountains (Tian Shan) and Dunhuang, but after they were defeated by the Xiongnu they moved far away to the west, beyond Dayuan, where they attacked and conquered the people of Daxia and set up the court of their king on the northern bank of the Gui River. A small number of their people who were unable to make the journey west sought refuge among the Qiang barbarians in the Southern Mountains, where they are known as the Lesser Yuezhi."

The Qilian and Dunhuang original homeland of the Yuezhi has recently been argued not to refer to the current locations in Gansu, but to the Tian Shan range and the Turpan region, 1,000 km to the west, Dunhuang being identified with a mountain named Dunhong listed in the Shanhaijing.

The Yuezhi may have been a Europoid people, as indicated by the portraits of their kings on the coins they struck following their exodus to Transoxiana (2nd-1st century BCE), some old place names in Gansu explainable in Tocharian languages, and especially the coins they struck in India as Kushans (1st-3rd century CE).巴里坤：月氏与匈奴的远古王庭

Ancient Chinese sources do describe the existence of "white people with long hair" (the Bai people of the Shan Hai Jing) beyond their northwestern border. Very well preserved Tarim mummies with Europoid features (light hair and eyes) and dominated by the Europe-born Haplogroup R1a1a (Y-DNA), today displayed at the Ürümqi Museum and dated to the 3rd century BCE, were found at the ancient oasis on the Silk Road, Niya.

Evidence of the Indo-European Tocharian languages also has been found in the same geographical area, Although the first known epigraphic evidence dates to the 6th century CE, the degree of differentiation between Tocharian A and Tocharian B and the absence of Tocharian language remains beyond that area suggest that a common Tocharian language existed in the same area of Yuezhi settlement during the second half of the 1st millennium BCE.

According to one theory, the Yuezhi were probably part of the large migration of Indo-European-speaking peoples who were settled in eastern Central Asia at that time. The nomadic people of the Ordos culture, who lived in northern China, east of the Yuezhi, are another example. Also, the Europoid mummies of Pazyryk, which were probably Scythian in origin, were found around 1,500 kilometers northwest of the Yuezhi and date to around the 3rd century BCE.

According to Han Dynasty accounts, the Yuezhi "were flourishing" during the time of the first great Chinese Qin emperor, but were regularly in conflict with the neighboring tribe of the Xiongnu to the Northeast."