iranian in wusun

vkgppg"fg"nc"Xckuuktg

Ktcpkcp"kp"YwuwpA"C"vgpvcvkxg"tgkpvgtrtgvcvkqp"qh"vjg"Mwnvqdg"kpuetkrvkqpuThe great migrations of the 2nd c. BC modified the political landscape of Central Asia:

many tribes moved to the West. Among them, the Wusun, who settled on the pastures all along the North-Western Tianshan. Although many attempts tried to identify them in Greek sources describing the fate of the Bactrian kingdoms destroyed by these migrations, or in the Igqitcrj{ of Ptolemy, no safe result was achieved in this way. For the time being, the only data we have on the Wusun are the Chinese ones, and the archaeology.

The Wusun are described in the Dayuan chapter of the Ujklk (chap. 123), as well as in the Ogoqkt"qp"jcpi"Skcp"cpf"Nk"Iwcpink of the Jcpujw (chap. 61). Their myth of origin is thus described in the Jcpujw:

When I was living among the Xiongnu I heard of Wusun; the king was entitled Kunmo, and the Kunmos father was named Nantoumi; originally [Wusun] had lived with the Da Yuezhi between the Qilian [mountains] and Dunhuang; and they had been a small state. The Da Yuezhi attacked and killed Nandoumi, seizing his lands; and his people fled to the Xiongnu. An infant Kunmo had recently been born, and the Bujiu Xihou, who was his guardian, took him in his arms and ran away. He laid him in the grass and searched for food for him; and on his coming back he saw a wolf suckling the child; furthermore there were ravens holding meat in their beaks and hovering at [the childs] side. (transl. Hulsew, p. 214215). 12620???,263???R34???1071??20?e?@ ?????@?6 (Jcpujw 61.26912)

This myth of origin is extremely striking, in that it reminds us both of parallel myths in the steppe and in the Indo-european world: the she-wolf suckling a baby is part of the Turk and Mongol legends of origins, as well as the Roman one.

The other animal of the legend, the crow, is clearly refered to in the name of the Wusun: descendants (uwp ) of the crow (yw ). However most of the authors regarded Wusun as a transcription of a foreign tribal name. The crow part of the myth would have been a Chinese addition in an attempt to explain what was essentialy in fact a transcription. It would have been a learned gloss and no crow would have nourish the heir of the Kunmo in the original

321K t cp kcp " k p "YwuwpA "C " v gp v c v k x g " tg k p v g tr tg v c v k qp " q h " v j g "Mw n v qdg " k p u e t k r v k qp u

myth. E. Pulleyblank, among others, wrote for instance: the part played by the crow seems to be an embellishment based on the meaning of the Chinese characters used for the name of the Wu-sun, i.e. crow grandson. Since these characters are undoubtedly a transcription of a non-Chinese word, one can only suppose that this punning interpretation was added by Chang Chien himself or some other Chinese (Pulleyblank, 1970, p. 156).

It is not clear why this solution was prefered to the equally possible opposite one, that the crow was an original part of the myth and that the Chinese translated the self-designation of the Wusun, or, third possibility, that they played on words to mention a crow in what was still an approximate attempt of transcription of the name.

Of these possibilities, the first, transcription, and the third, mixed transcription, are best attested in Chinese dealings with the names of foreign tribes. Xiongnu is a good example of the third possibility, the mix of meaning and sound, rendering very approximately Hun so that to convey a derogatory meaning crying slaves (Henning, 1948, la Vaissire, 2005). The various Chinese names of the Rouran are also good examples, Rouran simply transcribing a foreign name, while Ruanruan is both a transcription of the same name and a translation, if we are to accept the Ruanruan-Avar link1, or at least part-phonetical and part-derogatory if we are not. As regard the second possibility, the High Carts (Gaoju) of the Tiele (< mongol vgngigp, cart) confederation are a good example.

However, recent developments have shown that among these possibilities, only the sec-ond or the third ones are to be accepted as regard the Wusun. To cut it short, the crows were there from the beginning and are not a learned gloss.

In an article recently published in Cukcp"Hqnmnqtg" Uvwfkgu, Namu Jila has discovered many parallels to the close association wolf-crows in Mongol and Oirat myths, including a legend of a baby nourished by a she-wolf and a crow (Namu, 2006)2. However, being later than the Wusun myth, it can be objected that these myths might have been in a way or another influenced by the Chinese texts. But the author adds a parallel that is not questionable: in the Roman version of the myth, if usually only the she-wolf is remembered, in fact the original texts mentioned both a she-wolf and a bird, a woodpecker, nourishing the twins3. Whatever might have been the evolution of the myth in the Mongol world, the oldest version of this myth, the Roman one, does associate a wolf and a bird. So that we do have to reject the hy-pothesis that the mention of the crow in the Chinese source is a mere learned gloss created to explain the name Wusun. It is the opposite, the birds were there from the beginning, and the name cannot be a mere transcription.

Consequently, this name, meaningful, or is a translation of the self-designation of the Wusun, or, more complex, is a meaningful attempt to transcribe their name.

In the following, I will assume that Wusun is not a plain translation, but an attempt to play both on the sound and the meaning, as so often the case in Chinese. If I cannot rule it out, it

1 These wriggling insects might translate the mongol Abarga, with the same meaning, itself to be linked to the name Avar, the name of the Ruanruan after they would have fled to the West. On all this Golden, 1992, p. 7677.

2 There are errors in this study, especially as regard the linguistic affiliation of the Wusun.3 See also Beckwith, 2009, p. 8485, 376377 and 388, n. 12, who is aware of the woodpecker/

crow parallel, but does not see that it impaired the Chinese transcription of the sounds. Beckwith favors the old idea of Wusun transcribing Avin, that is the Horsemen in Old Indic, considering the possibility of pockets of Old Indic speakers left outside of India.

322 v k g p p g " f g " n c " Xc k u u k tg

should be pointed out that in the myth, Wusun and Roman, the crow is always secondary to the wolf and eventually disappears in the Gaoju, Turk and Mongol myths of origin. In a way it would be strange to put the crow forward instead of the wolf. Would it had been a transla-tion, the heirs of the wolf would have been more logical, as were the Turks or the Mongols.

Yw was pronounced in Han time, the date of our earliest mentions of the Wusun, as according to Baxter, q according to Cobin in the Northwestern dialect. However it tran-scribes also a simple c, as in Yw{kujcpnk, Alexandria, and also Sanskrit q, in Han-time Bud-dhist texts from China. Karlgren gave the value w. Uwp was uwp, or uwp, or uqp during the Han period. Ywuwp might have been pronounced Wup, or Qup, or Cup, or Wuwp, or Quqp, Wup, Cup, Wuwp

But the main result up to now is not the phonology, but rather its limited value: this pro-nounciation was most probably only an approximate one, being distorded by the necessity to find some meaningful characters. There is theoritically the possibility that, by an extraordi-nary chance, Yw + uwp would have actually both sounded exactly as the actual name of the Wusun and meant something important for Wusun origins. But the chance is so low that I will ignore it. As Zkqpipw is only a very approximate transcription for Hun, coined mainly to be derogatory, Sons of the crow could be only an approximate rendering of the original name, something close to Wup, or Qup, or Cup, or Wuwp, but most likely not exactly that, so that to accommodate a meaning.

We should now shift to an entirely different of data, directly linked with Vladimir Aro-novich Livshitss interests. It is a pleasure to dedicate this study to a wonderful scholar and actual gentleman the works of whom are at the basis of so many discoveries in Central Asian studies and especially Sogdian epigraphy.

In 1992 came to light the first of a serie of fragmentary inscriptions on ceramic plaques from the Kazakh site of Kultobe, on the river Arys, excavated by N. Podushkin (Podushkin, 2000, 2005). Identified as Sogdian by F. Grenet and N. Sims-Williams, they were translated and commented in two articles published in 2006 and 2007 (Sims-Williams, Grenet, 2006 and Sims-Williams, Grenet, Podushkin, 2007). They were discovered in a much ruined for-mer citadel on the bank of the river, at the foot of a plateau inhabited by nomads as shown by the big kurgans overlooking the valley.

N. Sims-Williams edited and translated the main inscription so:1. ZNH knth BDt spny (c)[......... ZKn ..........]2. BRY ZY wtt (WTt ?) TMH KZY ZY [..........]3. P ZK np LYK P ZK wnnp [LYK......]4. ZK symrkntc MRY P ZK k[yk MRY P ZK]5. nxpyk MRY P ZK nw(k!)my[tn MRY PZY]6. ZK GNZ KL LKt P ZK [....... P ZK .......]7. (blank) LYK NP()[H/Y (blank?) ]

Translation: This city was built by the leader of the army, Ch[... the] son of [...]. He went (?) there so that (?) both the (land) allotted to (our) people and the [land allotted to] the nomads [might be ...; and] the lord of Samarkand and the [lord of] K[ish and the] lord of Na-khshab and the [lord of] N}k-mI[than agreed(?); and he (?)] took all the treasure and the [... and the] (land) allotted [to ...] (as his) own.

The other inscriptions are more fragmentary and shorter, the second one mentions the founding of the fortress by a general from Chch. The inscriptions cannot be dated with any


certainty but on paleographical and grammatical grounds should be older than the Ancient Sog-dian Letters of the beginning of the 4th c. AD. They do correspond quite closely to the situation described in the Chinese sources on Western Central Asia in the 1st c. AD. By then the formerly united Kangju state, centered on Chch, has dissolved into a confederation of oasis-states. This situation seems to have lingered up to the 3rd c. AD as the Sassanian Paykuli inscription of 262 seems to describe the same confederation under the name of Kash, Soghd and Chch.4

It is clear that the inscriptions refer to a colonization originating from Kangju. In these texts are described the creation of a frontier citadel by a Chchian general (in the inscription n 2), with the agreement or participation, and may be population, of all the main Southern oasis of Kangju. This strategical move seems to have been at the expense of a people iden-tified as the yppr, here translated as nomads,"pr meaning people or community in Sog-dian, and *yp being the regular, if unattested, Sogdian counterpart of some other Iranian words, like Manichean Parthian yfp, meaning tent5. The yppr would be the people of the tent, hence the translation nomad.

But I cannot regard this name as equivalent to nomad, even if *yp could mean tent. In this text and in this context, a precise name would be required, as precise as all the other ethnonyms mentionned in the text, Chch, Samarkand, Nakhshab, Kesh, Bukhara. These in-scriptions record the founding act of the city, it was most certainly placed at its gates, as dem-onstrated by F. Grenet. There were several copies of them, as several examples of the same inscription are recorded in this small corpus. These are official texts, describing precise ne-gociations in a precise context, to be remembered. The contrast between the supposed mean-ing of nomads, very vague to say the least, and the precise ethnonymic vocabulary is strik-ing. I do not know a single ancient text in which a neighbour next door litteraly speaking in Kultobe would be named in such a broad and generic way. In Sogdian or Khotanese texts there are no words for nomads, there are Turks, or Huns, but no nomads. Similarly, in Chinese texts, there are Rong, or Di, or Hu, but no nomads. The use of Huns for nomads from the North-East is especially striking in the Mugh documents because the word is used precisely where nomads would be correct, or the more precise Turk. Nomad as a descriptive anthropological word belongs to the Greek inheritage in Western vocabulary, and in Greek it is used only to describe faraway peoples barely known as the Numids for instance, or associated with the Anthropophagi in the farthest regions of the Steppe. But in direct contact with some actual nomads, even the Greeks named them, Scythian, or Saka, or Tokharian.

It would seem more logical to regard this name, the people of the tent, as precise, that is, not a generic name given by the Sogdians, but the self-designation of this people. This name does exist in nomadic ethnonymy, and for instance our Bedouin, people of the desert name actually themselves the ahl al-Bayt, people of the tent. It is a much likely hypothesis that the people involved in the negociation with the Kangju troops are the Tents as the Gaoju are the High Carts.

4 The discovery of the Kultobe inscriptions and the way it describes what is Kangju according to the Chinese sources should lead to modify the current interpretation of the Paikuli inscription and revert to the former one which interpreted Kash in the inscription as Kesh in Sogdiana and not Kashgar. Kash, Soghd and Chch seems to be a way to describe the three main components or valleys of the confederation.

5 In latter Sogdian texts it is y{p, a borrowing from Middle Persian.

324 v k g p p g " f g " n c " Xc k u u k tg

If we are to try to identify this people of the Tents, an obvious candidate are the Wusun. The Northern neighbors of Kangju, as testified repeatedly by all the Chinese dynastic his-tories, from the Jcpujw to the Ucpiwq"jk, that is during this precise period, are the Wusun. It might be argued however that the Chinese texts are not especially detailed and that some more local nomadic peoples might have existed in this region. To reduce the group of candi-dates would in this regard be only a typical tgfwevkq"cf"pqvwo.

Against this objection, it should be pointed out that the Kultobe inscriptions do not de-scribe a local and limited operation. The four main towns of settled Transoxiana, and Chch, representative of the Kangju confederation as a whole, exactly as described in the Chinese sources, operated an important attempt of colonization on the very edge of the steppe and, sur-rounded by nomads (a fact obvious on the spot), managed by a military offensive (the Chchan general) to assure its success. It is not a minor operation, but one which involved forces and an agreement coming from the whole Kangju. All its princes are mentionned in the inscription. The foe should be equally important, on par with this coordinated strategical attempt.

In the Chinese texts of this period (IIII c. AD) the Northern foe of Kangju, established from the Ili to Semireche, exactly as latter the Western Turks (the tudun of whose was at Tarvand/Otrar a few kilometers away from Kultobe) has only one name: Wusun. It is sim-ply logical to think that such a major attempt from the whole Kangju had major opponents, the Wusun according to the same Chinese texts. In front and against this straightforward his-torical evidence, it is not obvious that in a diplomatic and political text we could have found such a vague reference to the nomads. These nomads should much more precisely be the Wusun. Is this possible, i.e. can we propose an cf"jqe phonetical hypothesis bridging the gap between Wusun and yp?

As demonstrated above, the Chinese attempt was most probably an approximate one, as room had to be made for a meaning. Wusun might have been pronounced Usun, but this form was not a perfect rendition of the sounds. Conversely, yp in Sogdian, and keeping the meaning tent, should have been pronounced *ykp, in which is the voiced dental frica-tive, 6 much unfrequent in most of languages, and totally foreign to Chinese phonology. Last-ly and perhaps mainly, in this hypothesis both were attempts to reflect the self-designation of the same group, with a language and a phonology of its own, in other words both Sogdian and Chinese are here approximations to the actual name, the Chinese much more than the Sogdian, impaired as it was by the meaning it conveyed and deprived of the phonological flexibility of an alphabetic system.

Although hypothetical, I can see nothing which would preclude the following scenar-io: the self-designation of the Wusun is actually the Tents, in an Iranian language close to, but not similar to, Sogdian. In this language Tent might have been *yp xgn"uko0, close enough both to *Ykp, the Sogdian transcription and translation a possibility created by the closeness of the languages7 , and to Wusun, *Wuwp, the Chinese partial transcription coined to convey also the legend of origins8.

6 My sincere thanks to Nicholas Sims-Williams for clarifying this to me. 7 My sincere thanks to Ilya Yakubovich for helping to sharpen my ideas on this part of the

argument.8 The structure ww-fricative-nn is common to both, and we might even consider a diachronic

aspect: the two names were transcribed at an interval of 2 to 4 centuries, the 2nd c. BC for the Chinese,


When compared with the strategical situation in Kultobe and once taken into account the fact that the Chinese name could not be a good transcription, it would be a mistake to ar-gue on the actual but limited phonological differences and not to see the wider picture. The people of the tents are designated as the main foe of the Kangju confederation by this major Kangju attempt of colonisation at the very limit of the territory of the nomads. The only pow-erful nomadic neighbours of Kangju on par with it are the Wusun, with a name close, if not exactly similar, to yp of the Sogdian texts.

Does it mean that the Wusun were Iranian speaking? There is theoritically the possibility that, by an other extraordinary chance, a name in an unknown language would have sound-ed close enough to Sogdian tent to be transcribed that way. In front of the fact that People of the Tents is an actual nomadic name, in use among one of the major nomadic people on earth, it is much more probable that the two languages were close enough to allow a tran-scription which did not modified the meaning.

It is clear that the interpretation put forward here is tentative. We have to accept some preliminary hypothesis, mainly: 1. that Chinese Wusun is not a plain translation ; 2. that no other major foe emerged on the Northern frontier of Kangju without being noticed by the Chinese ; 3. that the self-designation of the Wusun was not by chance close to yp but in an unknown language. But none of these hypothesis is actually difficult to accept. If we do, then there is a strong possibility that the Wusun are mentionned in the Kultobe inscriptions under their own Iranian name, the Tents.

Dkdnkqitcrj{Beckwith C. Empires of the Silk Road. A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the

Present. Princeton, 2009.Golden P. An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples. Wiesbaden, 1992.Henning W. B. The Date of the Sogdian Ancient Letters // BSOAS, 1948, 123/4, p. 601615.Hulsew A.F.P. China in Central Asia: the Early Stage: 125 B.C. A.D. 23. An annotated

translation of chapters 61 and 96 of the History of the Former Han Dynasty, with an introduction by M.A.N. Loewe. Leiden, 1979.

de la Vaissire |. Huns et Xiongnu // CAJ, 2005, 491, p. 326.Namu J. Myths and Traditional Beliefs about the Wolf and the Crow in Central Asia: Examples

from the Turkic Wu-Sun and the Mongols // Asian Folklore Studies, 2006, 652 p. 161177. .. . , 2000. .. // Shygys

2005, 2, c. 133139.Pulleyblank E. The Wu-sun and Sakas and the Yeh-chih Migration // BSOAS, 1970, 33, p. 154

160.Sims-Williams N. Grenet F. The Sogdian Inscriptions from Kultobe 2006 // Shygys 2006, 1, p. 95

111.Sims-Williams N. Grenet F. Podushkin A.N. Les plus anciens monuments de la langue sogdienne:

les inscriptions de Kultobe au Kazakhstan // CRAI, 151e anne, n 2, 2007, p. 10051034.

and between the 1st and 3rd c. AD for the Sogdian. The Wusun language would have been alveolarized in Chinese, i.e. rendered as s, a quite common phonological phenomenon, to convey a meaning, while later it would have been voiced as a in Sogdian.

iranian in wusun

Documents