Bactria and the Later Tocharians

This blog sketches the wanderings of the Indo-Europeans who came down from the steppes above the Caspian and through the North Central part of Iran into the Margiana high desert oases, and farther East to settle along the Amu Darya.

At the same time, a group of European clans that had wandered from the steppes above the Danube crossed much of Eurasia to the Volga region and came down to settle among the Late Neolithic planters along the Yellow River in what is now called Inner Mongolia.  This is a simplification of the route that is proposed by David Anthony in his work The Horse, the Wheel and Language.  As they followed the Yellow River upstream, they built settlements and left cultural remains, finally settling so far west in Taklamakan Desert that they left their very bodies entombed as mummies as a witness to their one-time habitation there as early as about 1500 BC.   You can judge their appearance from this forensically re-structured corpse from the Tarim Basin of the Taklamakan Desert, dating about 1200 BC.

When Greeks, following the route of Alexander the Great, came into this region about the first century A.D., they began to record their observations about the people, the geography and the flora and fauna.  They found first in Bactria a Greco-Persian people speaking a language that had many of the words and sounds of their own Koine Greek language, which is the language of the Christian Bible, but is now passed out of popular usage.  From these people there descended a type that still exists.  They have the Greco Persian complexion and body structure.   And their Dari language is an Indo-European language related in sentence structure to the French language.  For the two years I lived in Afghanistan, the location of Bactria, I was able to manage a bit of everyday life in Dari.  It is quite beautiful when spoken or when written in the Arabic alphabet.

But back now to the European face and body that we see in the grave uncovered in very recent decades  among a group of bodies of this type and types mixed with the Mongol Chinese.  These are the ones that were supposed by David W. Anthony, author of The Wheel, the Horse and Language,  to have come through the Tian Shan range from the Northern Steppes into Mongolia and up the Yellow River to the Tarim Basin.  They too were found by the first century A.D. Greek travelers and were called the Tocharians.  Their language could be recognized to have much in common with the Greek language of the time, but not as understandable as the Bactrian language spoken by the Indo-European type across the Pamir range from the Tarim Basin.

Several archeologists and linguists place the Tarim Basin European types within the same group of wanderers as the Bactrians, except that they did not go to Bactria.  They ended up in the area of Swat which is located now within the country of Pakistan.   There they developed a more Hindu (Indian) culture than a Zoroastrian culture (Persian).  And then after a time, the Tocharians went North over the Himalayas and into what is now the Xinjiang autonomous region of China.  The Tocharians there became Buddhist, moving away from the Hindi culture as missionary monks came over the Himalayas from India where Buddhism was born.

All these Greco-Indo-Persians shared many similarities in the practices and symbols of their habitations as Anatolian Greeks, as Kerman Desert Persians, as the Margiana Persians, as the Bactrian Greco-Persians, and the Tocharians.  We have to remind ourselves here that the Greeks in that area of that time would have resembled the archaic and classic Greek types, not most of the modern Greeks.  They would have appeared more like somewhat paler modern Persians. But it is their culture that is the important and interesting part of their heritage, not their genetics.  Nevertheless, their remains have been tested and found naturally to be mixed with the people they emigrated into from their steppe origins.  But the tests also showed that the European genes showed up very often in their samples.

As an almost final note, we acknowledge that by the time Greek travelers came through, the Tocharians from the Tarim Basin on the East side of the Pamir range had become rulers over Bactria and the Xinjiang region.  They had established what is known to history as the Kushan Dynasty.

Ending here, I will only add that I collected several artifacts from Kabul merchants who sold the findings from unofficial excavations of the ruins of Bactria.  Contact me privately by using the private message form above. 

Travel, Trade and inter-Cultural Exchange

Reviewing and continuing from my last post, and still based on David Anthony's work The Horse, the Wheel and Language, we can explore a bit deeper into the economic activity along the route taken by the Bactrians from the steppe region north of the Black Sea and Caspian Sea to a settlement that became a kingdom in Bactria at the foot of the Pamir mountains along the Amu Darya.

By 3,500 B.C., trade routes were being blazed by early traders that instigated the movement toward the global village in which we live today.  Material goods were carried by the merchants and were acquired by different settlements, even different cultures, along the length of the route.  This development makes it much more difficult to assign the artifacts discovered in excavated ancient sites to one culture rather than the other.  But if a group of sites yield great amounts of a certain type of goods and the technology for making those goods is also found on the site, it is assumed that the complex of settlements using that type of goods to a great extent were in close cultural association.  They constitute an ethnic group with similar if not identical beliefs, rituals, societal organization and burial customs.

This is my brief explanation of how the Bactria-Margiana Archeological Complex is identified.  After all, the people in those regions left no written records until much later in their history.  The buildings, housewares, ritual objects and personal accessories were buried in the ruins of a community or in the ancient burial grounds.  However, we remind ourselves that the trade route even at this time allowed the exchange of material goods and language, and from a shared language come the metaphysical assumptions rooted in the language.   These exchanges -- at least of the material goods -- were happening in places as distant from each other as Ur in Chaldea, Bogazkoy in Anatolia, Mohenjo Doro in the Indus Valley Bactria along the Amu Darya and Kashgar in Western China.

The Bactria-Margiana culture became influential in the Bronze Age, beginning around 2,000 - 2,500 B.C., through the tin trade.  Tin mines were active in Anatolia and in the foothills of the Pamir mountains, an offshoot from the West end of the Himalayas.  The mine lay between Bactria and Kashgar, just over the Pamir in what is now the northwest region of China.  Naturally, merchants followed the even more ancient path of the migrating people of the Neolithic through the mountain pass and then the tin was passed along to various cultures within the huge geographic area now known as China.

Tin was a desired commodity because it is a necessary ingredient of true bronze and it was bronze that made tools tough enough and sharp enough to work stone into ritual vessels, personal ornaments that both decorated the household or person and stored wealth and therefore could be exchanged for other necessities.  Bronze tools and weapons empowered the user in work and in hunting or fighting.  Bronze tools held a point and a sharp edge longer than the former copper tools had done.  Bronze as well as copper could be cast in stone molds to form small copper and bronze seals or ritual and household vessels.

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Jade workers in settlements along the eastern part of this trade route were no doubt eager to turn in their bamboo, stone and bone tools for bronze tools.  Here is a jade item at least several centuries old, if not a few thousand, on which you can see what I think are the irregular diagonal traces of a hand saw that was not totally abraded to a smooth surface.  Granted the saw could have been an iron or steel saw if the piece is only several hundred years old.

My next blog entry will continue this brief and casual review of the cultural background and the influence of the ancient Bactria-Margiana people. 

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