Henning, First Indo-European

THE FIRST INDO-EUROPEANS IN HISTORY
1
W.B. HENNING f
One of the Indo-European tribes that sought a home in Asia is distinguished
from all others by its apparent lack of energy and vitality: that is the tribe
whose descendants spoke the languages known as "Tokharian". By nature
isolationist, they chose to make permanent settlements in a remote region in
the heart of Central Asia - a chain of oases along the northern edge of the
Great Desert of Chinese Turkestan, at the foot of the T'ien-shan mountains
for which there was little or no competition. When the Chinese first en-
countered this tribe in the 1st century B.C., they did not even recognize it as
constituting a distinct ethnic unit and failed to give it a name, such as they
had for their neighbors to the North and East. Even today, after the enor-
mous growth of our knowledge of Central Asian history in this century, we
still have no name for this tribe and even its linguistic designation "Tokharian"
is in dispute. In order to avoid confusion, I will not refer to "the Tokharians"
but to "the speakers of Tokharian".
We should never have so much as heard of the existence of these speakers
of Tokharian if Buddhism had not flooded Central Asia with its missionaries,
and succeeded in a wholesale conversion of the peoples in the early centuries
A.D. Buddhist works were translated into the local languages and a Tokharian
literature arose, divided into two dialects: known unofficially as "Tokharian
A" and "Tokharian B". The first has been claimed as the eastern dialect,
spoken in Qarasar (called Argi
2
in ancient times) and perhaps also in the ad-
joining oasis of Turfan; the second, as the language of the western kingdom of
Kuc (formerly known as Kuci). However, some scholars regard Tokharian
as the language of the entire area and Tokharian A as an extinct literary
language of uncertain geographical designation. Once established, the Tokhar-
ian literary language was naturally used for general purposes, such as business
documents and monastery records. Comparatively little of this material has
come down to us. The greater part of the surviving material is Buddhist
literature translated from Sanskrit and other languages. No precise dates
can be given for either the beginning or the end of Tokharian literature;
the dates usually given are "about A. D. 500 to 700" or "about 500 to 800".
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216
At any rate, no one believes that the literary languages continued in use long
after about A. D. 800, and we have no cause for assuming that the spoken
languages survived the death of the written forms for any length of time.
The disappearance of Tokharian was not in any sense the result of a
spectacular political upheaval. There was no desperate but glorious struggle to
preserve the national entity nothing of the sort. Indeed, nothing particular
happened: Tokharian just faded away. As unnoticeably as they had crept onto
the scene of history, so the speakers of this language group slipped away, and
no one even noticed their absence.
The contrast with the other Indo-European nations is obvious. They
showed vigor and enterprise, conquered vast and fruitful lands, were resilient
in adversity. If they perished, as did the early invaders of Asia Minor, they
perished because they were exterminated in a great catastrophe, after having
exhausted their strength in centuries of war. Other small groups did not give
way so readily to pressure by neighboring populations, such as doubtless
contributed to the gradual extinction of the speakers of Tokharian. The
Armenians, for example, who have been conquered, subdued, decimated, and
massacred by more powerful neighbors time and again, nevertheless have
contrived to exist till the present day.
Such considerations, it seems to me, make it advisable to regard the speakers
of Tokharian as a mere defeated remnant, an enfeebled splinter of a once large
and powerful nation that like its brethren went through the usual phases of war,
adventure, and conquest, but ultimately proved unsuccessful. If this supposition
holds, there is a good chance that the activities of this lost nation will have
impinged on one or another of the great civilizations of antiquity, and will
therefore be recorded in our historical material; it is the object of this paper
to trace the early history of that long extinct nation (which provisionally we
shall call the "Proto-Tokharians").
In order to approach the problem at all, we shall have to make somewhat
generous assumptions at the outset, which will subsequently be tested against
the records of actual events; naturally, I shall pass by in silence approaches
that have proved useless. There are three basic assumptions we need regarding:
first, the number of the "Proto-Tokharians", second, the place of their
appearance; and third, the time of their appearance.
First: their number. Tokharian is linguistically isolated, it has no close
relatives and is therefore the sole survivor of a language-group on a par with e.g.
Germanic or Indo-Iranian. This circumstance renders it probable that the
speakers of this language-group were not less numerous than the speakers
of some of those other groups. Or positively expressed, the Proto-Tokharians
constituted a large and populous nation, divided into numerous tribes speaking
divergent dialects.
217
Second: the place of their appearance. This is easily determined. All other
Indo-Europeans of Asia, sooner or later, come within the view of the civiliza-
tions emanating from Babylonia. There is no good reason for excepting the
Proto-Tokharians from the common fate: they will have made their debut
somewhere in the Near and Middle East.
Third: the time of their appearance. The assumption to be made is inevitably
contentious. Comparativists have asserted that, in spite of its late appearance,
Tokharian is a relatively archaic form of Indo-European.
3
This claim implies
that the speakers of this group separated from their Indo-European brethren
at a comparatively early date. They should accordingly have set out on their
migrations rather early, and should have appeared within the Babylonian
sphere of influence also rather early. Earlier, at any rate, than the Indo-
Iranians, who spoke a highly developed (therefore probably later) form of
Indo-European. Moreover, as some of the Indo-Iranians after their division
into Iranians and Indo-Aryans
4
appeared in Mesopotamia about 1500 B.C.,
we should expect the Proto-Tokharians about 2000 B. C. or even earlier.
If, armed with these assumptions as our working hypothesis, we look
through the pages of history, we find one nation one nation only that
perfectly fulfills all three conditions, which, therefore, entitles us to recognize
it as the "Proto-Tokharians". Its name was Guti\ the initial is also spelled
with q (a voiceless back velar or pharyngal), but the spelling with g is the
original one. The closing -i is part of the name, for the Akkadian case-endings
are added to it, nom. Gutium etc. Guti (or Gutium, as some scholars prefer)
was valid for the nation, considered as an entity, but also for the territory it
occupied. It persisted as a geographical term long after the nation itself had
disappeared. Such multiple acceptance of a national name was common in
antiquity; for example, Prsa meant the Persian nation, a man belonging to it,
the country inhabited by it, and the capital of that country four different
meanings expressed by one and the same word, without a change in its gramma-
tical status.
The Guti appeared towards the end of the first Semitic dynasty ruling over
Babylonia, the dynasty of Agade (Akkad), in the reign of Narm-Sin, one of
the great conquerors in Babylonian history. He struggled to secure the northern
limits of the Babylonian plain, the mountainous country on the border of
present-day Persia. One suspects that the reason, or at any rate a reason, for his
efforts in that direction was pressure caused by the influx of new tribes. After
a long rule (of 37 years), in the course of which he carried the power of Babylon
far beyond the limits attained by his predecessors, he suffered a great defeat at
the hands of the Guti, who thereupon conquered the whole of Babylonia and
kept it in subjection for a hundred years.
The mere fact that the great Naram-Sin, at the height of his powers, could
218
be overthrown by this previously unknown nation, is a measure of its vigor
and freshness. At least, it has been widely believed that the end of Narm-Sin
was due to the Guti.
5
There is a direct statement to that effect in a latish text,
the "Weidner Chronicle", which tells of the wrath of God Marduk against
Narm-Sin:
For the second time he [Marduk] set against him the hordes of Gutium, and gave his
kingship away to the hordes of Gutium. The Gutium, sullen fellows who do not know
the fear of God, who do not know how to apply the rules and precepts of the cult
properly, etc.6
There are, however, some difficulties which I need not go into; many of these
are caused by the habit of Babylonian chronologers of treating contempora-
neous kings or dynasties as successive to each other.
A difficulty that deserves mentioning is the isolated appearance of Gutium
in a passage relating to far earlier times a story about a legendary prehistoric
king, Lugal-anni-mundu by name. In it he is credited with having conquered
many countries, among them Gutium. The list of these countries clearly
bespeaks its late origin. Thus the text has been generally and rightly regarded
as an item of mythology rather than history.
7
The invasion of the Guti, to whom the Babylonians referred in terms
associated with the way in which civilized nations talked of obnoxious
nomadic invaders all the world over, caused a setback to the development of
Babylonian civilization. Not surprisingly, there are not many records from
the time of Guti rule, so that it becomes difficult to form a clear idea of the
actual conditions.
The length of the period of Guti domination (which had "caused . . . long
grass to grow on the highways of the land")
8
has been calculated as 91 years
by J acobsen, in his edition of the Sumerian kinglist, but as 124 or 125 years
in some of his sources; at any rate, it lasted for a considerable time. At the
end of the period, the last king of the Guti, Tirigan, was overthrown and
killed by Utu-hegal, the ruler of Uruk, who characterized Gutium as:
a viper of the hills, an enemy of the gods, who had carried the kingship of Sumer off to
the mountains, who had filled Sumer with evil. 9
These words, from an inscription by Utu-hegal, show already clearly that the
Guti never truly settled in Babylonia, but merely exploited and gradually
ruined that country.
As yet I have carefully avoided stating an absolute date for the events
sketched here. The reason for this reticence is the general uncertainty of all
219
dates in the early history of Babylonia. While there is a good system of
relative chronology, in absolute terms its points are shifted every few years,
as a rule in a downward direction. It would be consonant with present-day
opinion if we assumed that the time of Guti rule centered about the year
2100 B.C.10
The Guti descended upon Babylonia from the hills of Western Persia.
Their name remained attached to a specific district, the neighborhood of the
Lower Zb, which may thus be presumed to have formed their headquarters
during their rule of the lowlands. That they had freshly arrived there within
the life-time of Narm-Sin seems very probable. Actually, the opinion that
they were then recent intruders into the scene of the Middle East has enjoyed
some support from the late German Assyriologist A. Ungnad, a fact that is
particularly valuable here because that eminent scholar was reluctant to admit
any such intrusions. His work on Subartu, published in Berlin in 1936, is a
most useful and highly competent guide in the type of problem that concerns
us here. Regrettably it is marred by racist prejudices, such as one associates
with the time and place of its publication.
Ungnad
11
thought it possible that the place of ultimate origin of the Guti
was somewhere in "the East" (by which he meant Russian Turkestan); there
is no actual evidence in favor of such a hypothesis. When one considers the
location of the headquarters of that nation, one may be more readily inclined
to believe that it had arrived by way of the Caucasus. Such an assumption
finds some support in a parallel situation of later history.
If we regard the Guti as "Proto-Tokharians", their nearest relatives among
the Indo-Europeans would be the Hittite nations of Asia Mi norl 2
w
ho (so the
archaeologists insist) had reached their historic settlements through the
Caucasus. The distribution of the Guti at the Lower Zb and the Hittites
(et al.) in Asia Minor recalls the outcome of a Vlkerwanderung at the end
of the 8th century. At that time two savage nations of northern barbarians,
the Kimmerians and the Scythians, invaded the Near East. Both emerged from
Southern Russia, and both passed through the Caucasus. The Kimmerians
(to believe Herodotus) crossed that mountain range by the central pass, the
"Gate of the Alans", and ultimately flooded all Asia Minor. The Scythians
followed the eastern passage, the Pass of Derbend, on the shores of the
Caspian Sea, brought ruin on Media, and ended up not far from the place
which had once been the headquarters of the Guti. As such tribal movements
are apt to take the same direction and follow the same routes, it is probable
that the Guti, too, had come from Southern Russia through the Pass of
Derbend.
After their ultimate defeat in Babylonia, the Guti withdrew from the scene.
A small remnant, perhaps a part of the nation that had adopted more settled
220
habits, was left behind in the Lower Zb region. It is mentioned from time
to time in later centuries as one of those noisome hill tribes on the northern
frontier, that need to be punished by a military expedition. However, that
remnant no longer constituted a serious danger: evidently, the bulk of the
powerful Guti had departed, gone beyond the horizon of the Babylonian
observers.
Barbarous nomadic invaders have frequently adopted a different course.
They often settled among their new subjects, conceived a liking for the gifts
of civilization, dispersed, intermarried, gradually merged in the population,
and with their distinctiveness lost their energy and warlike habits. The Guti,
however, never settled down in Babylonia, they remained barbarians, and
preserved their identity as well as their mobility. Hence, when conditions
turned adverse, they were still capable of breaking up camp and setting out
on the road to fresh worlds to conquer and despoil.
13
There is no need for us to follow the fate of the remnant Guti in the
Persian foothills. A single fact suffices to illuminate the change in their
position: Gutians, in succeeding centuries, were apt to figure as merchandise
in the slave market. Incidentally, the trade in Guti slaves may supply a pointer
to their having been physically distinct from the general run of people in
Babylonia. However, it depends on the interpretation of a single word,
14
and
as its meaning has been disputed, it may be wiser not to rely on it. It is in any
case not seriously in doubt that the Guti differed ethnically from the people
of the lowlands. A direct statement by the great Babylonian king Hammurapi,
made in describing his conquest of the border nations, indicates that their
languages differed from those familiar to him: "whose hills are distant and
whose language is queer".
15
Hammurapi, in the inscription just quoted, names four such border-nations.
The first has been restored as "Elam", but this is uncertain. The others are
Gutium, Subartu, and Tukris. Leaving aside Subartu (the subject of Ungnad's
book cited above), we find the Guti here associated with the Tukris, a nation
comparatively rarely mentioned, whose settlements (it seems) adjoined the
Guti territory in the east or south-east. As with the Guti, there is an old refer-
ence to their having been in Western Persia in remote antiquity, in a story from
Boghazky about a prehistoric Elamite king (Autaluma), in which a king of
TukriS, Kiklipatalli,
16
is mentioned; it has been generally accepted as a further
instance of mythical history. If we leave aside that isolated reference, the
TukriS would appear to have been contemporaneous with their Guti neighbors.
The sibilant at the end of the name is presumably an indigenous case-ending,
so that it is actually Tukri. For reasons that will become clear later, I assume
that Tukri and Guti were two closely allied brother nations that came together
to Western Persia and who left it together shortly before the end of the third
221
millennium.
Where did they go from Persia? The first part of this paper has already in-
dicated how I propose to answer that question: they migrated to the heart
of Asia, and there took over huge territories, including most of Chinese
Turkestan, a portion of China proper, and a part of Kan-su to the west of the
Huang-ho. Some of their tribes settled in permanent habitations, others clung
to the nomadic life. Their dispersal over a very large area loosened the bonds
between them, so that, two thousand years or so later, the various sections
were no longer aware that they shared a common ancestry. Their languages,
after so great a lapse of time, very likely had become mutually unintelligible.
This is the heart of the theory that I wish to propound. Possibly the
archaeologists may welcome a theory that involves a considerable movement
of people from Persia to the limits of China as early as the close of the third
millennium B. C. Similarities in various artifacts and in the ornamentation of
pottery of prehistoric Persia and Ancient China have been pointed out long
ago. They formed the principal subject of Ernst Herzfeld's last important
work, Iran in the Ancient East. After studying the comparative material
illustrated in that volume, even one who cannot claim to be an archaeologist
is driven to assert that some of the similarities are so remarkable, in their
details and complexities, that independence is impossible. Actually, the
Tokharians themselves have been mentioned as the agents of communication
here, but on the basis of a different, more vague, and less satisfactory historical
construction.
17
Before turning to the settled sector of the invaders of Central Asia, we
shall deal with their nomadic brethren, who continued to pursue the way of
life of the Persian Guti and therefore were the appropriate vessels of the
national spirit. The nomads went furthest to the East and set up a powerful
empire, which centered upon Western Kan-su. There they came under the
observation of the Chinese, who referred to them by their old national name,
as Guti. The two characters which were fixed as standard orthographs for
that name shortly before 200 B. C. are pronounced as Ye-chih in modern
Mandarin.
All students of Ancient Chinese history are familiar with the Ye-chih,
and know what a desperate search there has been for the Western equivalent
of that name; that such an equivalent existed has been taken for granted, and
rightly so. The search has produced so many equations that it is scarcely
reasonable to propose a new one, yet all of them have been found wanting
in one particular or another. Some differences between the Chinese form and
the proposed Western equivalent were glossed over. In this respect, at least,
our new equation is preferable to all others: Guti and Ye-chih are perfect
equivalents.
222
In the latest edition of his dictionary,
18
Karlgren gives ngiwOt-ts'ie as the
Middle Chinese pronunciation of Ye-chih ( ^ ) and *ngiwt-tie(g)
as the corresponding Old Chinese form. Middle Chinese means A. D. 600,
while Old Chinese is defined by Karlgren as "early Chou", which may mean
1000 B. C. or a little later. What we need to know is the pronounciation
current when the orthography of the foreign name was established, i. e. about
200 B. C., and as that point in time bisects the years between the dates set
for Old and Middle Chinese, the appropriate pronunciation may be assumed
to have been intermediary between the two forms supplied.
In the first syllable (which is the crucial one), there is virtually no difference,
so that we may adopt either form. In the second syllable, the closings is be-
lieved to have disappeared long before 200 B. C., and the difference in its
initial, from palatal f 'to palatal affricate, is very slight. If the name
represents foreign Guti, one would assume that its t had been assibilated or
palatalized in front of i, a requirement that incidentally is in consonance with
the surviving Tokharian languages in both of which t has turned into c before i.
Further remarks are necessary on the first syllable. In Middle Chinese
representations of foreign words, an initial nasal may render a foreign voiced
stop as well as a nasal and a closing t may represent a foreign -r as well as a
dental; groups of internal sonants have to be simplified. Hence the regular
Central Asian equivalent of the first syllable is gwar or gur in medieval times.
19
In antiquity, however, final -t was never used for -r, so that the form appropriate
for about 200 B. C. would begwat or gut for the first syllable, gwat-fi or
gut-t'i for the whole name. This agrees well enough with Guti, especially if we
allow for the tendency to palatalization mentioned above. Such a reconstruc-
tion has indeed been made by none other than Bernhard Karlgren, the
eminent Swedish Sinologist, who has contributed more than any other
scholar to the elucidation of ancient Chinese phonology. In a statement
supplied to Sten Konow at his request, Karlgren postulated foreign gwat/gwot
or gat I got or gut etc. +ti (or possibly a? ) etc.
20
It may be possible to decide which of these variants is the correct one.
Considerable efforts have been made to trace references to the Ye-chih in
such Chinese sources as are earlier in origin than the end of the 3rd century.
The various names claimed as attributable have been fully discussed by the
late G. Haloun in his admirable article, Zur e-tsi-Frage.
21
An assured form
of the name, found from the 4th century onwards, is Y-chih
22
which
yields Old Chinese*ngiu-tie(g)\ it surely indicates that the common spelling
should be interpreted as Gu(t)-t'i rather than Gwat-.
There is no need to discuss all the identifications that have hitherto been
advanced for Ye-chih, but a few remarks on recent proposals may not be
superfluous. First, the identification made by Haloun. I find myself at vari-
223
ance with the conclusions presented by him in his article on the Ye-chih
problem. Influenced by the work of Tibeto-Burman-Chinese comparative
philology, he posited a form: ? qiwt'ia or ? zqiwat-t'ia, with reservations
about the initial to be assumed. That form, he suggested, might represent
foreign *zgufa(ka) which should be the name of the Scythians.
This opinion is faced by difficulties in both directions. On the Chinese side,
the initial sibilant (which would be essential to the proposal) is uncertainly
grounded; it rests on a comparison with Tibetan (-ba) 'moon'. If it once
existed, one may well doubt that it still existed as late as 200 B. C.; indeed,
Haloun himself placed two asterisks before the form with z-. On the Western
side, the name of the Scythians is found only in Greek ( L)\ Akkadian
(asguzai) and Biblical Hebrew (TJDtfX ). Its initial was sk, not zg\ that at
least is certain. The nature of the third consonant cannot be determined
satisfactorily; there is no way to bridge the gap between the Greek aspirate
t and the Akkadian-Hebrew voiced sibilant; *zgufa is thus unacceptable.
The other explanation to which I should like to draw attention is that
advanced by E. G. Pulleyblank in the course of his recent study on the
reconstruction of Old Chinese.
23
The western equivalent favored by
Pulleyblank is , a tribal name mentioned but once in Greek literature,
in Ptolemy's Geography (vi 12 f 4). This comparison was made first by
Marquart (in 1901), who boldly identified with " (of Strabo) and
Asiani (of Trogus Pompejus) and (of Strabo) which he emended
into .
24
A striking feature in the equation as formulated by Pulley-
blank is the suggestion that of the first syllable of Ye-chih both the initial
velar and the central -u/w- can be disregarded, so that ye may represent
foreign (at. This opinion contrasts with that expressed by Karlgren, who
regarded precisely these two elements as the essence of that syllable. In
support of his case Pulleyblank adduces two or three other foreign names
in Chinese garb, but none of the equations seems entirely convincing.
25
A possible pointer to the value to be attached to an initial velar nasal may be
seen in the careful manner in which foreigners represented that Chinese sound;
there is an ancient example of it in the Sogdian rendering of the name of the
city of Yeh % , once pronounced as qiop: here the Sogdians wrote 'nkp-,
using three of their letters to reproduce the nasal.
26
To return now to the history of the Ye-chih. According to Haloun,
references to them may be traced as far back as the 7th century; the more
remote in time, the more vague and the less sharply defined they become,
until they cease altogether. Uncertainty does not allow us to infer that the
Ye-chih had not arrived yet, but it may indicate that the western approaches
were beyond the horizon of the Chinese in great antiquity. While we cannot
224
tell when the Ye-cht reached Kan-su, we can tell when they left it. Here for
once history truly repeats itself.
After having enjoyed the fruits of their empire for a long period, the Ye-
chih were overthrown by the rising power of theHsiung-nu in the first half
of the second century B.C. Their last king was killed and the main body of
the nation, still nomadic and mobile, turned its back upon civilization, broke
up camp and departed seeking fresh pastures. However, they left behind
several small groups that had settled in the mountains fringing the southern
edge of Kan-su. The Chinese named those that departed the "Great Ye-chih"
those that stayed the "Little Ye-chih".
When the Great Ye-chih withdrew, they set out in the general direction
of Persia. One might be inclined to say that they retraced their steps. Possibly
a dim memory had been preserved among them of a pleasant land far to the
West whence their ancestors had come. However, conditions had greatly
changed and the renewed migration never reached as far as Persia. Some 30
or 40 years later it came to a halt in Bactria, the northern part of present-day
Afghanistan. Here theGreat Ye-chih established a new empire (which was to
be their last), dominated the surrounding countries and generally made a
nuisance of themselves to their neighbors.
We come now to a remarkable circumstance. While the Chinese continue
to call that nation Ye-chih or more precisely Great Ye-chih, their new
neighbors use an altogether different name: , i.e. 'Tokharian'. Indians,
Persians, Sogdians, Greeks - everybody called the Ye-chih by this new name,
and Bactria itself came to be known as Toxristn 'land of the Tokharians'.
It is as if that nation had changed its name on the way, had left the fringes
of China as Ye-chih and arrived in Bactria as Tokharians. However, further
investigation has shown that the seemingly new name was used for theYe-
chih already in their old home in Kan-su. The remnant "Little Ye-chih"
there was also known as (Tuxr). The Tibetans spoke of theThod-kar
living in the north-eastern corner of their country; and through the silk-trade
various related forms (the town , the tribe , the mountain
Qayaopov ) reached the pages of Ptolemy's Geography. Because of
such evidence it has long been recognized that the Ye-chih and the
Tokharians, in both the East and the West, must have been virtually identical.
In order to account for the origin of the double name, I would propose
having recourse to the ancient Tukri. I have postulated above that theGuti
and the Tukri, two brother nations, set out from Persia together in the
distant past. Let us assume that these two groups fused in the course of the
centuries into a new whole, which could claim either this or that name. As
some two thousand years have elapsed, we should not be unduly surprised at
the slight alteration in form of the ancient name Tukri. Actually, all the new
225
forms associated with the Ye-chih ( , Qayovp-, -, , Tsywr,
Tukhr-) have preserved the consonantal skeleton (dental +velar +r) and the
old u-sonant appears in every specimen of the name.
Powerful support for the opinion expressed in the preceding paragraph is
supplied by the nomenclature attached to the "speakers of the Tokharian
languages", the groups settled at the foot of the T'ien-shan mountains, which
we considered first and to which we now return in our concluding argument.
It will be recalled that there were two dialects, "Tokharian A" in the East,
"Tokharian B" in the West (in the kingdom of Kuci). 27 It was because of the
eastern dialect that the name "Tokharian" has been introduced for these
languages by modern scholars. In a bilingual text, preserved in Tokharian A
and in Uy7ur Turkish, the name of the other language was stated to be Tuyri
in the Turkish version. That formTuyri (twyry) was wrongly vocalized and
regarded as representing the Tokharian name familiar from the story of the
Ye-chih. Strictly speaking, the appellation "Tokharian" for these
languages is erroneous.
There can hardly be any doubt now that Tuyri is the same name as ancient
Tukri-s The form is wonderfully well preserved, even including the stem-
vowel -i, the only difference being a slight alteration in the quality of the
second consonant.
More than a quarter of a century has passed since I published an article
28
in which I made an effort to establish Tuyri as the correct pronunciation and
argued that at the time when it was in use (about A. D. 700) it differed
substantially from the Tokharian name (Tu\r), indeed sufficiently so to
exclude confusion. While this argument has been widely accepted, I have
sometimes been credited also with proving that the two names, Tuyri and
Tuxr, had no connection with one another. This was never my intention.
On the contrary, I regard it as certain that both derive from one and the same
prototype, which we can now identify as ancient Tukri.
Once the name of the Tukri is found to be preserved for the speakers of
the Tokharian languages, we are bound to ask whether the name of their twin,
theGuti, has also survived in the same area. In order to arrive at an answer,
we should consider the changes that Guti would have undergone if it had
been a Tokharian word. It is well established that g before u becomes
k in either Tokharian dialect, and t beforei 29 becomes c: therefore Guti
should have becomeKuci. This we know is the name of the western part of
the Tokharian language area, the home of Tokharian B.
It would be tempting to infer that Tokharian B, the language of Kuci,
continued the language of theGuti, while Tokharian A, named Tuyri,
continued the language of the Tukri. This would be a neat solution, but one
I fear would be too simple. In fact, Tuyri occurs also as a political and
226
geographical term, and so used serves to cover the whole area of Tokharian
speech. There are references to the "Four Tuyri Land", which term apparently
designates the four kingdoms of (1 )Kuci in the west, (2) Argi/Qarasahr in the
east, (3) Turfan in the north-east, and (4) the district to the north of Turfan,
centering upon Bisbaliq. It seems also, that Kuci once referred to the whole
area and was confined to the western kingdom only by later political develop-
ment. There is an admittedly dubious mention of a country called "the four
Kucis",3 possibly an alternative term for "the four Tuyri Land". The two
states in the North-East, which were the first to be abandoned to Turkish
infiltration, used to be known to the Chinese as "Anterior *Kiisi" and
"Posterior *Kiisi", which name ( . Chin, kiwo-si, Anc. Chin. *kjp-s{ (rj)
is likely to constitute a dialect form of Kuci.H
For long it was not known what form the nameKuci assumed in either of
the Tokharian languages. Recently, however, Professor Werner Winter discovered
the name in an unpublished Kuchean document, in the guise of k
u
sinne-, it
accompanies forms of orotstse walo 'great king'.
32
In the adjective, "of Kuci",
the first syllable has been reduced through the progression of the stress accent
and the second consonant has turned into a palatal sibilant through contact
with the initial. The resulting form closely resembles the above-mentioned
name of the North-Eastern kingdoms. It also resembles the long-known medie-
val Turkish name of Kuci,
33
i. e. Ksn .
34
There are thus strong arguments in favor of the assumption that the names
Kuci and Tuyri once embraced the whole of the speakers of the Tokharian
languages.35 This is in perfect consonance with the observations made previously
about the Ye-chih or Toyr and equally reflects the fusion of the twin
nations, the Guti and the Tukri. If they were indeed the Proto-Tokharians,
as I have endeavored to argue in this paper, they could claim to be the first
Indo-Europeans in history; for their appearance in Persia precedes the arrival
of the Hittite nations in Asia Minor.
APPENDIX
Linguistic evidence in support of identifying the Guti (and Tukris) with the
Proto-Tokharians can hardly be expected; for virtually nothing is known of
their language. Yet the personal names, especially those of the Guti kings, may
supply some hints.
J acobsen, Sum. King-List, 207 n. 40, wrote "that (ejs is a grammatical
ending is suggested by the frequency with which it occurs at the end of Gutian
proper names; cf. Inimabak-es, Inkisu-(e)s, Igesau- (e)s, andIarlaga-(e)s". Or,
one might suggest, -s by itself was such an ending, presumably of the Nom. Sg.
227
masc. (=I.-. -s), there being no need to change the actual In-ki-sus (var. In-
gi4-sus ;J acobsen 118-19, line 30), I-ge4-es-a-us (line 35), la-ar-la-ga-as (line
32 var.) from -us and -as into -u-(e)s, -a-(e)s; cf. also Tukri-s explained above.
The names thus reveal the existence of different types of vocalic stems, ending
in a/e, i, and u.
Ungnad, Subartu, 83 n. 2, wrote about one A-ra-tja-ab, an enemy of
Ammiditana, the great-grandson of Hammurapi, in these terms: "Sein Name
ist jedenfalls nicht indogermanisch Vielmehr ist ein Zusammenhang
mit gutischen Namen unabweisbar; vgl. Lasirab . .. ,Nikillagab,Jarlagab (3.
bzw. 8. Knig des Reiches von Gutium),Jakulaba . . . ,Jadihab . . . ". Instead
of Lasirab {La-si? -ra? -ab) Gelb proposed and J acobsen (118-19, line 41)
accepted Laerab\ and instead of Nikillagab J acobsen (line 31) read Sarlagab
{Sr-lagab-la-gab, var. z-ar-la-ga-ba). This Sarlagab J acobsen, p. 207, compared
with Sarlag (Sar-la-ag), the name of a Guti king not otherwise included in the
King List; assuming that one and the same ruler was meant to be recognized
"in the name Sarlag an abbreviated form of this Sarlagab". We might prefer
to invert that statement and regard Sarlag as the stem, Sarlagab as a form
lengthened by a declensional ending. That -ab was such an ending, is strongly
suggested by the existence of Iarlagab (Ia-ar-la-gab, line 36, cf. 38) by the side
of Iarlagas. If the latter constituted the nominative in the Guti language, it is
probable that the frequent forms in -ab will have been genitives; for in the
kind of sentence from which foreigners could have abstracted the forms of
names (e. g. "king X. the son of king Y. orders .. .") nominatives and genitives
will have predominated. Incidentally, A-ra-1ja-ab, far from being "jedenfalls
nicht indogermanisch", is now seen to belong to A-ra-hu, Old Pers. Araxa, in
the inscr. of Bisitun, an Armenian acc. to Darius.
Beside Iarlagas and Iarlagab there is a cognate name which occurs as
la-ar-la-ga-an =larlagan outside the King List, see J acobsen p. 150 . 34, who
proposed to identify it with [i? \-ar-la-ga-an-da, King List line 47 (p. 12021);
according to J acobsen we have here two different ways of spelling *Iarlagand.
One ventures to suggest that -an (or possibly -and) constituted a further
declensional ending; cf. also Tirigan, the name of the last Guti king. In view of
the poverty of the Sumerian phonemic system and the wealth in consonants
of the more ancient I.-E. languages, it is conceivable that 5- and I- in Sarlag(ab)
and Iarlagfab) are merely different approximations to a consonant alien to
Sumerian (a palatal sibilant? ).
If indeed the royal names contain various case-forms, a comparison with
the actual Tokharian case-system is suggestive:
228
Guti
Stem Sarlag
TokharianA
Stem kssi risak tsopats klyom
Nom. larlagas Nom. 'teacher' 'saint' 'great' 'noble'
Gen. Iarlagab Gen. ks(si)yp risakyp tsoptsap klyomntap
t
Iarlagan(d) Obi. kssim risakm tsopatsm klyomnt
It should be explained that in Tokharian (1) final I. E. -s had long been lost,
so that stem and nominative coincided; (2) voiced consonants did not exist,
hence earlier -b necessarily became -p\ and (3) final -n is expressed as -m.
The Tokharian forms quoted here in comparison are not selected at random
from a vast repertory, but constitute the basic forms (the whole of the
"primary" declension) of the appropriate class of nouns, those designating
"vernunftbegabte Wesen". The endings -()m of the oblique case (on which
the "secondary" declension is built) and -p/-yp of the genitive singular are
confined to nouns of that type.
36
The uniqueness of the ending of the
genitive within Indo-European enhances the probability that the agreement
owes nothing to coincidence.
1 The essentials of this paper were presented to the Collegium Orientologicum of
Berkeley as the First Lessing-Olschki Memorial Lecture in November, 1962.
2 The great antiquity of the name of this kingdom, which the Chinese rendered by Mi S
Yen-ch'i (reflecting *rgi, cf. BSOS. ix, 571), as shown by the Herodotean
, i.e. 'inhabitants of Argf (iv 23), is placed by some scholars a little to the
north of the true position (see e.g. Minns, Scythians and Greeks, 108 sqq.). Owing to its
legendary features, Herodotus' report has been given so little attention recently that the
equation has never been pointed out.
3 See E. Benveniste, "Tokharien et I ndo-Europeen", Festschrift H. Hirt, vol. 2, 227 sqq.
4 Recent work by P. Thieme, M. Mayrhofer, and others has increasingly made it likely
that the Indo-Iranian language that left traces in the ancient Near East was an archaic
form of the Indo-Aryan sub-group.
5 Cf. Th. J acobsen, The Sumerian King List (1939), p. 207. Recently, however, grave
doubt has been thrown on the involvement of Narm-Sin in the downfall of his realm,
see J .J . Finkelstein, "Mesopotamian Historiography", Proc. Am. Philos. S. 107 (1963),
461-472, esp. 466-69.
6 H.-G. Gterbock, "Die historische Tradition bei Babyloniern und Hethitern", Zeit-
schr. f . Assyriologie xlii (1934), 50 sqq.
7 Gterbock, loc. cit. , 40-47; A. Ungnad, Subartu (1936), 31, 36 sq. ; J acobsen, loc. cit. ,
102 sq. ; I. J . Gelb, Humans and Subarians (1944), 33 sq.
8 See J acobsen p. 138 n. 10a.
9 Ibid. , p. 139, n. 11.
10 P. van der Meer, The Chronology of Ancient Western Asia and Egypt2 (1954), p. 48,
gives 2122-2025.
NOTES
229
11 Ungnad, loc. cit. , 151 n. 5.
12 Benveniste, loc. cit. , 237.
13 A similar case of resilience and conquest of new lands may be seen in the Liao/Qara-
khitay, to whose elucidation the jubilary to which these pages are dedicated has made
a signal contribution (K. A. Wittfogel and Feng Chia-sheng, History of Chinese Society,
Liao, American Philosophical Society 1949).
14 namru, lit. 'light'. Cf. Ungnad 104 sq. ; Gelb 43; . . Speyer, JAOS. (1948), 12 sq. ;
J .J . Finkelstein, J. Cuneiform Stud., ix, 6; J. Near East Stud, xxi, 76.
15 Or 'intricate, complicated', see Ungnad 48 sq. ; Gelb 41; Speiser, loc. cit. , 7 a, 8 a,
9 b; Meissner-v. Soden, Akk. Hdwb. , 190 s. v. egru(m).
16 Ungnad, 18; Speiser, loc. cit. ,10 a, transcribes Kiklib-adal.
17 See O. Franke, Gesch. d. chines. Reiches, I, 44-47; iii, 27-30 (with references).
18 Grammata Serica Recensa (1957).
19 Tibetan transliteration hgvar, see F. W. Thomas, J RAS. (1927), 297; Tib. Lit. Texts
and Doc., ii, 295; the tribal name Kungur is written ^^ , cf. BSOS. , IX, 563 . 1
20 Kharoshthl Inscriptions (1929), lix sq.
21 ZDMG. 91 (1937), 243-318.
22 Ibid. , 301.
23 Asia Major, IX (1962), 93 sq., 106 sq., 109.
24 J . Marquart, Ernsahr, 206.
25 Thus the river (Middle Chin.) qei-la-gye-tei, whose name according to Pulleyblank,
loc. cit. , 94 sq. , "probably represents some form of the name Yaxartes", could more
fittingly be identified with the river of Gilgit (spelled gldagitti in Khotanese, see H. W.
Bailey, Acta Orientalia, XIV, 261 sq.), which was once considered the source of the
Indus. The Chinese text exemplifies the ancient theory that the great rivers of I nner
Asia had a common source, according to Hsan-tsang in the Dragon Lake in the Pamir
valley, the center oiJambudvTpa (Watters, II, 282 sq.). The rivers named are the Oxus,
the Tarim +Huang-ho, and the I ndus, but never the Yaxartes (Oxus and I ndus in
Western material, see J . Markwart, Wehrot und Arang, 94-114,132; Minorsky, Hudd,
72,210).
26 SeeBSOAS., XII, 609.
27 See above p. 1. On the problem of dialect variations within Tokh. B, see W. Winter,
JAOS. (1955), 216 sqq.;"Z 75 (1958), 234 sqq.
28 "Argi and the Tokharians", BSOS. IX, 545-571.
29 Latest discussion by W. Winter, Indogerm. Forsch, lxvii (1962), 16 sqq.
30 Trkische Turfan-Texte, II, 414 line 14 trt ks[n?], cf. . Gabain-Winter, . .
IX, 8 (the photograph, unless inadequate, hardly favors this restoration).
31 It is probably reflected by Ksy'n'k 'people of K.' in the Sogdian '%ist of Nations"
(my Sogdica, p. 8 line 15); another Ksy'n'k = 'people of Ksy = Kiss(=Sahrisabz)' occurs
in the Mugh documents, see Livshitz, Iuridicheskie dokumenti i pis'ma (1962), 65 n. 5,
220.
32 W. Winter, "Tocharians and Turks", in Aspects of Civilization, UAS. 23 (1963), 240
sq. , 249.
33 Known since the publication of Bretschneider's Mediaeval Researches. Uncertainty
about the identification is needlessly evinced in T.T. IX p. 8; Kashghari wrote in clear
terms: "Ksn, the frontier post of the Uy7urs, is the city (also) known as Kula".
34 According to Winter, loc. cit., Ksn cannot simply represent the adj. k
u
iifine,
because that would be spelled kwyi'n or kwySyn in Manichaean script, not Kwys'n (as it
actually is); Winter then prefers to combine Ksn with the name of the KuSan (strictly
KuSn), on the basis of an interesting historical construction. Yet if the objection lies in
the sibilant, would it not be equally strong in the case of KuSnl In the Kuchean text in
Manichaean script (T.T. IX both and s are normally rendered by !; Kwys'n, however, is
not a form transliterated ad hoc, but a long-established name familiar to every speaker of
Turkish. If *KSi ultimately reflects Guti, it may be difficult to deny that the name of
the KuSn of Bactria has a similar origin, yet there are difficulties in the way of such a
230
combination which make it advisable to leave the Bactrian form aside.
35 Winter, in his discussion of k
u
sinne, loc. cit. , has not accounted for k
u
canne, which
is also Kuchean and has also been claimed as the equivalent of Turkish Ksn. It was
discovered by V. S. Vorob 'ev-Desiatovskii, in a fragment of a Sanskrit-Kuchean
vocabulary, as the equivalent of Skt. tokharika. Unfortunately the acceptance of neither
term can be clearly determined. According to V. V. Ivanov, Probl. Vostokovedeniia 5
(1959), 188-190, both ="Tokharian B". See also H. W. Bailey, Adyar Library Bulletin
XXV, p. 4 . 1.
36 The Guti names do not show, in fact cannot show, whether the "secondary"
declension or the grammatical categorizing of nouns according to their meaning as
rational beings etc. existed already. These two features of Tokharian have been attributed
to the influence of a non-I.-E. language group. Dravidian, in which these two features
are prominent, has often been mentioned. I f the Proto-Tokharians once lived in Persia,
and if the eastern part of the Iranian plateau was a Dravidian language area at the same
period (as recently claimed by K. Menges, "Altajisch und Drvidisch", Orbis XI I I (1964),
98 sq.), one need not be as despondent as W. Krause who wrote "denn wer wollte an-
nehmen, dass die Vorfahren der Dravidas. irgendwann einmal Nachbarn der Vorfahren
der zentralasiatischen 'Tocharer' gewesen seien? " ("Tochari sch" in Handb. d. Orientalistik
IV/ 3, p. 36). On the details of the nominal systems involved s. W. Krause, KZ. 69 (1948),
185 sqq.; Menges, loc. cit. 81 sq.

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THE FIRST INDO-EUROPEANS IN HISTORY

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