my-server
← Wiki

List of Tocharian (Agnean-Kuchean) peoples

This is a list of the peoples that are called “Tocharians” (although now most scholars think it is a misnomer for them) also known by the name Agnean-Kuchean, a now extinct Indo-European group of peoples that were speakers of a distinct Indo-European branch of languages. They inhabited the Tarim Basin (occupied in most part by the Taklamakan Desert) in today's Xinjiang Chinese Province, in western China. At the end of the first Millennium AD they were assimilated by the Turkic Uyghur people and lost their distinct ethnic identity.

Several scholars such as J. P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair argue that they were descendants of the Afanasievo culture people, that possibly were speakers of an Indo-European language or languages and that, in a still undetermined time, migrated south towards the Tarim Basin and settled mainly on the northern and eastern edges, and also on some southern edges (north, east and south of the Taklamakan Desert).

Ancestors

Eastern Tocharians

They were possible speakers of Tocharian A, but also may have spoken Tocharian B because the two languages overlapped. There is the possibility that Tocharian B replaced Tocharian A.

Western Tocharians

They were possible speakers of Tocharian B, possibly they were not speakers of Tocharian A because the two languages did not overlap in that area.

Hypothetical Tocharian peoples

Southern Tocharians

They were possible speakers of Tocharian C, a substrate language to the later written Prakrit Indo-Aryan languages on the southeast edge of the Tarim Basin and possibly in its southern part also.

Western Tocharians

Possible Tocharian peoples

Tocharian or Iranian

There are different or conflicting views among scholars regarding the ethnic and linguistic kinship of the peoples known by the Han Chinese as Wusun and Yuezhi and also other less known peoples (a minority of scholars argue that they were Tocharians, based, among other things, on the similarity of names like "Kushan" and the native name of "Kucha" (Kuśi) and the native name "Kuśi" and Chinese name "Gushi" or the name "Arsi" and "Asii", however most scholars argue that they were possibly Northeastern Iranian peoples)

Tocharian, Iranian or Turkic

See also

References

Bibliography

Further reading

Note: Recent discoveries have rendered obsolete some of René Grousset's classic The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia, published in 1939, which, however, still provides a broad background against which to assess more modern detailed studies.

  • Baldi, Philip. 1983. An Introduction to the Indo-European Languages. Carbondale. Southern Illinois University Press.
  • Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. 1999. The Mummies of Ürümchi. London. Pan Books.
  • Beekes, Robert. 1995. Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction. Philadelphia. John Benjamins.
  • Hemphill, Brian E. and J.P. Mallory. 2004. "Horse-mounted invaders from the Russo-Kazakh steppe or agricultural colonists from Western Central Asia? A craniometric investigation of the Bronze Age settlement of Xinjiang" in American Journal of Physical Anthropology vol. 125 pp 199ff.
  • Lane, George S. 1966. "On the Interrelationship of the Tocharian Dialects," in Ancient Indo-European Dialects, eds. Henrik Birnbaum and Jaan Puhvel. Berkeley. University of California Press.
  • Ning, Chao, Chuan-Chao Wang, Shizhu Gao, Y. Yang and Yinqiu Cui. “Ancient Genomes Reveal Yamnaya-Related Ancestry and a Potential Source of Indo-European Speakers in Iron Age Tianshan”. In: Current Biology 29 (2019): 2526–2532.e4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.06.044
  • Walter, Mariko Namba 1998 "Tocharian Buddhism in Kucha: Buddhism of Indo-European Centum Speakers in Chinese Turkestan before the 10th Century C.E." Sino-Platonic Papers 85.
  • Xu, Wenkan 1995 "The Discovery of the Xinjiang Mummies and Studies of the Origin of the Tocharians" The Journal of Indo-European Studies, Vol. 23, Number 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 1995, pp. 357–369.
  • Xu, Wenkan 1996 "The Tokharians and Buddhism" In: Studies in Central and East Asian Religions 9, pp. 1–17. http://61.54.131.141:8010/Resource/Book/Edu/JXCKS/TS010057/0001_ts010057.htm

External links