The Yuezhi

The Chinese name of the people, Yuèzhī 月氏, recorded in the Han histories as the nomads of the Gansu corridor whom the Xiongnu broke and drove west around 176 BCE. The Shiji follows their migration in detail through the report of Zhang Qian, the envoy the Han emperor sent to find the Great Yuezhi, Dà Yuèzhī, and propose an alliance against their common enemy; Zhang Qian reached them at last on the Oxus, settled and prosperous and no longer interested in revenge.

Yuèzhī is the eastern name for the people the Western sources call the Tócharoi, the two records catching the same migration from its two ends, the Chinese as it began on their frontier, the Greek and Indian as it ended in Bactria. The Chinese histories give the fullest narrative of the journey, the Yuezhi pushed by the Xiongnu pushing the Saka in turn, the chain-reaction of the steppe written out as a sequence of named peoples. The Kushan empire that one Yuezhi clan, the Guìshuāng, would build is the great sequel to this name.

The Greek name Tócharoi, the people whom Strabo names among the nomads who came down from beyond the Jaxartes and stripped the Greeks of Bactria in the second century BCE. Writing from the western side of the great migration, the Greek and Roman geographers saw only its end: the sudden arrival of horse-peoples out of the northeast who overran the last Greek kingdom of the East and settled its rich land, which came in time to be called Tokharistan after them.

Tócharoi is the western name for the people the Chinese followed as the Yuèzhī, and the family it heads, with Latin Tochari and Sanskrit Tukhāra, is the Graeco-Indian record of the same nation. The identification of the Tócharoi with the Yuèzhī is the standard reconstruction, though, like much in the long-vexed “Tocharian” question, not beyond dispute. What is certain is that one people destroyed Greek Bactria, and that the Greeks called them Tócharoi while the Chinese, who had watched them set out, called them Yuèzhī.

The Latin name Tochari, taken from the Greek; the prologues of Pompeius Trogus’s lost history single them out as the people who seized Bactria, calling their kings the “Asian and Tocharian” rulers and recording the destruction of Greek power in the East. Pliny lists the Tochari among the peoples of the far Central Asian frontier, at the edge of what Roman geography could reach.

The Latin carries the *tochari family into the Western tradition, and through it the name Tokharistan for the land of the upper Oxus. Centuries later, modern scholars would reuse “Tocharian” as the label for a newly discovered Indo-European language of the Tarim Basin, on the assumption that it was the speech of these same people, an attribution still debated and quite possibly mistaken. The Latin Tochari, in any case, fixes the western end of the record of the nation the Chinese called Yuèzhī, the nomads who ended Greek Bactria and, as the Kushans, would rule from the steppe to the Ganges.

The Sanskrit name Tukhāra (also Tuṣāra), the Indian record of the people Greek called Tócharoi and Chinese Yuèzhī. The Indian sources, which knew them from the north and then from within, as the Kushan empire pushed deep into the subcontinent, list the Tukhāras among the foreign peoples of the frontier, beside the Śakas, the Yavanas, and the Pahlavas, and the name attached itself to their Central Asian homeland as Tukhāristān.

Tukhāra is the Indian member of the *tochari family, the third literature to name the conquerors of Bactria, joining the Greek and Latin from the west and standing opposite the Chinese Yuèzhī from the east. That a single steppe people should be traceable, under recognizably related names, through Chinese histories, Greek geographers, and Sanskrit epics is the same marvel the Saka present: the great migrations of the steppe, invisible from any one vantage, become visible when the records of the settled civilizations on every side are read together. The Yuezhi rode out of Chinese sight and into Indian and Greek, and the name followed them the whole way.