Comments on: Who’s the barbarian now? Empires of the Silk Road

By: Mackinder’s revenge and the rise of the mongrels : Gene Expression

Mackinder’s revenge and the rise of the mongrels : Gene Expression — Mon, 24 Jun 2013 09:01:41 +0000

[...] years ago I reviewed Christopher Beckwith’s magisterial Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia [...]

By: Eric Johnson

Eric Johnson — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 11:14:41 +0000

What half-spiritual type of person could fail to get off on climbing a mountain? It’s about as indo-european as drinking water and eating food. Does Beckwith actually put that forth as evidence?

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 07:45:17 +0000

Is David an Indo-European interloper in the Semitic world?

Beckwith too often assumes that cultural traits originating among Indo-Europeans are evidence for actual IE language / descent. Cultural traits are transmissible.

Moses in the Bible can be compared to Genghis Khan. One theory of this is that Moses was a tribal interloper into the Mesopotamian-Egyptian world. Or you could say that many Mongols were Christians.

On the other hand, certain cultural traits (going to a mountaintop to talk with God, which Moses and early Hebrews did but which later was forbidden or discouraged by the priesthood) may simply have been extremely archaic traits (shamanism-like?) which had survived among peoples of certain types and whose origin cannot be found.

Or then, the heroic leader and his band of sworn followers, which you see all over the place, may not have been a cultural marker at all, but just a functionally-effective form of organization which, whenever discovered, tends to win.

By: Doug l

Doug l — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:57:40 +0000

I’ve enjoyed this review and the disscussion here in the comments section. It’s a period of history that has so many compelling aspects to it including the archaeology and genetic history.
As to motives for the movements of people considered here, do none of the theories take into consideration the changing climate and the impact of herding cultures and their land-us practices on the hydrologies and ecosystems of landscapes that could not support them in great numbers as their success brought about population increases? I’d heard that mentioned in a lecture many years ago long before the current climate concerns regarding AGW.

By: Bob Sykes

Bob Sykes — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 06:20:19 +0000

In any event, Beckwith's book is entertaining. As was Conan the Barbarian.

His discussion of the hero and his friends brings to mind the stories of David in the Old Testament. These read like the foundation myth of an Indo-European group and include all the elements of the myth. Is David an Indo-European interloper in the Semitic world?

Gordon wrote a book entitled "The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations." If one takes Beckwith seriously, then Gordon's results might stem from a common Indo-European background. Gordon points out that Abraham looks a lot like a Greek war lord.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 05:22:03 +0000

I agree with Razib that the "orientalist" slur should be dropped. Anybody can study anybody. I have a degree of sympathy with anthropologists defending threatened peoples, but China and Japan haven't been victim peoples for some time.

I've also read a fair amount of Japanese and Chinese occidentalism, and some of it seems to be right on the money. I plan to write something about this one of these days.

As Razib said, Beckwith is explicitly on the edge, and his theories certainly can't be substantiated. The further back you go the harder it is to be sure of anything; this is true of most areas of history and prehistory. The recent integration of archeology, anthropology, and pre-history, with the use of tools from climatology, metallurgy, genetics, pollen studies, etc., has really revolutionized and transformed what we know and don't know in every area, above all in central Asia. And one of the results of this is that unsubstantiated theories now approach testability and can be put seriously on the table. (So can traditional concepts, such as that of a Xia dynasty preceding the Shang. There's a plausible candidate, but there are problems too).

I'm familiar with Beckwith mostly from his Tibetan History, which seems very well done, though I'm not in a position to critique it.

By: toto

toto — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 02:16:21 +0000

There is also a pretty good argument that Shang and earlier proto-Chinese were in some kind of cultural contact with Pacific coastal peoples of the Americas.

I’d really like to get some reaonably reliable sources for that. Sounds pretty mind-boggling.

By: ren

ren — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:18:09 +0000

Mair is another Orientalist who has a lot of theories that can't be substantiated. For example, his claim that the Tao Te Ching is basically a translation of some as yet unknown Tocharian oral masterpiece.

Some of his exploits are even more entertaining, such as translating the word "qing" (ancient Chinese word for "dark" that has come to slightly mean "green" in modern usage) so that he ended up claiming the Yellow Emperor had green eyes instead of the accurate translation that the emperor had dark, cruel eyes.

It's amazing this guy teaches at the Ivy Leaque level.

Anyway, if the chariot and bronze can imply IEs, then Ancient Egyptians must've also been. For bronze, there was a culture in Qinghai which seemed to have bronze earlier than the Xia-Shang, and mtDNA analysis show them to exhibit all East Eurasian lineages, with some closeness to Tibetans. So, the Xia-Shang complex got bronze through intermediaries, and I imagine the chariot was the same way.

By: jrbentley

jrbentley — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:33:04 +0000

I'm probably the only one here that has read Beckwith's earlier work "Koguryo: the language of Japan's continental relatives." I have a background in linguistics specifically E. Asian (Kr&Jp) so this book was right up my alley.

I don't want to review the book here, but suffice it to say this relationship, Beckwith's claim that Japanese is a Koguryo language, is based on the tenuous comparison of about 140 Koguryo etyma. To me this is like looking at the skin of an elephant through a microscope and trying to
guess what the animal is. It is not impossible, mind you, just highly difficult, and requires great skill.

Just to give a couple reservations I have with Beckwith's work in the book: it bothers me to see his lack of knowledge about Japanese historical phonology (which forms half of this theory) and his grouping of homonyms. Beckwith's grasp of Japanese historical phonology has serious weaknesses, so I'm suspicious of his other conclusions in this book. This doesn't mean his theory is wrong, mind you, but it hasn't solved the problem, in my opinion. Others have claimed that Koguryo and Japanese may be related, and I don't necessarily dismiss that claim. All I want is for the work to be well-grounded in the historical linguistic methodology (as well as phonology), and take account of what we already know about Japanese historical phonology and its development. Beckwith falls short in this regard and this makes me cautious in general of some of his claims. At times it feels like he is being provocative just to be provocative and stretching his claim when the support is tenuous at best.

Now having said this, Beckwith is a Central Eurasia specialist, so I imagine he makes much better arguments in "Empires of the Silk Road." Though after reading "Koguryo" I'm not surprised at all that Beckwith makes some rather provocative and tenuous claims in that book as well.

By: Eventine

Eventine — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 20:20:25 +0000

Thanks for the comments.

I largely agree that it is not implausible for there to have been significant contact between the Tocharians and the Chinese. But I am not sure that it is prudent to trace all or most outside influences to them. Are you guys familiar with the Seima-Turbino Phenomenon? Or the presence of bronze artifacts in Thailand in 2000 BC, or Majiayao (2700-3100 BC in Gansu) even earlier? Contact between China and the outside world might have occurred before the Tocharians, prompted by either settlers or traders. The Seima-Turibno Phenomenon, in particular, suggests a rapid migration of peoples from the Altai Mountains region into China (as well as Europe) around 1500-2000 BC. I hesitate to say what people these were, but they could've been Indo-European (perhaps Indo-Iranian) or Altaic.

These peoples seem to have had the chariot and metallurgy, but did not appear strong enough to attack major civilization centers. It could be that they were simply absorbed by the Chinese elites, and that would've been another way by which the technology & ideas could have been transmitted. Ultimately, though, I think a major piece of the puzzle that is currently missing is the precursor to the Chinese logorams. Historically, scholars have noticed similarities between these and the written forms of Babylonian and the Indus Valley culture, but nothing so significant that would suggest that it was a simple adaptation. Yet these influences could provide clues as to who, exactly, the Chinese were in contact with. Any thoughts?

By: razib

razib — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 16:31:22 +0000

re: the chinese as indo-european, i think one can’t emphasize enough that reading beckwith you are quite aware that he is in an extreme and eccentric minority on this issue. he doesn’t hide that, nor does he act as if he’s being persecuted. he just disagrees and seems to suggest that sinologists are parochial. when he’s in the minority on a position i don’t get the sense he’s slipping in a heterodox reading without telling you that it’s heterodox.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 16:19:40 +0000

Beckwith is basically a western advocate for the steppe peoples. Someone can call it orientalism if they want, but it’s really a major revision of the way we think about 3 or 4000 years of history, and it doesn’t seem to me to be Eurocentric — the Tokharians may have been Indo-Europeans, but they weren’t at all like any other European since perhaps the pagan Lithuanians around 1400. I don’t see it at all as a revival of 19th c. Teutonism.

On Chinese being originally an Indo-European language: I can’t believe that at all. Beckwith is a trained linguist, but also sort of a crank, and the historical linguistics of the distant past is a can of worms, and may be entirely unrecoverable.

By: razib

razib — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 15:50:47 +0000

A point I've made with regard to the Turks is that there is no Turkish race any more, if there ever was one

this is true. but, let us observe that the frequency of "eastern" alleles, that is, genetic variants more common in eastern eurasia, drops off proportionally from the altai. there is also a secondary component i think of lifestyle; those groups who remained nomadic more did not admix as much as those which became sedentary. so, the uyghurs of the tarim basin are probably turkicized tokharians and other western eurasian types, and so their genes are about 50/50 "east" and "west." in contrast, for the kazakhs to the west it's more 75 east and 25 west. think the difference here has less to do with distance from the 'turkic homeland' and more to do with the larger extant population in the cities of the tarim basin than in the plains between the arab sea and siberia.

So imagine that the Tokharians were mixed race after a thousand years or so (I believe that the archeology confirms this)

the frescos from the mid-first millenium AD seem to show a predominant european type, thoughs already exhibited mongoloid or south asian appearances. this is about 2,500 years after the first tokharians settled the tarim basin, and if the archaeologists are right they were the first to really populate the basin in any numbers (probably pre-agriculturalists simply needed too big of a range). by the time of genghis khan though the tokharian language was gone and they'd be turkicized. it seems likely that most of the action occurred between 500-1500 AD.

y. The second is to take serious contact as the default, rather than taking isolation as the default.

amen. the extremes of diffusion and isolationism don't work as a catchall model for all geographic regions.

By: razib

razib — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 15:42:18 +0000

i’m enjoying the comments. just a note, let’s keep discussions free from casting aspersions of “orientalism” or what not. this is 2009, not 1809. i think that beckwith’s assertions in many areas are a bit too far, but it sounds like that’s more of a function of a tibet and central eurasia focused academic philologist talking about what he knows about without knowing what he doesn’t know. though for the record, i found the author’s support for the thesis that old chinese is at its root indo-european rather thin in the text (excepting obvious lexicon which is borrowed). i’d like to get john’s perception.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 15:14:56 +0000

Beckwith definitely make the maximal case and in the end I think he'll have to pull back.

A point I've made with regard to the Turks is that there is no Turkish race any more, if there ever was one. The Turks expanded their range continuously starting as early as 100 AD, and at every point they were intermarrying: by voluntary alliance, by kidnapping and capture, by fotering and adoption, and so on. The Turks (and other steppe peoples) were highly mobile, travelling hundreds of miles to find a bride even in peacetime, and there were really no structures causing the production of definable racial groups -- the opposite of the Iceland (island) effect, where a genetically definable group came into being over time even though all of its ancestors are known and none of them are exotic.

So imagine that the Tokharians were mixed race after a thousand years or so (I believe that the archeology confirms this) and perhaps mostly bilingual too, and they neighbor on the Chou (Zhou), intermarry with them, learn the Zhou language in some cases and teach their own.

By this method you could have enough contact to explain the data Mair and Beckwith are working with, without a great deal of genetic evidence even at the time, and over the course of centuries the genetic evidence would be diluted to disappearance. (This mostly assumes that Yin and Zhou conquests were elite replacement, with already-existing substrates.)

There are a couple of welsome changes I've seen in my lifetime. One is big history -- Eurasian rather than national or areal history. The second is to take serious contact as the default, rather than taking isolation as the default. Indo-European influence on China, Persian influence on Greece and Israel, and Muslim influence on medieval Europe are four cases where I think that the cultural (and racial) influence has been mistakenly minimized for various good and bad reasons.

In short, probably neither the Shang nor the Zhou "were" Indo-Europeans (i.e Tokharians). But some of their ancestors may have been, and culturally they may have been significantly "Indo-Europeanized".

By: Eventine

Eventine — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 14:19:47 +0000

John Emerson: except Beckwith argues that the Zhou, too, were “non-Chinese,” and that the Zhou maternal line was “probably Indo-European.” This would make almost the entirety of early Chinese history Indo-European (if you also believe the Shang era entrance), which seems suspicious – how could such a large impact, akin to the founding of a civilization, not be reflected at the genetic or linguistic level? Everywhere else the Indo-Europeans went, the descendant populations have marked Indo-European traits and ended ups peaking an Indo-European language. Why would the Chinese be exempt?

My own thought is that too little credence is given to the possibility that the Eastern Eurasians were also active at this time – not in Central Asia, but perhaps in Siberia and Manchuria. Koreans claim that they were part of the Scytho-Siberian cultural sphere in ancient days. If this is true, then there might have been a diffusion into China from the Eastern steppes. This would preserve China’s genetic composition and also explain the extensive word borrowing from Indo-European by Old Chinese, since the Eastern Eurasian steppes would’ve had contact with the West Eurasian steppes, which were dominated by the Indo-Europeans.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 04:25:08 +0000

Victor Mair has been working on the IE influences on Early China for some time. As I piece it together, there was major early contact with the Tokharians and later contact with the various Iranian peoples. Certainly elite contact, but possibly also more extensive interchange.

There was an apparent break at about the middle of the Shang dynasty during the reign of Pán G?ng. (The later period was sometimes called Yin Shang. Dates are uncertain but the Yin era began around 1300. This would be a candidate for the entry of IE influence in force. (KC Chang, "Shang Civilization", read some time ago. I don't think Chang mentions the IE theory).

Shang has always been recognized by the Chinese as ancestral but cruel and barbarous -- a step on the way to real civilization. The succeeding Chou civilization has always been the Chinese ideal. Finding IE influences in Shang would not really damage the Chinese origin legend much at all.

There is also a pretty good argument that Shang and earlier proto-Chinese were in some kind of cultural contact with Pacific coastal peoples of the Americas. At the moment I cannot find good documentation of this on the internet, since the internet is flooded with speculative amateur stuff.

Both theories would make the Shang into proto-Chinese or pre-Chinese, which is not really much different than they've always been thought to be.

By: razib

razib — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 21:10:37 +0000

His claims are pretty far out? biased

he admits that.

By: Steve Sailer

Steve Sailer — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 21:08:18 +0000

Thanks.

By: ren

ren — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 19:26:38 +0000

Ask any linguist about the Oracle Bone language of the Shang and they?ll tell you it?s definitely Sinitic and most definitely not Indo?European?I?ve looked at it myself to know that much?Archaeological-wise? besides the chariot what is Indo-European about the Xia-Shang-Zhou? It?s basically a Neolithic Liangzhu ?actually in the Yangtze Delta? which makes it Southern? core with Dawenkou and Hongshan influences?

His claims are pretty far out? biased? and follow a long tradition of Orientalists making outrageous claims on Chinese civilization? He should?ve stopped at IE loan words such as ?horse??