The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s1.272

c10.s1.272

The passage in Apollodorus is the earliest known mention of this word.¹ The name Seres in the sense of the silk-producing people of the extreme East, the Chinese, does not occur before the time of Julius Caesar and Augustus;² knowledge in the West of the Chinese was one of the consequences of the opening up of through trade between China and Iran in 106 B.C., due to Chang-k’ien’s discoveries. But Pliny (VI, 88) has preserved one notice of ‘Seres’ which, as has long been known, has nothing to do with China³ and is taken, he says, from a Ceylonese who had visited them: they were a very tall race with red hair and blue eyes, living north of the Himalayas (montes Hemodos), whose speech was unintelligible and who traded by silent barter in the usual way. The conventional location of Pliny’s blonde Seres has been in the Tarim basin, a view which has been developed in modern times⁴ by calling them the Tochari (Little Yueh-chi) on the strength of von Le Coq’s identification of the Tochari with the people who have red hair and blue eyes in the much later art of Turfan;⁵ but one need not go to the Tochari, for a wedge of blondness stretched far into Central Asia from Europe, and, while Hippocrates recorded a red-haired strain among the Scyths of Russia, one of the tribes of the Hiung-nu (Huns) were blondes,⁶ there is said to have been a blonde strain in the Wu-sun, and there was a red-haired Sarmatian horde called Roxolani, ‘blonde Alans’. I feel little doubt that the Seres of Apollodorus and of Pliny, the two mentions of the name which are not the Chinese, are connected, though they are far apart in time. Professor Herrmann’s conjecture that Pliny’s Seres might be the Wu-sun, or that section of the Tochari-Yueh-chi who had remained behind in the Wu-sun country,¹ has much to commend it. The Wu-sun country at the time seems to have been the district about Lake Issyk Kul and the plains north of the Alexandrovski range;² and to a Ceylonese ‘north of the Hemodi mountains’ could just as well mean beyond the Tien-shan range as in the Tarim basin south of it. Pliny’s informant must have called the people he saw Seres because they were in a country where he expected to find Seres, *i.e.* the country of Apollodorus’ Seres, and traded by silent barter in the same way. Who Apollodorus’ Seres were cannot be said, because the Chinese information does not go back to *c.* 200 B.C.;³ but if they lived in the Lake Issykul country and were the nearest middlemen to the Bactrian Greeks for the Chinese as well as the Siberian trade, it is easy to see how, at a later time, the name of the middlemen on the route was transferred by Greek or Greek-speaking merchants to the silk-producing people at the end of it.