The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s5.108

c10.s5.108

The race and language of the Tochari are a most difficult problem;⁶ I would gladly pass it over if I could, for I feel much diffidence in saying anything at all. It was once supposed that they brought with them from Europe, and spoke, the famous *centum*-language with Italo-Celtic affinities, discovered in Chinese Turkestan, which used to be called Tocharian. To-day this language is no longer called Tocharian, and we are told that it is certain that its two forms, called Dialects A and B, were the languages of two states in the northern part of Chinese Turkestan, A of Agni-Karachar (with Turfan) and B of Kucha;¹ and we are also told that neither dialect could have been (*i.e.* represent) the language of the historical Tochari who invaded Bactria, because their name is aspirated while Dialects A and B have no aspirates.² None of this is much help to the historian of Greek Bactria, for it belongs to a later world: the known history of Agni and Kucha begins later than the conquest of Bactria,³ and the known remains of Dialects A and B belong, I understand, to the eighth century A.D.⁴ But *centum*-languages did not grow of themselves in Central Asia, the Indo-European languages of Asia belonging to the *satem* group; it would seem that the two dialects, or rather their parent form, must originally have come from Europe and must have been brought to Agni and Kucha by some definite people before they could become the languages of little states in those localities; and granted that the two dialects are full of loan-words from other languages, that does not alter the fact that they are *centum*-languages at bottom, just as Roumanian, though said to be full of loan-words, is none the less a Romance language. The only people at present known who could have brought a *centum*-language from Europe to Chinese Turkestan—no other has ever been suggested—are the Tochari; not the Tochari who as part of the Great Yueh-chi invaded Bactria, but the Tochari element in the Little Yueh-chi who after 174 B.C. moved into Chinese Turkestan.