The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s5.114

c10.s5.114

Certainly it is not known what language was spoken by the second-century Tochari,⁵ for apparently those in Bactria at some period after the conquest adopted the Saca speech of their Kushan overlords; and though Bactria after the fourth century A.D. bore their name, Tocharistan, it is now said that the language called toxrï (toxarï or toyarï) in Central Asian documents was the Saca speech of the Kushans of Tocharistan and nothing else.¹ It seems to me probable, however, that whatever the Tochari spoke in the second century B.C. it was not an Iranian dialect like the speech of the Asii; for unless there had been two completely different languages spoken in the Yueh-chi horde it is difficult to see how two contemporary, or all but contemporary, Greek historians could have distinguished the two components of that horde as sharply as they did, seeing that they were not scientific ethnologists and must have gone largely by language; and that means that unless the Tochari, who had originally come to Kan-su from somewhere else,² spoke Turki, one is thrown back for their language upon the West. One thing however is definite, the numerous and varied Greek forms of the name of this people, which are considered in Appendix 21; the analysis there given seems to me to put a somewhat different complexion upon the question of the aspirate in the name and to suggest that further investigation might be desirable before it be laid down as certain that Dialects A and B cannot have been, or represent, the language of the Tochari. The whole problem is shifting sand; but at the moment I can see no conclusive reason why anyone who so desires may not continue to hold—as theory, of course, not as fact—the once so attractive belief³ that a large element among the conquerors of the Bactrian Greeks was a people with Italo-Celtic affinities who had trekked from Europe to the Chinese border, marking their road north of the Tien-shan with their grave-mounds,⁴ and some of whom at a later time, when their culture had flowered, are represented by the blue-eyed people of the amazing frescoes from Turfan, with the men looking like Italians of the Renaissance and the women in dresses which would have been in place at Venice in her prime.