The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s5.29

c10.s5.29

I must now turn to the particular consideration of the conquest of Bactria. To Chang-k’ien, that conquest was the work of a single great nomad horde, the Ta Yueh-chi. The Yueh-chi¹ (the name is still unexplained) first appear in history in Kan-su, in the north-west of China, where apparently they had been for some time; a struggle between them and another great horde, the Hiung-nu, usually supposed (though it has been doubted) to have been the people known later to the western world as Huns, culminated in 176 or 174 B.C. in their complete defeat, and they quitted Kan-su and set out westward. Part of the horde, called by Chinese writers the Little Yueh-chi (Siao Yueh-chi,² in contrast to the larger body, the Ta Yueh-chi or Great Yueh-chi), unable or unwilling to follow, turned southward into the Tarim valley and settled among the Ki’ang, apparently a general term for the border peoples of China in that region; it used to be thought that they formed two kingdoms there, Turfan and Kucha,³ but that may now be doubtful (see p. 289). The main horde, going westward, fell on the Wu-sun, killed their king, and must have attempted to occupy their grazing lands and been driven out again, presumably by the Hiung-nu. Still going westward, somewhere before 160 they attacked a people called Sai-wang⁴ about Lake Issyk Kul and the plain northward of the Alexandrovski range and attempted to occupy their lands; the Sai-wang, or some part of them, fled southward (pp. 277 sq.). But in or just before the year 160⁵ the Yueh-chi were again attacked by the son of the dead Wu-sun king with the help of the Hiung-nu and were driven out of the Sai-wang country, of which the Wu-sun took possession; the main body of the Yueh-chi again went westward, though some remained and were ultimately absorbed by the Wu-sun, as were also some Sai-wang elements who had not joined in the flight southward.¹ After 160 the Yueh-chi vanish from view for a generation—a fact which has not been noticed—till we meet them again shortly before 128; their steady progress westward was doubtless primarily to escape from the Hiung-nu, but it is noticeable that they were retracing the road which, on one theory, the Tochari section of the horde may have originally followed from Europe (p. 290).