The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s5.65

c10.s5.65

For what he saw himself his evidence is excellent, but the things he only heard are not necessarily in the same category. No doubt he could speak the Yueh-chi language, for it was apparently customary in China for officials destined for any country to be taught its language before starting;¹ but outside of the Yueh-chi he may have depended on such interpreters as they could provide (as the Wu-sun in 115 provided interpreters for his subordinates),² and they themselves were new arrivals in a strange world, as he was. At the same time, if the leading Yueh-chi clans spoke Saca, as is now the dominant belief (p. 287), then Chang-k'ien could himself more or less understand the peoples he met with; this is reflected in his statement that from Ferghana to Parthia, though there were dialectical variations, the people could all understand one another.³ His one real mistake was that sometimes, over the relative positions of peoples, he got the points of the compass wrong,⁴ a mistake easy enough to make in a new world; Pan-ku, by whose time a mass of information on the subject was available, occasionally corrects him.⁵ One thing however the Yueh-chi could not provide, and that was an interpreter for Greek: from first to last he never notes the existence of Greeks⁶ though he records their works, just as neither he nor his subordinates ever discovered the Parthian aristocracy. He distinguishes most carefully, as any Chinaman of experience would, between nomads like the Yueh-chi and the K'ang-kiu, who followed their flocks, and settled countries like Ta-yuan, Ta-hia, and An-si (Parthia), where the people had ‘fixed abodes’ and practised agriculture. The strange thing about his Report as we have it is that it never mentions the Sacaraucae and Massagetae and their invasion of Parthia; this was going on while he was among the Yueh-chi and he must have heard of it. But by the time Ssu-ma Ch'ien wrote it was ancient history; direct intercourse by caravan between China and Parthia was well established, and if Ssu-ma Ch'ien edited the An-si section he may have omitted some reference to the invasion as being now meaningless; he does not give the Report as a separate formal document but incorporates its substance in his own work. But one cannot analyse from translations as though they were Greek texts, and the work must be left to Chinese scholars.