The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s5.85

c10.s5.85

The name Asii, then, represents the Yueh-chi. But very many scholars, from Richthofen to Herzfeld, have held that the Tochari were the Yueh-chi;⁵ and to-day that is certain, from the now known occurrences of the name Tochari. It has been identified with the Thagouroi of Ptolemy on the Silk Route who had a city Thogara;⁶ the Chinese knew of remnants of the Togara in Kan-su in the second century B.C.;¹ the name occurs in or about Kan-su in Thibetan texts;² and the same name, ttaugara, for a town in Kan-su, is found in a document in Khotan Saca as late as A.D. 800.³ It follows that the Tochari, who as we know from Apollodorus came to Bactria in the second century from somewhere else, came from Kan-su; but the Chinese historians show that what did come from Kan-su to Bactria at that time were the Yueh-chi. Again, we know from Apollodorus and Pliny (fully given p. 84) that, while there were no Tochari in the Tarim basin in the reign of Euthydemus (died about 190 B.C.), there were Tochari there later at the date of some source of Pliny's; and here again Chinese historians show that part of the Yueh-chi (the Little Yueh-chi) came and settled there at some time not long after 174 B.C. (p. 276); and Indian writers called both the Great and the Little Yueh-chi by the same name, Tukhāra (Tochari).⁴ Finally Ptolemy, all unknowingly, locates Tochari in several places where the Yueh-chi are known to have been on their journey (see App. 21, p. 517), which alone would be conclusive. In fact, wherever we meet Yueh-chi from the Chinese side, we also meet Tochari, whether the evidence comes from texts in Greek, Chinese, Indian, Thibetan, or Saca; that suffices.