The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s5.97

c10.s5.97

The race and language or languages of the composite Yueh-chi horde have been the subject of much discussion, chiefly philological.¹ A few years ago the dominant belief was that the Asii (Arsi) were a Turki people,² but to-day it is thought that they were Iranian Sacas;³ I may perhaps venture the remark that Asia is getting very full of Sacas, even if Pliny (VI, 50) did call them ‘innumerable’. One must take the Kushans as representing the Asii or say rather the dominant element among the Yueh-chi,⁴ whether the Kushans were a tribe or sept or whether Kushāna was not a tribal name but a family or dynastic title;⁵ and it is a strong argument that when the Kushan language was first reduced to writing on its coins, it was apparently the north-Iranian dialect now called Saca and not the Sogdian dialect of Bactria.¹ But language and race are not identical things. To Greeks, who were not scientific ethnologists, the matter was simple: if a horde spoke Saca it was a Saca horde. It is not so simple to-day; the one assurance we have is that every great horde must have been a racial mixture, whatever might be the preponderating element. No philological arguments can make some of the Kushan portraits look like Iranians or any other ‘Indo-European’ people;² and I have felt trouble myself—no one else seems to have done so—over the number five of the five Yueh-chi princes (*yabghu*), for five is not a typically Iranian number and one cannot well separate the five princes of the Yueh-chi from the five of the Turki Hiung-nu. But five was a dominant number in China,³ where it occurs with the same monotonous regularity as does seven in astrology; and it may be that both hordes had merely borrowed from China,⁴ with which they had long been in contact, and had passed the number on to others.⁵ But this is a guess, and the number where it occurs *might* indicate a Turki custom and a Turki element; the word *yabghu* is Turki. Be this as it may, the right view about the Asii in Bactria, I think, is to say that they probably spoke Saca, but to refrain from dogmatising about their racial quality.