月氏, ऋषिक, ACIOI, ARSI
17 Jan 11
First minutes of 2011
(Photo: U. Schücking)
17 Jan 11
New Year’s message 2011
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
with 2011 CE this blog, devoted to historical research, now goes into its third year…
2010 went by much too quickly. Most of it I used up to reorganize my working conditions. The all-important source material, collected in the span of a decade by copying excerpts of what I had been reading mostly in the Berlin State Library, reached an extent where I rapidly lost track of it. The files, filling a dozen meters of shelf space, needed a more careful organization. To each copied journal or book text a tag had to be added to stick out so that I could find what I was looking for fairly quickly. As a matter of fact, a complete bibliography with a thousand titles was called for — but I have hardly begun the tedious task.
I am a private researcher. An amateur doing work for his own pleasure and in any case without remuneration. Under such circumstances, it is not altogether easy to secure the means for our basic needs: clothing, food, and shelter. However, I find this situation a healthy and challenging one and somehow manage to survive.
Last year, I celebrated my 70th birthday. At an age, where others are inclined to retire from a life-long occupation, I find that a huge amount of work is still left for me to do. I am trying my best to stay fit and healthy enough to go on for a few more years. At least as far as age and health are concerned, I hope to follow the example of Strabo of Amaseia who, two thousand years ago and at the age of over eighty, bequeathed to the world the manuscript of his monumental Geographika. In our context, his work is of crucial importance — it includes a sentence which has confused and mislead generations of scholars.
Late last year, I took up the topic once more I had started to investigate twelve months before: the unique and fateful migration of the greater part of the whole Yuezhi/Arsi people from their original seats between Anding and Dunhuang (or from the center of the Yellow River bend to the western end of the Hexi corridor) in East Asia, first to the Ili River, and from there into Sogdiana in Central Asia. Here, they founded a new kingdom and soon extended it into East Bactria or Daxia 大夏 — the land of the Tachar(ians) —, since the Ili River plains always chasing the Sakaraukai/Saiwang 塞王 or “King Sakas” before them.
For the year of this exodus/flight from one world into a completely different one, where the Easterners rather quickly rose to prominence under the guise of several Western names, various dates have been suggested, ranging from 176 to 157 BCE. By quoting and evaluating the well-known Chinese sources (and including the less-known notes of the ancient Chinese commentators as well) I hope to have shown convincingly that the great irruption of a huge Xiongnu army through the Xiao Guan 蕭關, or Northern Gate in the Great Wall of the Qin, into the territory of Anding, next to the Han Chinese border province of Beidi, “in the year fourteen of Han Emperor Wen, in the winter” 孝 文 帝 十 四 年 冬 (167/166 BCE), was thus directed against, not the Chinese, but their immediate Western neighbors, i.e. the Yuezhi/Arsi. This people, like the Xiongnu, shared a common border with Beidi province. Suffering a traumatic defeat at the hands of the proto-Huns, they decided to escape the prospect of subjugation and annihilation by moving far enough west to be out of reach for their arch enemy, the despised Xiongnu under their mighty Emperor (Chanyu) Lao Shang, or “The Venerable High” …
The year 166 BCE is thus a date in the history of Asia which stands out as the beginning of the movements/relocations of certain nomad peoples that reshaped the whole map of Central Asia in the following decades and centuries.
Berlin, January 17th, 2011 (revised April 9th, 2011)
Chris M. Dorn’eich
12 Jan 11
New Year’s Greetings 2011
10 Jan 11
Page 1 of “The Great Exodus” … to read more click the following link.
27 Jan 10
Saluting the New Year 2010
(Photo: U. Schücking)
27 Jan 10
New Year’s message 2010
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
one year ago I started this blog and opened it with a bulky book: the compilation of the chapters on the Xiongnu in the two most ancient Chinese Standard Histories, the Shiji and the Hanshu. I gave it a layout composed of the best Western translations, placed side by side and vis-à-vis the Chinese original text (i.e. in parallel columns).
Such an arrangement was clearly a novum as all translations into Western languages (Russian, French, English, German) had always been published without the Chinese text and hence without the possibility of checking the translations, sentence by sentence.
This now is possible. And so I took the liberty of carefully amending the latest and naturally best translation in such a way that it comes as close to the Chinese original text as possible (all translations I reproduced in cursive, my few corrections in upright script).
And there was another novum : I had made it a point to include those classic Chinese commentaries which had become an integral part of the Shiji and the Hanshu. The oldest blockprint edition of the Shiji which I had been able to look up in the National Library in Beijing, in October 2004 with the kind help of Prof. Chao Huashan, did not yet reproduce these important and very copious commentaries (originally they had been separate books), but they were included and embedded into the main text at least since Ming times.
It had been difficult for me to understand why no Western translator had ever bothered to also translate these classic Chinese comments in toto - they were referred to sporadically, or not at all.
Hence, in my compilation I included these Chinese notes without any translation. In this way, the defect became better known and in due time I was able to convince a well-known American sinologist (whom I had met here in Berlin during the symposium Tocharisch Maitrisimit, organized by the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, section Turfanforschung, April 2008) to reconsider the matter : Professor Victor H. Mair, of Pennsylvania University, Philadelphia/USA.
In September 2009, I received from there the first-ever English translation of the 215 classic Chinese notes in Shiji 110 and the 237 like notes in Hanshu 94A. They had been done by a well-educated couple amongst the Chinese students of Prof. Mair, Wang Xiang & Wen Jing.
As soon as I finish revising these precious renditions, I shall be able to add English translations to the classic Chinese notes in my compilation on THE XIONGNU.
Already, two very inconspicuous classic Chinese notes in Shiji 110 have been of great help to me. They enabled me to solve one dispute amongst students of Yuezhi (*Rudsi/Arsi) history : the date of their Great Exodus from the Hexi Corridor, just West of the Yellow River in Far Eastern Asia.
It was this westward migration of 166 BCE which transposed the Yuezhi from their old habitat, firmly anchored in the Eastern (Xiongnu-Han) Oikumene, to a new one in the Western (Greek-Roman) Oikumene - two worlds which until that time had know little to nothing about each other.
In their new surroundings the Yuezhi were total strangers. They very naturally strove for a new (Western) identity and became the New Kangju, the New Sogdians, the New Tocharians, the New Bactrians, and finally also the New Indo-Scythians. Under all these guises they were likewise shrewd conquerors, accomplished merchants and devout patrons of Buddhism - and other Asian religions …
Click the link The Great Exodus.pdf below to see :
- my New Year’s card 2010 (text / sketch in the box);
- a discussion of the topic on the following 8 pages .
27 Jan 10
New Year’s Greetings 2010
02 Aug 09
New Year’s Greetings 2005-2009