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The Wu-sun and Sakas and the Yüeh-chih migration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

E. G. Pulleyblank
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Extract

In an appendix to the article ‘Chinese and Indo-Europeans’ it was shown that, contrary to the view put forward but never demonstrated by the eighteenth-century scholar Ts'ui Shih, and adopted by the eminent sinologists Paul Pelliot and G. Haloun, chapter 123 of the Shih-chi on ‘Ta-yüan’ could not have been reconstituted from parallel passages in the Han shu but must have been the source for the latter—as one would naturally assume if doubts had never been raised. In summing up the evidence I noted that the most important discrepancies between Shih-chi, 123, and the Han shu concerned the Wu-sun and Sakas and I argued that one must assume that the Han shu had grafted separate, additional, material on to the account in the Shih-chi. I did not, however, go into the matter in detail. This is the burden of the present article.

Type
Articles and Notes and Communications
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , February 1970 , pp. 154 - 160
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1970

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References

1 JRAS, 1966, 9–39.

2 Shih-chi, 123. (This and subsequent references are to Takigawa Kametaro, Shiki kaichū kōshō, Tokyo, 1934.)Google Scholar

3 Shih-chi, 123. 19–20.

4 Taking in the text to be a corruption of . I can discover no other reference to a Western Fort or Wall in the Hsiung-nu territory and the use of such fortifications by the nomads seems highly unlikely. On the other hand, the term Western Regions does not begin with Chinese penetration of the Tarim Basin but is found with reference to the period of Hsiung-nu domination. See Han shu pu-chu, 96A, p. 5437 (Kuo-hsüeh chi-pen ts'ung-shu).

5 Shih-chi, 110.30, Han shu pu-chu, 94A, p. 5316.

6 Han shu pu-chu, 61, p. 4216 ff.

7 The possibility of connecting this syllable -mi with the Tokharian word for ‘king’ is suggested in JRAS, 1966, 29.

8 For evidence that Pan Piao, Pan Ku's father, who died in A.D. 54, was responsible for Han shu, 96, ‘The Western Regions’, see Haloun, G., ZDMG, XCI, 1937, p. 250, n. 1Google Scholar. See also Pulleyblank, E. G., ‘Chinese evidence for the date of Kaniska’, in Basham, A. L. (ed.), Papers on the date of Kaniska, Leiden, 1968Google Scholar. This is the revised version of an article prepared for a conference held in 1960. There it is shown that three items can be identified as having been added by Pan Ku to the chapter as completed by his father.

9 Haloun, G., art. cit., 295Google Scholar.

10 See p. 156, n. 5, above.

11 Han shu pu-chu, 96A, p. 5463 ff.

12 The combination Sai Wang ‘King of the Sakas’ has been taken by some scholars as a transcription of the ethnic name Sacaraucae, a people referred to in Western sources in connexion with the end of the Greek kingdom in Bactria. This completely arbitary identification has no linguistic basis whatever and attempts to draw together the historical accounts of the King of the Sakas, who, according to the Han shu, went to Kashmir, and the Sacaraucae in Sogdiana and Bactria have only added to the general confusion in which the obscure history of these events is immersed.