Origin of the Alans

[Michael Kerr]

 Hi Alanus, I have Benjamin’s book and although I don’t agree with all of what he has to say, I think his book is not that bad although I agree it is expensive.  As I am finding out in this thread the Yuezhi are a hard and mysterious tribal group to follow. You have brought up some good points about their history and the possible regions that they might have controlled (probably not all at the same time), their burial grounds and especially their special relationship with the various Chinese dynasties through trade and helping the Chinese adopt steppe cavalry equipment, horses and tactics, long before the Hsiung-nu came into the picture and to top it off their possible link with the Alans movements west a bit later on. 

 Then we have examples of royal burial kurgans like Pazyryk in the Altai and others that you point out and who were buried there still seems a mystery. The usual answer we get in books is they are Scythian, which seems a little general  and lazy to me. There is a line in Mair and Mallory’s book “The Tarim Mummies” which just about sums up the dilemma about their so called occupation of the Gansu Corridor. “That the Yuezhi are ghosts summoned up by historians to torment archaeologists”. Mair said the Yuezhi of the Gansu Corridor have an historical existence, not an archaeological presence as it seems that there is no evidence of camps or burial grounds of 400,000 Yuezhi recorded in Chinese texts anywhere that historians positioned them, but back to the book. This book mainly covers their origin and the migration of the Yuezhi from the time they were expelled from the Gansu Corridor and up to their conquest of Northern Bactria. Victor Mair whom I respect did a review of Benjamin’s book a few years ago and although he criticized aspects of the book he did offer some praise as well. So this is what he thought of the book.

 Although its production is unprepossessing (looking like nothing more than a word processing printout) this is an intrinsically important work of scholarship. The book is written from the vantage of a world historian, which means that the author approaches his subject in a rather different way than would, say, a Sinologist or a classicist. He does not focus on merely one phase or one aspect of the Yuezhi but aims to view them as part of a "big picture," much in the manner of his mentor, David Christian.

 The book is logically divided into five chapters made up of four or five sections, each of which has several straightforwardly entiitled subsections, as well as an introduction and conclusion for each chapter. The chapters cover the following main topics: "The Origin of the Yuezhi," "The Yuezhi in the Gansu: 220-162 BCE," "Migration of the Yuezhi Stage One: From the Gansu to the Hi Basin," "Migration of the Yuezhi Stage Two: From the Hi to the Amu Darya," and "The Conquest of Northern Bactria." The data for these chapters are drawn from a wide variety of sources, including historical texts (primarily in Greek and Chinese), but also make extensive use of archaeological and numismatic evidence, as well as studies in physical anthropology, textile research, and other fields. It is evident that the author has consulted secondary scholarship in English, Russian, French, German, Italian, and Japanese but not in Mandarin Chinese. He appears to have closely and critically consulted primary Chinese sources in their many Western-language translations, but Greek and Latin sources directly.

 Benjamin begins his investigations with a serious examination of the Bronze Age nomadic migrations that took place in Central Eurasia. For the historical period, he pays close attention to chronology, giving-as much as possible-a nearly year-by-year account beginning around 220 BCE, when the Yuezhi entered the realm of written history, following them through their unsuccessful battles with the Xiongnu on the northwestern border of China and with the Wusun in the area of the Hi Valley, and ending about 125 BCE, when the Yuezhi securely settled in a semisedentary existence as conquerors of northern Bactria. A major theme running through the latter two chapters of the book is Zhang Qian's mission to the Yuezhi, which is divided into five stages that are intricately interwoven with the tracking of the migrations of the Yuezhi. A perennial problem in dealing with the Yuezhi is the extent to which they are identical with the Tocharians and the Kushans. The author adopts a basic policy of conflation, whereas what might be called for is a model of overlapping entities.

  The bibliography is ample, including many valuable references that were previously unknown to me. It is, however, somewhat behind the times, containing few items (other than the author's own) that appeared after 2000. There are also some conspicuous absences, such as the detailed works of Taishan Yu, several of which are available in English in Sino-Platonic Papers.

 Now, having pointed out some small mistakes and relatively insignificant inadequacies in the volume under review, I wish to close with a ringing endorsement of Benjamin's work as a major contribution to our understanding of the history of ancient Central Asia. This is a fairly large work (more than 100,000 words) that draws on materials from many different languages and diverse fields. Consequently, it is inevitable that there will be some minor missteps. What is essential to note is that, in matters of substance and argumentation, Craig Benjamin has done an outstanding job of piecing together a coherent picture of a people who previously had been known in only a fragmentary fashion.

 Another criticism seems to be a lack of maps and an index. I haven’t read the chapters on the podboy type tombs yet but will get back to you later on them. I know this doesn’t answer all your concerns but overall it seems a good book. I note that Mair acknowledges that Benjamin did not cite the work of Taishan Yu whom you have mentioned a few times in this thread. As to the chapter about the Yuezhi remaining in Gansu from 220-162 BCE Benjamin points out that it took the Hsiung-nu three attempts to drive out the Yuezhi from Gansu. The first two which you mentioned although the letter Modu sent may have contained a bit of bravado as the Yuezhi although weakened did not surrender like all the others and he wrote that he had destroyed them but it was not Modu who killed the Yuezhi king and made his skull into a cup but his son Jizhu (the old Shan-yu) and he came to the throne around 174 BCE on the death of his father and Benjamin thinks that he could have attacked the Yuehzi from somewhere between 172 and 162 BCE, he favours a later date for when the leaderless Yuezhi started on their trek to the Ili Valley, which was when he signed a treaty with the Han, So overall I didn't mind the book with a large amount of sources especially Russian and a few Indian sources of which I was unaware of. Benjamin seems to have been a late bloomer as a historian as from what I read he is Australian although currently living in USA and before he did his thesis was a professional musician for 25 years.  

Regards

Michael Kerr