Roman Descendants Found in China?

[Renicus Ferrarius]

Hello, new member here. I thought that this article in today's "Telegraph" might interest a few people.

Roman Descendants Found in China?
"Residents of a remote Chinese village are hoping that DNA tests will prove one of history's most unlikely legends — that they are descended from Roman legionaries lost in antiquity..."


There is also a video link the top, where it reads "Richard Spencer Meets the Residents of Liqian".

Enjoy. :-) )

[Theodosius the Great]

I read this a couple of days ago. Frankly, the green eyes, ruddy complexion, blond hair, and sheer proximity to central Asia suggests to me that they're more likely to be of Slavic stock. The Mongul Empire seems a more likely candidate to trace back their ancestry to.

And why pick Crassus' last stand at Carrhae as their point of origin ? Why not the later defeat of Emperor Valerian in the mid-third century by Sassinid Persia ?

The whole story, of course, seems too far-fetched.

Theo

[Jona Lendering]

The theory is an old one, proposed in 1957 by the sinologist H.H. Dubs (A Roman City in Ancient China). He quotes census records, and I thought he was probably right that there was a "western" settlement, called "Roman" in the Tarim bassin. What this means? Whether they settlers were indeed Romans? How they got there? I do not know, but I was once willing to give Dubs the benefit of the doubt. I lost the book long ago.

[Matthew Amt]

Sorry, folks, not to be sounding rude but this whole "Romans in China" thing has to be squashed once or twice a year. It keeps staggering back to its feet like a bad Hollywood zombie, refusing to die...

THERE IS NO EVIDENCE. NONE. ZIPPO. NADA. ZILCH.

Make up all the neato stories you like, but frankly I prefer the one about aliens carrying Crassus' men off to fight on low-tech planets for them.

What Dubs and his buddies have found are some old stone walls and a few pieces of pottery. None of it has ever been shown to the public, much less shown to be even remotely Roman. They get all excited about a place name, implying that it means something about "Rome", when at best it translates to "Stranger-town". They go wild about historic accounts of troops putting their shields over their heads in combat, claiming that "ONLY Romans knew how to do this!!" Say what?? They mention a double palisade in the same account, and claim it's Roman, when actually the typical Roman palisade was not double!

In short, Hogwash, bunk, hooey, and other silliness. At best, their DNA tests will tell them that some Chinese people are related to other Chinese people. Gee. Mind you, this is from the same country that is frantically trying to deny the existence of a culture of tall blondes (the Tarim or Urumchi mummies) several hundred years before the Romans! Wacky.

There must be several other threads about this already, plus several discussions on the Roman Army Yahoo group. Look 'em up. You'll find them very repititious. Show me some decent research on the matter, and I'm all ears. Until then, Valete!

Matthew

[Komet]

Yeah, it's garbage. It really irks me to read all this uninformed and unsubstantiated stuff on the internet. Then again, that's what 95% of the "history" on the internet really is. I wrote a paper critiquing Dubs' paper a few years ago and greatly expanded on it for a Roman architecture class I had last semester, looking far more deeply into Roman fortifications in the East and other fortifications in Central Asia in search for references for Dubs' other main point of evidence concerning a "double palisade of wood." I also took a look at the philological debate about the various places that the word "Li-chien" actually represents. I can post the pdf of my paper if anyone is interested.

[Tarbicus]

Rubbish? Probably. But the DNA results aren't in yet. :wink: