Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present Read Online Free PDF Page A

based on oral tradition, the bad king is a frog surnamed Kim ‘gold’. Though this detail is not found in the brief ancient versions, it seems likely to be genuine. It could be that the birth story represents not only the results of a conflation of two different stories, one of which is more “southern,” but the mixture of two different peoples, of which one people’s story had a frog ancestor with a hero son born as an egg. However, there is no mention of a frog in any of the early versions.
    15. The texts say that the name means ‘shoots well’ in Koguryo. The correctness of the gloss for the second syllable (’good, excellent’) is confirmed by other Koguryo data, indicating its correctness for the other syllable, but in view of the repeated occurrence of the same name for the same historical function it is clear that at least two of the peoples who have this name in their national origin stories borrowed it from someone else. The gloss here suggests it could be a folk etymology designed to explain a problematic name, so it is possible that the
name
*Tüme N is not Puyo-Koguryoic in origin. On the other hand, the now generally accepted etymology of the name Scythian as a development from Northern Iranian *Skuδa ‘shooter, archer’, and the attested form of the name of the original home of the Puyo-Koguryo people “in the north,” *Saklai, a form of the name of the Scythians (see appendix B ), suggests that the name ‘Good Archer’ may be a Puyo-Koguryo translation of the name *Sakla- ‘Archer’. This problem deserves further attention.
    16. Today
Alligator sinensis
is a rare, extremely endangered animal, found only in the lower Yangtze River area of Anhui Province, but in Antiquity it was found in the Yellow River basin (Ho 1999). Tomb 10 from the neolithic Dawenkou (Ta-wen-k’ou) Culture (ca. 4300–2500 BC ) in Shantung contained eighty-four alligator bones, the vast majority of bones in the tomb; the other bones consisted of two deer teeth, two pig heads, and fifteen pig bones ( http://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/archae/2dwkmain.htm ). A bronze in the shape of an alligator was found in Shilou, Shanxi in 1959. It is 41.5 centimeters long and dates to the late Shang period (Gyllensvärd 1974: 48–49).
    17. T’u-menNMan
tŭmén
< MChi *thumәn (Pul. 312, 211 *t h o 2 -mәn 1 ) is written
Bumïn
in the Old Turkic inscriptions from the Orkhon. Modern scholars nearly all believe this to be the correct form. For example, Rybatzki (2000: 206–208, 218) argues that
Bumïn
is a loan from Indo-Iranian (Old Persian
bûmî
‘earth, land’ Sogdian
ßwm
‘world’, Old Indic
bhûmi
‘earth, ground, soil, land’). This would mean the Chinese form would have to be a semi-calque translation, but this is unlikely in the extreme. Klyashtornyi and Livshits (1972) claim to have read the name
Bumïn
in the Sogdian inscription from Bugut (ca. 582, making it the earliest dated source on imperial Türk history), but this is contradicted by the recent study of the inscription by Yoshida and Moriyasu (1999), who see no such name. My own examination of the inscription concurs with Yoshida and Moriyasu’s on this point. The chronological precedence of the Chinese form and the simple, clear, everyday characters used to transcribe the name in Chinese; the improbability of the Chinese form transcribing a Turkic taboo form (i.e., Tumïn as an avoidance form of an original Bumïn); the extreme unlikelihood of a Central Eurasian empire founder having a name that meant ‘earth, world’ or the like (as well as, for Turkic, the oddity of supplying a missing final -n); and, especially, the recurrence of the same name for the empire founder in the foundation stories of the Hsiung-nu and Koguryo, who also share other cultural elements with the Turks, most notably the ancestral cave, all indicate that the Old Turkic name was Tumïn, not *Bumïn. The reason for the erroneous form “Bumïn” in the Old Turkic inscriptions is