Tocharians
The Tocharians or Tokharians were speakers of the Tocharian languages, a group of Indo-European languages known from around 7,600 documents from the 6th and 7th centuries, found on the northern edge of the Tarim Basin. The name "Tocharian" was given to these languages in the early 20th century by scholars who identified their speakers with a people known in ancient Greek sources as the Tókharoi, who inhabited Bactria from the 2nd century BC. This identification is now generally considered erroneous, but the name "Tocharian" remains the most common term for the languages and their speakers. Their endonym is unknown, although they may have referred to themselves as the Agni, Kuči, and Krorän or as the Agniya and Kuchiya known from Sanskrit texts.
The origins of these people are uncertain. Links have been proposed with the Andronovo and Afanasievo cultures, as well as the Tarim mummies found in the eastern Tarim dated to the 2nd millennium BC. However, genetic analysis has revealed that the Tarim mummies were unrelated to Afanasievo, although contemporaneous populations in Dzungaria to the north did show Afanasievo ancestry and might possibly have spoken Tocharian.
Agricultural communities first appeared in the oases of the northern Tarim circa 2000 BC.
By the 2nd century BC, these settlements had developed into city-states, overshadowed by nomadic peoples to the north and Chinese empires to the east. These cities, the largest of which was Kucha, also served as way stations on the branch of the Silk Road that ran along the northern edge of the Taklamakan Desert.
For several centuries, the Tarim basin was ruled by the Xiongnu, the Han dynasty, the Tibetan Empire, and the Tang dynasty. From the 8th century AD, the Uyghurs – speakers of a Turkic language – settled in the region and founded the Kingdom of Qocho that ruled the Tarim Basin. The peoples of the Tarim city-states intermixed with the Uyghurs, whose Old Uyghur language spread through the region. The Tocharian languages are believed to have become extinct during the 9th century.
Names
Around the beginning of the 20th century, archaeologists recovered a number of manuscripts from oases in the Tarim Basin written in two closely related but previously unknown Indo-European languages, which were easy to read because they used a close variation of the already deciphered Indian Middle-Brahmi script. These languages were designated in similar fashion by their geographical neighbours:- A Buddhist work in Old Turkic, included a colophon stating that the text had been translated from Sanskrit via toxrï tyly.
- Manichean texts in several languages of neighbouring regions used the expression "the land of the Four Toghar" to designate the area "from Kucha and Karashar to Qocho and Beshbalik."
Müller's identification became a minority position among scholars when it turned out that the people of Tokharistan spoke Bactrian, an Eastern Iranian language, which is quite distinct from the Tocharian languages. Nevertheless, "Tocharian" remained the standard term for the languages of the Tarim Basin manuscripts and for the people who produced them. A few scholars argue that the Yuezhi were originally speakers of Tocharian who later adopted the Bactrian language.
The name of Kucha in Tocharian B was Kuśi, with adjectival form kuśiññe. The word may be derived from Proto-Indo-European *keuk "shining, white".
The Tocharian B word akeññe may have referred to people of Agni, with a derivation meaning "borderers, marchers". One of the Tocharian A texts has ārśi-käntwā as a name for their own language, so that ārśi might have meant "Agnean", though "monk" is also possible.
Tocharian kings apparently gave themselves the title Ñäktemts soy, an equivalent of the title Devaputra of the Kushans.
Languages
The Tocharian languages are known from around 7600 documents dating from about 400 to 1200 AD, found at 30 sites in the northeast Tarim area. The manuscripts are written in two distinct, but closely related, Indo-European languages, conventionally known as Tocharian A and Tocharian B. According to glotto-chronological data, Tocharian languages are closest to Western Indo-European languages such as proto-Germanic or proto-Italian, and being devoid of satemization predate the evolution of eastern Indo-European languages.Tocharian A was found in the northeastern oases known to the Tocharians as Ārśi, later Agni and Turpan.
Some 500 manuscripts have been studied in detail, mostly coming from Buddhist monasteries.
Many authors take this to imply that Tocharian A had become a purely literary and liturgical language by the time of the manuscripts, but it may be that the surviving documents are unrepresentative.
Tocharian B was found at all the Tocharian A sites and also in several sites further west, including Kuchi. It appears to have still been in use in daily life at that time.
Over 3200 manuscripts have been studied in detail.
The languages had significant differences in phonology, morphology and vocabulary, making them mutually unintelligible "at least as much as modern Germanic or Romance languages".
Tocharian A shows innovations in the vowels and nominal inflection, whereas Tocharian B has changes in the consonants and verbal inflection. Many of the differences in vocabulary between the languages concern Buddhist concepts, which may suggest that they were associated with different Buddhist traditions.
File:Se pañäkte saṅketavattse ṣarsa papaiykau.jpg|thumb|upright=1.25|The Tocharian script is very similar to the Indian Brahmi script from the Kushan period, with only slight variations in calligraphy. Tocharian language inscription: Se pañäkte saṅketavattse ṣarsa papaiykau "This Buddha was painted by the hand of Sanketava", on a painting carbon dated to 245-340 AD.
The differences indicate that they diverged from a common ancestor between 500 and 1000 years before the earliest documents, that is, sometime in the 1st millennium BC. Common Indo-European vocabulary retained in Tocharian includes words for herding, cattle, sheep, pigs, dogs, horses, textiles, farming, wheat, gold, silver, and wheeled vehicles.
Prakrit documents from 3rd century Krorän, Andir and Niya on the southeast edge of the Tarim Basin contain around 100 loanwords and 1000 proper names that cannot be traced to an Indic or Iranian source. Thomas Burrow suggested that they come from a variety of Tocharian, dubbed Tocharian C or Kroränian, which may have been spoken by at least some of the local populace.
Burrow's theory is widely accepted, but the evidence is meagre and inconclusive, and some scholars favour alternative explanations.
Religion
Most of the Tocharian inscriptions are based on Buddhist monastic texts, which suggests that the Tocharians largely embraced Buddhism. The pre-Buddhist beliefs of the Tocharians are largely unknown, but several Chinese goddesses are similar to the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European sun goddess and the dawn goddess, which implies that the Chinese were influenced by the pre-Buddhist beliefs of the Tocharians when they traveled on trade routes which were located in Tocharian territories. Tocharian B has a noun derived from the name of the Proto-Indo-European sun goddess, while Tocharian A has, a loanword etymologically connected to the Turkic sun goddess Gun Ana. Besides this, they might have also worshipped a lunar deity and an earth one.The murals found in the Tarim Basin, especially those of the Kizil Caves, mostly depict Jataka stories, avadanas, and legends of the Buddha, and are an artistic representation in the tradition of the Nikaya school of the Sarvastivadas. When the Chinese Monk Xuanzang visited Kucha in 630 AD, he received the favours of the Tocharian king Suvarnadeva, the son and successor of Suvarnapushpa, whom he described as a believer of Hinayana Buddhism. In the account of his travel to Kucha he stated that "There are about one hundred convents in this country, with five thousand and more disciples. These belong to the Little Vehicle of the school of the Sarvāstivādas. Their doctrine and their rules of discipline are like those of India, and those who read them use the same."
Proposed precursors
The route by which speakers of Indo-European languages reached the Tarim Basin is uncertain.A leading contender is the Afanasievo culture, who occupied the Altai region to the north between 3300 and 2500 BC.
Afanasievo culture
The Afanasievo culture resulted from an eastern offshoot of the Yamnaya culture, originally based in the Pontic steppe north of the Caucasus Mountains. The Afanasievo culture displays cultural and genetic connections with the Indo-European-associated cultures of the Central Asian steppe yet predates the specifically Indo-Iranian-associated Andronovo culture.J. P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair argued that the Tarim Basin was first settled by Proto-Tocharian-speakers from an eastern offshoot of the Afanasievo culture, who migrated to the south and occupied the northern and eastern edges of the basin. The early eastward expansion of the Yamnaya culture circa 3300 BC is enough to account for the isolation of the Tocharian languages from Indo-Iranian linguistic innovations like satemization. Michaël Peyrot argues that several of the most striking typological peculiarities of Tocharian are rooted in a prolonged contact of Proto-Tocharian-speaking Afanasievans with speakers of an early stage of Proto-Samoyedic in South Siberia. Among others, this might explain the merger of all three-stop series, which must have led to a huge amount of homonyms, as well as the development of an agglutinative case system.
Chao Ning et al. found in burials from around 200 BC at the Shirenzigou site on the eastern edge of Dzungaria 20–80% Yamnaya-like ancestry, lending support to the hypothesis of a migration from Afanasievo into Dzungaria, which is just north of the Tarim Basin.