Yamatai

Yamatai or Yamatai-koku is the Sino-Japanese name of an ancient country in Wa during the late Yayoi period The Chinese text Records of the Three Kingdoms first recorded the name as or followed by the character for "country", describing the place as the domain of Priest-Queen Himiko. Generations of Japanese historians, linguists, and archeologists have debated where Yamatai was located and whether it was related to the later Yamato province.

Chinese texts

The oldest accounts of Yamatai are found in the official Chinese dynastic Twenty-Four Histories for the 1st- and 2nd-century Eastern Han dynasty, the 3rd-century Wei kingdom, and the 6th-century Sui dynasty.
The c. 297 CE Records of Wèi, which is part of the Records of the Three Kingdoms, first mentions the country Yamatai, usually spelled as 邪馬臺, written instead with the spelling 邪馬壹, or Yamaichi in modern Japanese pronunciation.
Most Wei Zhi commentators accept the 邪馬臺 transcription in later texts and dismiss this initial spelling using Wikt:壹 meaning "one" as a miscopy, or perhaps a naming taboo avoidance, of Wikt:臺 meaning "platform; terrace." This history describes ancient Wa based upon detailed reports of 3rd-century Chinese envoys who traveled throughout the Japanese archipelago:

Going south by water for twenty days, one comes to the country of Toma, where the official is called mimi and his lieutenant, miminari. Here there are about fifty thousand households. Then going toward the south, one arrives at the country of Yamadai, where a Queen holds her court. takes ten days by water and one month by land. Among the officials there are the ikima and, next in rank, the mimasho; then the mimagushi, then the nakato. There are probably more than seventy thousands households.

The Wei Zhi also records that in 238 CE, Queen Himiko sent an envoy to the court of Wei emperor Cao Rui, who responded favorably:

We confer upon you, therefore, the title 'Queen of Wa Friendly to Wei', together with the decoration of the gold seal with purple ribbon....As a special gift, we bestow upon you three pieces of blue brocade with interwoven characters, five pieces of tapestry with delicate floral designs, fifty lengths of white silk, eight taels of gold, two swords five feet long, one hundred bronze mirrors, and fifty catties each of jade and of red beads.

The ca. 432 CE Book of the Later Han says the Wa kings lived in the country of Yamatai :

The Wa dwell on mountainous islands southeast of Han in the middle of the ocean, forming more than one hundred communities. From the time of the overthrow of Chaoxian by Emperor Wu, nearly thirty of these communities have held intercourse with the Han court by envoys or scribes. Each community has its king, whose office is hereditary. The King of Great Wa resides in the country of Yamadai.

The Book of Sui, finished in 636 CE, records changing the capital's name from the Yamatai recorded in the Book of Wei, to Yamadai :

Wa is situated in the middle of the great ocean southeast of Baekje and Silla, three thousand li away by water and land. The people dwell on mountainous islands....The capital is Yamadai, known in the Wei history as Yamatai. The old records say that it is altogether twelve thousand li distant from the borders of Lelang and Daifang prefectures, and is situated east of Kuaiji and close to Dan'er.

The History of the Northern Dynasties, completed 643-659 CE, contains a similar record, but transliterates the name Yamadai using a different character with a similar pronunciation.

Japanese texts

The first Japanese books, such as the Kojiki or Nihon Shoki, were mainly written in a variant of Classical Chinese called kanbun. The first texts actually in the Japanese language used Chinese characters, called kanji in Japanese, for their phonetic values. This usage is first seen in the 400s or 500s to spell out Japanese names, as on the Eta Funayama Sword or the Inariyama Sword. This gradually formalized over the 600s and 700s into the Man'yōgana system, a rebus-like transcription that uses specific kanji to represent Japanese phonemes. For instance, man'yōgana spells the Japanese mora ka using the character Wikt:加, which means "to add", and was pronounced as in Middle Chinese and adopted into Japanese with the pronunciation ka. Irregularities within this awkward system led Japanese scribes to develop phonetically regular syllabaries. The new kana were graphic simplifications of Chinese characters. For instance, ka is written Wikt:か in hiragana and Wikt:カ in katakana, both of which derive from the Man'yōgana 加 character.
The c. 712 Kojiki is the oldest extant book written in Japan. The "Birth of the Eight Islands" section phonetically transcribes Yamato as 夜麻登, pronounced in Middle Chinese as and used to represent the Old Japanese morae ya ma to₂. The Kojiki records the Shintoist creation myth that the god Izanagi and the goddess Izanami gave birth to the Ōyashima of Japan, the last of which was Yamato:

Next they gave birth to Great-Yamato-the-Luxuriant-Island-of-the-Dragon-Fly, another name for which is Heavenly-August-Sky-Luxuriant-Dragon-Fly-Lord-Youth. The name of "Land-of-the-Eight-Great-Islands" therefore originated in these eight islands having been born first.

Chamberlain notes this poetic name "Island of the Dragon-fly" is associated with legendary Emperor Jimmu, whose honorific name includes "Yamato", as Kamu-yamato Iware-biko.
The 720 Nihon Shoki transcribes Yamato with the Chinese characters 耶麻騰, pronounced in Middle Chinese as and in Old Japanese as ya ma to₂ or ya ma do₂. In this version of the Eight Great Islands myth, Yamato is born second instead of eighth:

Now when the time of birth arrived, first of all the island of Ahaji was reckoned as the placenta, and their minds took no pleasure in it. Therefore it received the name of Ahaji no Shima. Next there was produced the island of Oho-yamato no Toyo-aki-tsu-shima.

The translator Aston notes a literal meaning for the epithet of Toyo-aki-tsu-shima of "rich harvest's" "island".
The c. 600-759 Man'yōshū transcribes various pieces of text using not the phonetic man'yōgana spellings, but rather a logographic style of spelling, based on the pronunciation of the kanji using the native Japanese vocabulary of the same meaning. For instance, the name Yamato is sometimes spelled as 山 + 蹟. Old Japanese pronunciation rules caused the sound yama ato to contract to just yamato.

Government

According to the Chinese record Twenty-Four Histories, Yamatai was originally ruled by the shamaness Queen Himiko. The other officials of the country were also ranked under the queen, with the highest position called ikima, followed by mimasho, then mimagushi, and the lowest-ranking position of nakato. According to the legends, Himiko lived in a palace with 1,000 female handmaidens and one male servant who would feed her. This palace was most likely located at the site of Makimuku in Nara prefecture. She ruled for most of the known history of Yamatai.
After Queen Himiko died, an unknown king became ruler of the country for a short period, and then Queen Toyo reigned before Yamatai disappears from historical records.
According to Japanese historian , the Yamato Kingship collapsed Yamatai in 367, killing its last ruler, Queen .

Pronunciations

Modern Japanese Yamato descends from Old Japanese Yamatö or Yamato₂, which has been associated with Yamatai. The latter umlaut or subscript diacritics distinguish two vocalic types within the proposed eight vowels of Nara period Old Japanese, which merged into the five modern vowels.
During the Kofun period when kanji were first used in Japan, Yamatö was written with the ateji 倭 for Wa, the name given to "Japan" by Chinese writers using a character meaning "docile, submissive". During the Asuka period when Japanese place names were standardized into two-character compounds, the spelling of Yamato was changed to 大倭, adding the prefix Wikt:大.
Following the ca. 757 graphic substitution of 和 for 倭, the name Yamato was spelled 大和, using the Classical Chinese expression 大和
The early Japanese texts above give three spellings of Yamato in kanji: 夜麻登, 耶麻騰, and 山蹟. The Kojiki and Nihon Shoki use Sino-Japanese on'yomi readings of ya Wikt:夜 "night" or ya or ja Wikt:耶, ma Wikt:麻 "hemp", and to Wikt:登 "rise; mount" or do Wikt:騰 "fly; gallop". In contrast, the Man'yōshū uses Japanese kun'yomi readings of yama Wikt:山 "mountain" and ato Wikt:跡 "track; trace". As noted further above, Old Japanese pronunciation rules caused yama ato to contract to yamato.
The early Chinese histories above give three transcriptions of Yamatai: 邪馬壹, 邪馬臺, and 邪摩堆. The first syllable is consistently written with Wikt:邪 "a place name", which was used as a jiajie graphic-loan character for Wikt:耶, an interrogative sentence-final particle, and for 邪 "evil; depraved". The second syllable is written with Wikt:馬 "horse" or Wikt:摩 "rub; friction". The third syllable of Yamatai is written in one variant with Wikt:壹 "faithful, committed", which is also financial form of Wikt:一, "one", and more commonly using Wikt:臺 "platform; terrace" or Wikt:堆 "pile; heap". Concerning the transcriptional difference between the 邪馬壹 spelling in the Wei Zhi and the 邪馬臺 in the Hou Han Shu, Hong cites that 邪馬壹 was correct. Chen Shou, author of the ca. 297 Wei Zhi, was writing about recent history based on personal observations; Fan Ye, author of the ca. 432 Hou Han Shu, was writing about earlier events based on written sources. Hong says the San Guo Zhi uses 壹 86 times and 臺 56 times, without confusing them.

During the Wei period, 臺 was one of their most sacred words, implying a religious-political sanctuary or the emperor's palace. The characters 邪 and 馬 mean "evil; depraved" and "horse", reflecting the contempt Chinese felt for a barbarian country, and it is most unlikely that Chen Shou would have used a sacred word after these two characters. It is equally unlikely that a copyist could have confused the characters, because in their old form they do not look nearly as similar as in their modern printed form. Yamadai was Fan Yeh's creation.

He additionally cites Furuta that the Wei Zhi, Hou Han Shu, and Xin Tang Shu histories use at least 10 Chinese characters to transcribe Japanese to, but 臺 is not one of them.
In historical Chinese phonology, the Modern Chinese pronunciations differ considerably from the original 3rd-7th century transcriptions from a transitional period between Archaic or Old Chinese and Ancient or Middle Chinese. The table below contrasts Modern pronunciations with differing reconstructions of Early Middle Chinese, "Archaic" Chinese, and Middle Chinese. Note that Karlgren's "Archaic" is equivalent with "Middle" Chinese, and his "yod" palatal approximant is replaced with the customary IPA j.
Roy Andrew Miller describes the phonological gap between these Middle Chinese reconstructions and the Old Japanese Yamatö.

The Wei chih account of the Wo people is chiefly concerned with a kingdom which it calls Yeh-ma-t'ai, Middle Chinese i̯a-ma-t'ḁ̂i, which inevitably seems to be a transcription of some early linguistic form allied with the word Yamato. The phonology of this identification raises problems which after generations of study have yet to be settled. The final -ḁ̂i of the Middle Chinese form seems to be a transcription of some early form not otherwise recorded for the final -ö of Yamato.

While most scholars interpret 邪馬臺 as a transcription of pre-Old Japanese yamatai, Miyake cites Alexander Vovin that Late Old Chinese ʑa maaʳq dhəə 邪馬臺 represents a pre-Old Japanese form of Old Japanese yamato₂. Tōdō Akiyasu reconstructs two pronunciations for 䑓 – dai < Middle dǝi < Old *dǝg and yi < yiei < *d̥iǝg – and reads 邪馬臺 as Yamai.
The etymology of Yamato, like those of many Japanese words, remains uncertain. While scholars generally agree that Yama- signifies Japan's numerous yama 山 "mountains", they disagree whether -to < -tö signifies 跡 "track; trace", 門 "gate; door", 戸 "door", 都 "city; capital", or perhaps 所 "place". Bentley reconstructs underlying Wa's endonym *yama-tǝ as underlying the transcription 邪馬臺's pronunciation *ja-maˀ-dǝ > *-dǝɨ.