Hyperboreans, all the way to the sea.”The Issedones appear to have been
intentionally disseminating false information at least with regard to the one-
eyed people and the griffins. Herodotus notes only:“I cannot get information
from anyone who claims to havefirsthand knowledge.”Ptolemy follows up
on the Issedones by giving them a town, Issedon Scythia, just west of Serica,
which means in the general region of Xinjiang. This appears to make
Aristeas’Hyperboreans the Chinese.
If the Chinese did not trade directly with Herodotus’Scythians, they did
trade with the people of Xinjiang, both nomadic pastoralists and oasis
dwellers, who like the Scythians were Indo-European speakers. Other horse-
breeding nomadic pastoralists initially lived more to the north of the
Chinese, people who were Turkic-Mongolian speakers. They are more diffi-
cult to pinpoint in Herodotus’list of peoples, but their importance to both
their neighbors on the steppe and to the Chinese would steadily grow from
thefirst millenniumBCEon.
In his poem, Aristeas notes that“all these people from the Arimaspians
on, except the Hyperboreans, are constantly attacking their neighbors.”The
consequence of this was usually to dislodge or, less commonly, to absorb or
annihilate one’s neighbors. The earliest of the nomadic peoples to attempt to
create a larger and more stable entity, thefirst true empire builders on the
steppe, were the Xiongnu (“Fierce Slaves,”a name given to them by the
Chinese), whose homeland is thought to have been Mongolia. The Chinese
described them in less thanflattering terms:“The Xiongnu live in the desert
and grow in the land that produces no food. They are the people who are
abandoned by heaven for being good-for-nothing. ...They wear animal
skins, eat meat raw, and drink blood. They wander to meet in order to
exchange goods.”
In the second century BCEthe Xiongnu attacked their neighbors, the
Yuezhi (“Meat Eaters,” another Chinese appellation), an Indo-European
group who had lived for some time in the Gansu Corridor and Xinjiang.
They had been trading partners with the Chinese across the Jade Road and
had provided the Chinese with a buffer against nomadic attacks from the
northwest. According to Ban Gu, the Yuezhi had “more than 100,000
trained bowmen and for this reason they relied on their strength and
thought lightly of the Xiongnu.”This was a mistake; the Yuezhi proved no
match for the Xiongnu as Sima Qian reports:“The Xiongnu overcame the
king of the Yuezhi and made a drinking vessel out of his skull. The Yuezhi
decamped and were hiding somewhere, constantly scheming how to revenge
themselves on the Xiongnu.”
Following their defeat, the Yuezhi movedfirst to the Ili River valley far to
the northwest (in Kazakhstan), where they were attacked by another tribe,
the Wusun, and chased to Lake Issyk Kul (in Kyrgyzstan). From there the
Yuezhi moved farther west to the Oxus River valley (Amu Darya in
Uzbekistan), then south across the Hindu Kush (through Afghanistan) and
From the Jade Road to the Silk Road 127