90. Erickson, Yi, and Nylan (2010: 166).
91. Munger and Frelinghuysen (2003).
92. Francis (2002: 57). Geographical distance is only part of the story. Distance from the potential owner in terms of cost is also a factor: a Gucci handbag is valued in China and Italy, even though manufactured in the former and branded to the latter.
93. For a description of Han tombs, see Erickson (2010: esp. 13–15).
94. Belt hooks are often also made of jade, so this one was probably emulating jade. As mentioned above, belt hooks were not part of traditional Chinese clothing.
95. See van Giffen (n.d.); Craddock (2009: 235).
96. Exemplifying the dichotomous and therefore inevitably simplified interpretation of the Silk Road as linking China and Rome (see Whitfield 2008).
97. See Braghin (2002) for a discussion of this and Shen Hsueh-man (2002) for an inventory of glass in later Buddhist stupas in China.
THREE
A Hoard of Kushan Coins
IN THE SIXTH CENTURY a Christian church and monastery were built on the top of a steep-sided plateau in the highlands of what was then the kingdom of Axum (ca. 100–940), in present-day Ethiopia (plate 2). It is possible there was an existing shrine at the site, although no traces are recorded. Among the treasures found in the monastery grounds was a hoard of over a hundred gold coins, possibly contained within a wooden casket decorated with gold and green stone. The coins had been minted at the heart of the Silk Road when the Kushan Empire united Central Asia. They ranged in date from the early second century to the beginning of the third century.1 The earliest showed signs of wear, but the newest—six gold staters of Vasudeva I (r. 190–230)—were in mint condition, suggesting they were probably taken to Axum during or shortly after his reign. Why, where, and how were the coins first minted, how did they travel to East Africa, and why did they end up in this Christian setting? And where are they now? To try to answer these questions, let us start their story in their homeland with the rise of the Kushan Empire in the first century AD and the Kushan use of coinage.
THE KUSHAN EMPIRE
The rise of the Kushan, like that of many Silk Road empires, is linked to the movement of peoples across the ecological rift that separates northern from
For places mentioned in this chapter see Map 4 in the color maps insert.
southern Eurasia (see chapter 1). Northern Eurasia, which David Christian has called “Inner Eurasia” but which is also called “Inner Asia,” has an arid continental climate that cannot support large areas of sustained agriculture. Much of Inner Eurasia has long been home to peoples surviving by varying mixtures of agriculture and pastoralism, moving in search of pasture one or more times a year, and creating small settlements.2 Christian calls the border with Outer Eurasia—a land of settled people living primarily from agriculture and with large cities—“the dynamo of Inner Eurasian history.”3 One such group of agricultural pastoralists living in Inner Eurasia were called the Yuezhi by Chinese historians.4 They were a group of tribes living around the Tianshan (Heavenly Mountains), including in the Hexi corridor of what is now northwestern China. Attempts have been made to link the Yuezhi to the burials from an earlier period found in the Tarim basin to the west, but without further evidence such connections remain hypothetical. We can only speculate on the Yuezhi’s language and ethnicity, if indeed they were one people.5 When we do read about the Yuezhi in Chinese histories, it is after they have been pushed out of the Hexi corridor by invaders from the north. These were another confederation of steppe pastoralists, named the Xiongnu in Chinese (see chapter 1), who in the third century expanded their territory south across the Gobi Desert and into the Yuezhi homelands.6
For this early history we have to rely almost exclusively on the Chinese records.7 But these were informed by firsthand accounts, primarily that of the imperial envoy Zhang Qian (d. 113 BC). He was sent in 138 BC by the Chinese emperor to seek an alliance with the Yuezhi against the Xiongnu, who were also pushing at the northwest borders of China. It is his intelligence on his return to China that informs Shiji, the great work of the so-called first historian of China, Sima Qian, and Hanshu, the subsequent history of the Former Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 9). The latter was compiled by Ban Biao and his son and daughter Ban Gu and Ban Zhao. Ban Biao had another son, Ban Chao, who also contributed his knowledge. Ban Chao rose high in the military, fought several decades of battles against the Xiongnu alliance, and became “protector general of the Western Regions.” From the Han onwards the chapter on the “Western Regions” was to remain a mainstay of Chinese official histories.
We are told in the biography of Zhang Qian in these same histories that he was captured by tribes loyal to the Xiongnu alliance on his journey out and managed to escape only after a decade, having married a local woman and fathered a son. He reached the Yuezhi in 126 BC, and it is from his accounts given in the histories that we learn of their exodus:8 “The Yuezhi originally lived in the area between the Qilian or Heavenly Mountains and Dunhuang, but after they were defeated by the Xiongnu they moved far away to the west, beyond Dayuan [Ferghana Valley], where they attacked and conquered the people of Daxia [Bactria] and set up the court of their king on the northern bank of the Gui [Oxus] River.”9
Elsewhere in the histories the account is expanded. It is recorded that the Xiongnu killed a Yuezhi ruler and that the son of Modu, the Xiongnu leader, used his skull as a drinking cup. Some Yuezhi moved south, but most, it is recorded, first fled north across the Tianshan to settle in the Ili and Chu valleys—now on the borders of Kazakhstan and China.10 When Zhang Qian embarked on his mission, he might have believed that they still lived in this region, close to the western borders of Xiongnu territory. However, probably around the middle of the second century BC, the Yuezhi were pushed out of this new homeland by other invaders from the steppe, called the Wusun in the Chinese accounts, and moved west again. They eventually settled in the land between the Sogdians—who lived north of the Amu Darya (Oxus)—and the Bactrians, who lived in the region just to the south of the river, in present-day northern Afghanistan. This was a long way from their old enemies, and Zhang Qian’s mission thus became longer than expected. But his journey further west in search of them was to result in intelligence that is traditionally seen as an impetus for the Chinese expansion into Central Asia.11
Zhang Qian spent a year with the Yuezhi and in Bactria to the south of the Amu Darya. He must have had many tales to tell on his return. Unfortunately, Chinese histories are terse, giving only brief descriptions of each foreign people.12 That in the Shiji for the Yuezhi simply reads: “They are a nation of nomads, moving place to place with their herds and their customs are like those of the Xiongnu. They have some 100,000 or 200,000 archer warriors.”13
The Chinese histories also suggest that the Yuezhi had conquered the lands immediately to the south of the Amu Darya, including the Hellenistic city of Balkh (see chapter 5), but that they remained a confederation with many leaders:
Daxia is located over 2,000 li southwest of Dayuan, south of the Gui river. Its people cultivate the land and have cities and houses. Their customs are like those of Dayuan. It has no great ruler but only a number of petty chiefs ruling the various cities. The people are poor in the use of arms and afraid of battle, but they are clever at commerce. After the Great Yuezhi moved west and attacked the lands, the entire country came under their sway. The population of the country is large, numbering some 1,000,000 or more persons. The capital is called the city of Lanshi [Balkh] and has a market where all sorts of goods are bought and sold.14
Here we see a group of agro-pastoralists of Inner