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The Yuezhi or Rouzhi (, Wade–Giles ''Yüeh-chih'') were an ancient Indo-European people originally settled in an arid grassland area spanning the modern Chinese provinces of Xinjiang and Gansu. After the Yuezhi were defeated by the Xiongnu, in the 2nd century BCE, a small group, known as the Little Yuezhi, fled to the south, while the majority migrated west to the Ili Valley, where they displaced the Sakas (Scythians). Driven from the Ili Valley shortly afterwards by the Wusun, the Yuezhi migrated to Sogdia and then Bactria, where they are often identified with the ''Tókharoi'' (Τοχάριοι) and ''Asioi'' of Classical sources. They then expanded into northern South Asia, where they became unified under one of their five leading branches, who founded the Kushan Empire. The Kushan empire stretched from Turfan in the Tarim Basin to Pataliputra on the Gangetic plain at its greatest extent, and played an important role in the development of the Silk Road and the transmission of Buddhism to China. == Name == Yuezhi is a Chinese exonym, formed from the characters ''yuè'' () "moon" and ''shì'' () "clan". While there are numerous theories about the origin of this name, none has yet found general acceptance.〔''Les Saces: Les « Scythes » d'Asie. VIIIe siècle av. J.-C.−IVe siècle apr. J.-C.'' (2006) Iaroslav Indo-EuropeanEditions Errance, Paris, pp. 240–247〕 According to Zhang Guang-da, the name ''Yuezhi'' is a Sinicized transliteration of a Yuezhi endonym, possibly akin to ''Visha'' ("the tribes") or ''Vèsh'' ("divisions") in modern Pashto and/or ''Vijaya'' in Tibetan.〔''History of civilizations of Central Asia, volume III: Zhang Guang-da, "The city-states of the Tarim Basin, p. 284〕 The relationship between the Yuezhi and other Indo-European peoples who lived in China and Central Asia is often unclear. The Kushans, a people who were among the conquerors of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom during the 2nd century BCE, are widely believed to have originated as a dynastic clan or tribe of the Yuezhi. Some inhabitants of Bactria were known as ''Tukhāra'' (Sanskrit) or ''Tókharoi'' (Τοχάριοι; Greek) – these names became associated with the Kushans and also, consequently, with the Yuezhi. Manuscripts dating from the 6th to 8th centuries CE, and written in two hitherto-unknown ''centum''-type, non-Iranian languages, were discovered by scholars more than a millenium later in the northern Tarim Basin. Assuming that the authors were ''Tókharoi'', Friedrich W. K. Müller referred to these languages as "Tocharian", and this became the common name for both the languages of the Tarim manuscripts and the people who produced them.〔(Tocharian Online: Series Introduction ), Todd B. Krause and Jonathan Slocum, University of Texas as Austin.〕 Most historians now reject the identification of the ''Tókharoi'' (Kushans/Yuezhi) of Bactria with the Tocharians of the Tarim, because the ''Tókharoi'' are not known to have spoken any languages other than Bactrian (a ''satem''-type, Iranian language). Other scholars have suggested, however, that the Kushan Yuezhi may be an example of an invading or colonising elite adopting a local language. That is, they did not necessarily speak Bactrian before arriving in Bactria, and they may previously have spoken the Tocharian languages of the Tarim. In support of this claim, Christopher Beckwith argues that the character 月, usually read as Old Chinese > Mod. ', could have been pronounced in an archaic northwestern dialect as '' *tokwar'' or '' *togwar'', a form that resembles the Bactrian name Toχοαρ (Toχwar ~ Tuχwar) and the medieval form Toχar ~ Toχâr.〔, page 5, footnote #16, as well as pages 380–383 in appendix B.〕 Likewise, Craig Benjamin in ''The Cambridge World History'' (Vol. IV), (2015), points out that "the problem of identifying the Yuezhi ... intersects history and language, since they may have spoken the ''centum'' Indo-European language variant of Tokharian."〔Craig Benjamin, ''The Cambridge World History Volume 4: A World With States Empires and Networks 1200 BCE–900 CE'' (2015); Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 475.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Yuezhi」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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