Tarim manuscripts hid an unexpected Indo-European branch
Around 7,600 manuscripts dug up on the northern rim of the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang preserve the Tocharian languages, an Indo-European group nobody knew existed until the early twentieth century. Stranger still, these tongues spoken deep in Inner Asia look closest to the ancestors of Germanic and Italic.
Farming villages appeared in the northern Tarim oases around 2000 BC, and by the second century BC they had grown into city-states, Kucha the largest, serving as way stations on the Silk Road branch along the Taklamakan’s northern edge. Xiongnu, Han, Tibetan, and Tang rulers took turns in control, and from the eighth century Turkic-speaking Uyghurs settled and founded the Kingdom of Qocho. Tocharian is thought to have died out in the ninth century.
The manuscripts, dated roughly 400 to 1200 AD and found at about 30 sites, were easy to read because they used a variant of the already deciphered Brahmi script. They record two related but mutually unintelligible languages. Tocharian A, from Agni and Turpan, survives in about 500 studied texts, mostly from monasteries, and may have been purely liturgical; Tocharian B, around Kucha, fills over 3,200 and seems to have been spoken daily. Shared vocabulary for cattle, horses, wheat, gold, and wheeled vehicles reflects an old Indo-European inheritance, and the lack of satem sound changes points to an early split from eastern relatives.
The name is a mistake that stuck. Friedrich W. K. Müller linked an Old Turkic phrase for the language of the Togari with the Tókharoi, who overran Bactria in the second century BC, but Bactria’s people spoke Bactrian, an Iranian language. What the Tocharians called themselves is unknown; Ārśi and Kuśi are candidates. Their kings styled themselves with a title matching the Kushan Son of God.
Origins remain disputed. J. P. Mallory and Victor Mair favour migrants from the Afanasievo culture of the Altai (3300–2500 BC), and burials near Dzungaria around 200 BC show 20–80% Yamnaya-like ancestry, though the Tarim mummies proved genetically unrelated. When the monk Xuanzang reached Kucha in 630, he counted about a hundred monasteries with more than five thousand monks.
Source: Tocharians
