Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China. E. N. Anderson

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      Finally, a fatefully important, putative phylum for Asian history is the Altaic, including the Turkic, Mongol, and Tungusic families. These three branches are very distantly related, if they are related at all. Much doubt has been cast on whether there really is an Altaic phylum. (It was once extended even farther, to include Korean and Japanese, but very few linguistic scholars accept this now, and evidence is overwhelmingly against it.) The Mongol languages show rather puzzling similarities not only to Turkic but also to Uralic and IE languages, ranging from such startling word resemblances as minii “mine,” to the Mongol noun case system’s similarities to Russian and Finnish (as opposed to Turkic, which structures these things differently). However, these similarities are notably lacking in pattern, indicating that they are likely borrowed. Those not borrowed very possibly have an older common origin in the “Nostratic” universe. Mongol has three roots for “I, me” (bi, min-, and na-), and all of them sound like pronouns in various languages all over the world (cf. Yucatec Maya in “I, mine”). Is this evidence for Proto-World (as some maintain) or merely a result of these being extremely easy sounds for the human mouth to make? People tend to save energy when talking—“television” becomes “TV”—and the commonest words, especially those much used by children, naturally become short and simple.

      The Turks and Mongols certainly nomadized, camped, and fought side by side for thousands of years. They also lived near Uralic peoples, and had early contacts with the Tocharians and probably other Indo-Europeans. Mutual influence was inevitable. The basic vocabularies of Mongolian and Turkic languages, however, do not show any believable relationship. No one can miss the similarities of English one, two, three, Latin unum, duo, tres, and Sanskrit eka, dva, tri, and there are hundreds of other such sets of cognates, even for quite complex concepts (Celtic ri, Latin rex, Sanskrit raja, …), in Indo-European. But try to find any similarities between (Khalkha) Mongolian neg, khoyor, gurvan and Turkish bir, iki, üç, “one, two, three.” The basic vocabulary words in the Mongol and Turkic languages are usually very different—unless they are so similar that they must be recent borrowings. On the other hand, there are some very deep and basic cognates, including the word for milk. The word for water is close—su in Turkic, us in modern Mongol—but Chinese is similar too (shui from earlier söi or swu). Perhaps we are looking at a very ancient common origin and a great deal of subsequent mutual influence. In any case, the idea that Turkic, Mongol, and Tungusic are related in an Altaic phylum seems extremely shaky, if not downright defunct (Vovin 2005).

      Color words are as confusing as in English: just as English has half Germanic (blue, white) and half French (violet, purple), modern Mongol has basically Turkic loans for black, yellow, and deep blue, but utterly un-Turkic words for white, red, and gray, and even a thoroughly un-Turkic word for blue (now used for pale blue). The borrowing for deep blue is significant: it refers to the sacred blue of Heaven (medieval Turkic gök, Mongol kök, now khokh; the change from k to kh pronounced like the ch in German ich is standard in modern Khalkh Mongolian). The native word tsenkher refers basically to nonsacred blue. Anyone familiar with Mongolia will know the sky-blue silk scarfs wrapped around every venerable tree, rock, cairn, shrine, and other object (including the occasional telephone pole) that is sacred, fortunate, or deserving of spiritual respect. Borrowing the Turkic word for the sacred color may indicate respect for Turkic cultural forms in the early medieval period, when the Gök Turkic Empire ruled Mongolia and much of Central Asia.

      The Altaic phylum, or cluster, bears the name of the Altai Mountains, where it supposedly originated. If it did not originate there, at least the Turkic languages apparently did. All these languages come from the cold steppes and forests of high Central Asia. The Altaic peoples emerge into history fairly late but were obviously active much earlier, having quickly acquired nomadic herding and riding, presumably from Indo-Europeans.

      The Altaic peoples have shown a truly astonishing ability to build huge empires. The Mongol Empire is only the most conspicuous of many. Turkic, though not the other languages, has shown a monumental ability to flourish at the expense of local languages. Millions of square miles of formerly IE and other languages’ territory are now Turkic speaking. There are parts of Turkey that in historic times have switched from Hittite to Phrygian to Greek to Turkish—yet archaeology reveals no change in the people themselves. They were and are genetically the same lineages. They switched languages according to who had most recently conquered them.

      Similar, if less complicated, language shifts are almost universal in Central Asian history, as elsewhere. Conquered peoples usually pick up the languages of their conquerors, but if the conquerors are few in number, the reverse takes place. In China, the spread of Chinese languages within historic times has led to linguistic absorption of many Thai, Miao, Yao-Mian, Austronesian, and others. Often, these older languages leave traces. Cantonese, in particular, seems to have begun as a form of Tang Dynasty Chinese spoken by Thai people; its tone system, much of its vocabulary (remember kai), and other traits reflect the massive linguistic acculturation of the Zhuang and other Thai-related minorities in historic times. This sort of linguistic acculturation guarantees that any language phylum is going to include languages spoken by very diverse peoples.

      It is certain that the Chinese languages proper have expanded with the Chinese state. The core of geographic China became Chinese speaking by the Shang Dynasty. The state of Chu, in and around what is now Hunan, seems to have originally spoken various Thai-Kadai languages. It became Chinese speaking in the latter part of the first millennium BCE—first among the elite, later—slowly—among all. With the spread of the Chinese-speaking groups, several very different languages developed: Cantonese, Shanghainese (Wu), Hakka, two or more Fujianese languages, Gan, Xiang, and so on. These have often been miscalled dialects for political reasons: political leaders have generally promoted the dominant and by far the most widely spoken language, Mandarin or Guoyu (“National Language”). A dialect is, correctly, a subvariant of a language—not a language in its own right. Guoyu is now rapidly replacing local languages and their (actual) dialects. This is, demonstrably, a huge loss to local cultures, literature, the arts, and free expression.

      As with the term “China” in its geographical sense, referring to the inhabitants of the region as “the Chinese” or “the Chinese people” before the Qin Dynasty is technically wrong. I try to avoid it but obviously do not always succeed. From Qin on, there is the problem of whether one is using “the Chinese” to mean the linguistic Chinese, or the people of the Chinese state, or the people of the geographical region called China. I usually try to stick with language, but consistency is simply impossible, if only because one must quote sources that use the term quite differently. The linguistic Chinese are now called the Han Chinese, from the Han Dynasty. However, many of the citizens of the Han empire were Tai, Yao, Miao, Vietnamese, Austronesian, Mongol, proto-Turkic, and so on and on. Some spoke languages now extinct and unclassified, like the language of the Xiongnu. So “Han” is as misleading a term as “Chinese.” However, it is established, and I cannot escape it.

       The Origins of Agriculture

      After humans managed to do without agriculture for around 150,000 years, they suddenly invented it in at least five places (perhaps more) almost at once. These were quite independent inventions. “Agriculture” is defined as food production based on domesticates, that is, plants and animals significantly changed by human selection from any wild ancestors. The selection can be deliberate or accidental, but it is usually deliberate. (Claims that inventing agriculture was an accidental or semi-accidental process are simply not credible; Asouti and Fuller 2013. The most accessible and accurate critique of theories of agriculture is Barker 2006. See also E. Anderson 2011.)

      Long ago, V. Gordon Childe (1954) famously wrote of three key revolutions in human history: Neolithic, Urban, and Industrial. The Industrial does not concern us in this book, and the Urban will be treated later. As to the Neolithic: Childe followed the archaeology of his day in thinking that agriculture, СКАЧАТЬ