Wusun, a Caucasian people in China

 

The Wusun (烏孫 lit: "Grandchildren of The Crow") were a nomadic steppe people who, according to the Chinese histories, originally lived in western Gansu in northwest China west of the Yuezhi people.

 

According to Chinese archaeologists the excavated skeletal remains of the presumed Wusun people are of the short-headed Europoid Central Asian interfluvial type.

 

The 7^th century commentary to the Hanshu by Yan Shigu says: "Among the various Rong [alien races] in the Western Regions, the Wusun's shape was the strangest; and the present barbarians who have green eyes and red hair, and are like macaques, belonged to the same race as the Wusun."

 

Wusun is a modern pronunciation of the hieroglyphs 烏孫. Originally, Wusun sounded probably more like Asman (*ah-sman < *asman^[13], or *o-sən, *uo-sen or ?ah-swē depending on the authors) suggesting that they may have been the Asii of Geographica.^[14]

As you read here: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Asman

 

 

From Old Persian 𐎠𐎿𐎶𐎠𐎴𐎶 (asman-, “sky”).

 

 

For some time, it was theorized that the Wusun spoke a Proto-Turkic language. Some scholars, including Chinese scholar Han Rulin, as well as G. Vambery, A. Scherbak, P. Budberg, L. Bazin and V.P. Yudin, noted that the Wusun king's name Fu-li, as reported in Chinese sources and translated as "wolf", resembles Proto-Turkic "böri" = "wolf". Other words listed by these scholars include the title "bag/beg" = "lord".^[18]

However, this theory is contradicted by some Turkologists, including Peter B. Golden^[19] and Carter V. Findley, who explain that none of the mentioned words are actually Turkic in origin. Carter V. Findley notes that the term böri is probably derived from one of the Indo-European Iranian languages of Central Asia,^[20] while the title beg is certainly derived from the Sogdian baga^[21] ("lord"), a cognate of Middle Persian baγ (as used by the rulers of the Sassanid Empire), as well as Sanskrit bhaga and Russian bog.^[22]

It is evident from Chinese sources that Scythian Sai (Saka) and the Yuezhi who are often identified as Tocharians were among the people of the Wusun state Zhetysu,^[23] and some scholars have also tried to identify the Wusun with the Issedones of Herodotus, an Iranian tribe related to the Scythians of antiquity. But this remains uncertain (see below),^[24] as it is very difficult to identify the Wusun with the "Tokharian category of Indo-European".