Language LogChina BabelMy basement is full of unpublished manuscripts. I call it the "Dungeon", because it is dark, dank, and crowded with books and papers — much worse than my office, which has achieved a fabled reputation for its crampedness — and very cold in the winter, though it does have a wonderful bay window on the eastern side where I can look out at the flora, fauna, and foliage to rest my eyes and mind from time to time.
Three of the most significant manuscripts in the Dungeon that remained unpublished for decades are:
1.
West Eurasian and North African Influences on the Origins of Chinese Writing (tentative title) has been alluded to on Language Log several times during the last couple of decades, but I began to think about its main themes already in the 70s. The bulk of the research was done during the 80s, after which I locked it away in a strongbox that I've not touched since them, nor do I have any intention of doing so during the foreseeable future. Why? Because the intellectual infrastructure for serious consideration of such a paradigm-shifting work simply does not exist. Too many, I would even say most, scholars simply cannot accept the possibility of long distance cultural interaction. Back in the 70s and 80s when I laid out my positions, colleagues would say, "You make an interesting case for convincing parallels at the two ends of Eurasia, but how are they connected in the middle?"
When, in the 90s, I brought the Tarim Basin mummies to the attention of the world and undertook deep, broad research on a wide variety of aspects concerning them, I thought that I had discovered the smoking gun in the center of Eurasia. Our (including J. P. Mallory, Elizabeth J. W. Barber, Han Kangxin, et al.) archeological investigations were complemented by the remarkable, long-running series of studies on east-west exchanges by Yu Taishan that were carried out primarily with the use of Chinese historical sources, which he plumbed in a thoroughgoing way that had never been done before (many are available in English translations in
Sino-Platonic Papers, including book-length volumes). But that was insufficient for the obdurate skeptics who also demanded that the dots connecting the two ends to the middle be filled in more decisively (though, in truth, we thought we had already gone a long way toward meeting that challenge).
Then, during the 00s, the situation improved markedly. Andrew Sherratt wrote his seminal "The Trans-Eurasian Exchange: The Prehistory of Chinese Relations with the West", which was published posthumously in Victor H. Mair, ed.,
Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), pp. 30-61, that is especially important for the study of the spread of bronze technology from west to east. A few years later, with a Eurasian-wide purview, the pathbreaking article by Joyce C. White and Elizabeth G. Hamilton, “The transmission of early bronze technology to Thailand: new perspectives”,
Journal of World Prehistory 22 (2009), 357–97 (Google Scholar) appeared.
Then came the 10s, which commenced the penetrating studies by Lucas Christopoulos linking up Greek, Central Asian, and East Asian cultural attributes through minute visual and textual comparisons, and the massive treatises of Brian Pellar on the astronomical derivation of the zodiac and writing systems based thereupon. These researches are bringing us ever closer to the fundamental premises upon which
Origins was predicated.
Just this March (2024), while I was preparing this note, two scintillating new works burst upon the scene that tie east and west together more tightly than ever before:
a. Petya Andreeva,
Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE (Edinburgh: University Press, 2024).
b. Hajni Elias, "The Southwest S[...]