Yancai Erotic

The Yancai were a nomadic people of the steppe near the Aral Sea and the northern Caspian. Chinese records from the 2nd century BCE to the 3rd century CE describe them, and later sources count them among the Alans, whose surviving descendants are the Ossetians of the North Caucasus. The Yancai never wrote about themselves. What we know comes from Han diplomats and historians looking west from the far end of the Silk Road, so the picture is sketched from a great distance, though in some places it is sharper than you would expect.

The first account came from Zhang Qian's reports, kept in Sima Qian's Shiji. It placed the Yancai about 2,000 li northwest of Kangju, the steppe power on the middle Syr Darya, and called them a xingguo, a moving state: a country that went wherever its herds went. They had more than 100,000 archers and lived beside a huge body of water with no visible shore, which the historian guessed might be the Northern Sea. Scholars still argue over whether that meant the Aral or the Caspian. Later sources add detail. The Weilüe says the Yancai had once been weak and subject to Kangju but no longer were, that they moved with water and pasture, and that their land was famous for sables. The Hou Hanshu reports that they had renamed their state Alanliao, lived in towns, dressed and lived much like the people of Kangju and fell under its authority. It also notes a mild climate with plenty of pines and white grass.

Scholars who reconstruct the older pronunciation of the name have long linked the Yancai to the Aorsi. The Aorsi were a Sarmatian confederation that Strabo placed between the Don and the Caspian. He described them as rich enough to wear gold and said they traded Indian and Babylonian goods carried by camel. Most scholars accept the link, but it is not proven. If it holds, the Yancai spoke an Eastern Iranian language related to Scythian. The new name would then mean they joined a larger and more aggressive steppe alliance, not that they disappeared.

That alliance traveled far. Alans raided Parthia and Armenia and settled across the North Caucasus, and some went on into Gaul, Iberia and North Africa alongside the Vandals. Ossetian, still spoken in Russia and Georgia, is the living remnant of that line. The Yancai stand out because they are one of the few peoples described by both Chinese and Greco-Roman geographers, each writing without knowledge of the other from opposite ends of Eurasia.