The Semu ren in the Yuan Empire - who were they? (original) (raw)

The Image of the Semu People: Mongols, Chinese, Southerners, and Various Other Peoples under the Mongol Empire, 西域歴史語言研究集刊, 7, pp. 199-221, 201404

This paper deals with Chinese records on the Saljuqs and interpretations of Chinese terms applied to the Saljuqs, particularly, the term Cengtan 層檀 which was used to the Saljuq Empire in Central Asia, Iran, and Transcaucasia and the term Fulin 拂菻 that was applied to the Saljuq Sultanate in Anatolia.

Full volume available at: https://www.univerlag.uni-goettingen.de/bitstream/handle/3/isbn-978-3-86395-489-5/reckel\_seidenstrasse.pdf?sequence=1& Next to the ultimate source of the Secret History of the Mongols (SH) Sino-barbarian bilingual glossaries also constitute important sources for the history of Inner-Asian languages as well as for the Chinese language itself. Furthermore, they may deepen our overall knowledge about the history of the ethnic groups the language of which they refer to. An interesting layer of the lexicon recorded in such compilations is the vocabulary denoting ethnonyms. Belonging to a special division of the linguistic data these names give invaluable information on the history of the ever-changing political situation of the steppe area from the Yuan to the Qing era. Some ethnonyms seem to have evolved long before the emergence of a similarly named people known from historical records, some have survived long after the time when the underlying peoples had disappeared as political entities, yet other shifted from one ethnic group to another. In this paper, I attempt to give an overview on the ethnonyms appearing in the most important bilingual Sino-Mongol glossaries.

It has often been argued that the Persian language was a lingua franca, and even an official language, of the Yuan empire. A variety of evidence has been adduced for this, including supposed Persian influence on the terminology used by Marco Polo, the use of Persian in letters from Mongol Qa'ans to the Pope, Persian inscriptions on objects from China and Mongolia, and so on. All this evidence is examined, and it is concluded that most of it is illusory, or at least of dubious value. It is argued that Turkic was much more widely spoken and commonly used than Persian. In support of this, it is shown that Turks were probably the single largest group of Semu ren in the Yuan empire, and that many, if not most, of the Muslims in China during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were Turks.

In this paper I discuss the attested names of the so-called "Xiōngnú" in the context of Inner Asian naming practices. I conclude that the term "Xiōngnú" is almost certainly not a pre-existing ethnic term (Inner Asian dynastonyms almost never are). Instead I argue that Qai (which is also the origin of Chinese Hú) is likely the ethnonym of the bulk of the Xiōngnú people, particularly those from Inner Mongolia. The term Xiōngnú, however, is likely a purely political term derived from the ancient form of the name of the Ongi River in Mongolia. Finally I argue that "People (or realm) that draws the bow” (yingongzhi min [or guo] 引弓之民 or 國) is a translation of the term that in Iranian became "Skythian," showing the linkage of the Xiōngnú to the Central Eurasian nomadic tradition.