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『東洋文庫所蔵』貴重書デジタルアーカイブ

ALFALFA   211

with this novel plant, and enjoyed the possession of large numbers of celestial horses.' From the palaces this fodder-plant soon spread to the people, and was rapidly diffused throughout northern China. According to Yen si-ku (A.D. 579-645), this was already an accomplished fact during the Han period. As an officinal plant, alfalfa appears in the early work Pie lu.' The Ts'i min yao .fu of the sixth century A.D. gives rules for its cultivation; and T`ao Hun-kin (A.D. 451-536) remarks that "it is grown in gardens at Cain-flan (the ancient capital in sen-si), and is much valued by the northerners, while the people of Kian-nan do not indulge in it much, as it is devoid of flavor. Abroad there is another mu-su plant for healing eye-diseases, but different from this species.''

Can Kien was sent out by the Emperor Wu to search for the Yüe-6i and to close an alliance with them against the Turkish Hiun-nu.. The Yüe-6i, in my opinion, were an Indo-European people, speaking a North-Iranian language related to Scythian, Sogdian, Yagnobi, and Ossetic. In the course of his mission, Can K`ien visited Fergana, Sogdiana, and Bactria, all strongholds of an Iranian population. The "West" for the first time revealed by him to his astounded countrymen was Iranian civilization, and the products which he brought back were thoroughly and typically Iranian. The two cultivated plants (and only these two) introduced by him into his fatherland hailed from Fergana: Ferganian was an Iranian language; and the words for the alfalfa and grape, mu-su and p`u-t'ao, were noted by Can K'ien in Fergana and transmitted to China along with the new cultivations. These words were Ferganian; that is, Iranian.' Can K`ien himself was

an altitude up to nine thousand feet. Cf. S. KORLINSKI, Vegetation of Turkistan (in Russian), p. 51. Russian Turkistan produces the largest supply of alfalfa-seed for export (E. BROWN, Bull. Dep. of Agriculture, No. 138, 1914).

1   ki, Ch. 123.

Cf. Chinese Clay Figures, p. 135.

8 Ceti lei pen ts'ao, Ch. 27, p. 23. It is not known what this foreign species is

4 HIRTH'S theory (Journal Am. Or. Soc., Vol. XXXVII, 1917, p. 149), that the element yüan of Ta-yiian (Fergana) might represent a "fair linguistic equivalent" of Yavan (Yavana, the Indian name of the Greeks), had already been advanced by J. EDKINS (Journal China Branch Roy. As. Soc., Vol. XVIII, 1884, p. 5). To me it seems eccentric, and I regret being unable to accept it. In the T'ang period we have from Hûan Tsai!' a reproduction of the name Yavana in the form M

Yen-mo-na, *Yam-mwa-na (PELLIOT, Bull. de l'Ecole française, Vol. IV, p. 278).

For the Han period we should expect, after the analogy of t   Ye-tiao, *Yap
(Diap)-div (Yavadvipa, Java), a transcription X AS Ye-na, *Yap-na, for Yavana. The term P Yù-yûe, *Yu-vat(var), does not represent a transcription of Yavana, as supposed by CHAVANNES (Mémoires historiques de Se-ma Ts'ien, Vol. IV, 1901, pp. 558-559), but is intended to transcribe the name Y14an (*Yuvar, still employed by the Cam and other peoples of Indo-China as a designation of