April 29, 2025 • 42 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss shield walls, the Roman tetsudo and a largely discredited but still interesting hypothesized example of military contact between the Roman Empire and the Chinese Han Dynasty.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
In this episode, I'd like to take us back to
the year thirty six VCE. So at this point we
have two of the most powerful kingdoms of the day
ruling over their respective spheres of influence. So in the
West we have the Roman Republic on the cusp of
collapse into the Roman Empire, and there at the time
(00:38):
in control of much of the Mediterranean coast, including all
or significant portions of the Italian Peninsula Sicily, Sardinia, Hispania, Gaul, Ireicum, Macedonia, Greece,
Asia Minor Syria, Judea, Cyprus, Crete, and parts of coastal
northern Africa. And then in the East we have the
(01:00):
Chinese Han dynasty controlling an even a larger territory that
consisted of much of modern day China, with a significant
expansion into western regions of this area. So each empire
was the most consequential of its day within its sphere
of influence, though they were hardly mirror images of each other.
The Roman Republic was in a very fragile state on
(01:21):
the verge of collapse into the Roman Empire, and it's
going to continue to experience threats to its stability from
that point onward. While the Han dynasty was somewhat consolidated
and stable, with a complex bureaucracy in place to solidify
its emperor's rule, it's also worth stressing that the Han
dynasty also clearly had longevity on its side at this point,
(01:44):
having existed from around two p six BCE. Interestingly enough,
each was ruled to a certain extent by some form
of unofficial triumvirate at the time, Rome by the first
Triumvirate of Caesar, Crassus and Pump and the Han Empire
was sometimes administered by something like triumvirate, most specifically in
(02:07):
the form of the three Excellencies who would run things
of the emperor happened to be very young. But again,
the Roman situation was an unsteady alliance of the day,
and the Chinese version we're seeing here was more of
a baked in aspect of imperial rule. At some point,
I'd like to come back and explore the idea of
rule by three in general is kind of like to
(02:29):
what extent it works or doesn't work in human governance
and so forth. Now, why are we talking about the
Romans and the Han dynasty. Obviously we're going to get
to contemplations of and hypotheses, maybe even wild hypotheses, about
how they might have come into contact with each other.
And I have to acknowledge something that I remember playing
(02:50):
as a kid. Maybe you played this when you're younger
as well. I think it's still around in various forms,
but the Age of Empire's real time strategy video games.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Yeah, I remember that. I didn't play it much, but
I remember it was popular among like my friends when
I was in middle school, and it did seem cool
because you could make historical empires or peoples that never
would have really had reason to have much interaction with
each other. You could make them clash.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Yes, yeah, and so it was. It was you know,
I haven't played in a long time, so I can't
really do a deep analysis of it, but you know,
at least on the surface, it was interesting that you
were generating interest about these various times and places by
putting them in oftentimes unreal proximity to each other, like
very unreal, like there's a river between the two of them.
(03:39):
And then engaging in combat. And in my experience, it
was like, well, what would happen if whichever empire I
picked a command fell to, I don't know, the Aztecs,
because I could never play these things correctly. I would
just feel overwhelmed and would inevitably be destroyed. But again,
in these games, it makes it seem and I'm you know,
and it's an artificial construct, you know, it could make
(04:00):
it seem as if well, there's really not that much
distance between these two empires in time or in space,
but in this particular instance, talking about the Han Chinese
and the Romans, the distance between the two empires, particularly
for this day and age, was quite vast.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Especially with other empires in between.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
That's right, Yeah, there were at least two major empires
in between as well. We'll mention here. So the Roman Roads,
the famous Roman Roads, did not directly link Roman China.
There was trade along the Silk Road that unofficially, I guess,
did sort of stitch the two together. There was definitely
trade awareness and perhaps a distant military awareness I've read,
(04:46):
but each existed well outside of each other's sphere of
influence and in between them. Yeah, as we're discussing here,
you had various Central Asian kingdom's nomadic groups, and a
particular note to what we'll be discussing here, you had
the Parthian Empire, which lasted from two forty seven u
BCE to two twenty four CE, and this empire controlled
(05:09):
modern day Iran and much of Mesopotamia and was heavily
invested in the Silk Road. This empire was preceded by
the Solucid Empire and ultimately succeeded by the Susanian Empire,
which we've talked about on the show before. You can
look up various maps of what these territories looked like.
I found one from a bit later for our notes here, Joe,
(05:31):
and you know, I encourage folks to look up on
I think the one we're looking at here is from
one hundred CE, so not one hundred percent accurate of
what we're talking about, but it gives like sort of
a basic shape, and you get to see a sizable
amount of territory between these two empires.
Speaker 3 (05:48):
Just to be clear for the folks at home, you're
talking about a map representing one hundred CE, not from.
Speaker 4 (05:53):
The year right.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Correct. This is a modern map that has been you know,
augmented to represent the you know, the rough boundary zone
of these different kingdoms and empires.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
Right, because the interesting thing being, at the time, probably
no one person could have combined a map with all
the geographical knowledge to represent the land masses between like
Portugal to Korea as we have here.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Yeah. Yeah, and the and distant kingdoms, distant empires were
truly distant, and there might just not be much known
about them at all. And more would of course be
known about your immediate neighbors, neighbors that you probably had
to deal with in terms of trade, in terms of
various military conflicts. So on the Roman side of things,
the Parthian Empire was a far greater immediate concern, and
(06:38):
even beyond then you had the Kushan Empire. And for
the Chinese it was, you know, essentially the reverse, though
their relationships were more but with the more immediate Kushan
were more cooperative. Apparently, conflict with various nomadic groups were
more of a common threat for these two, and so
contact between the Roman and Han empires basically remained a
(07:01):
distant one, handled through intermediaries among the Parthians and the Kashans,
as well as generally through the Silk Road, but their
knowledge of each other again was incomplete, even as their
respective interests continued to creep out closer and closer to
each other. And it's this is one of the I
think the fascinating things about this historical scenarios. It's so
(07:21):
different from the interconnected world that we know today, where
you know, there are places that are still very distant
to us for various reasons, and it may not even
be purely geographical distance. It could be informational distance and
cultural distance and so forth, and various other factors could
be involved. But like this was a time where something
(07:42):
like two kingdoms away it almost didn't exist. It almost
took on maybe almost kind of mythical energy. Now that's
not to say there were not at least some recorded
attempts at direct contact. One of them is mentioned in
the book China History by British historian John Key. Though
it occurred this occurs sometime after the period we're looking at,
(08:03):
This would be ninety seven CE, and this is when
the Chinese sent a mission to tashin a distant realm
with an apparently insatiable appetite for Chinese silk. According to
Qi and he points out that this was likely Rome,
or at least its easternmost provinces, but the mission ends
up being detained in Parthia, likely by parties with a
(08:25):
vested interest in preventing any direct trade between Rome and
the Han dynasty, because there's simply too much money to
be made as the middleman in trade between these two.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
Right, If you are currently making money as the station
house in the middle of the exchange, you don't want
to connect the parties on either side of you directly.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Right, So that seems to be at least one of
the stumbling blocks that occurred whenever direct communication was really attempted.
It's possible that there's something else in the history books
that I didn't come across, in which there was an
attempted connection. But as far as I know, not much
ever came together. But if we look to the world
(09:03):
of highly hypothetical interpretations of ambiguous literary data, it's possible
we could maybe find something right. And that's what we're
going to be talking about a little bit here today. Let's,
first of all, let's look to fifty three BCE. So
(09:23):
I mentioned the Roman triumvirate, of which Roman general and
statesman Crassus was a member. He assumed Syria as is
Roman province, but he apparently wanted more, perhaps perhaps in particular,
he wished to rival the military successes of Caesar and Pompey,
so he launched a military campaign against the Parthian Empire
that suffered from refusal to cooperate with allies, as well
(09:45):
as a deliberate misinformation campaign against his incursion. As a result,
his forces were outmatched at the Battle of Kari. This
was this would be modern day Heron and what is
now Turkey, and they suffered a disastrous defeat. Crassus himself
lost his life. Later tellings of this would claim that
(10:06):
the Parthians poured molten gold down his throat. I think
we mentioned this in a previous episode, but this was
likely a later Roman fiction. I think most historians contend.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
But absolutely true that the Romans did not do well there.
I think some of the troops escaped, but the majority
of them were either killed or taken prisoner.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Right, So that's fifty three PCE. Fast forwarding now to
thirty six PC. This is where we're getting to our
outside hypothesis here. This is where we get into this
mysterious affair of shields like fish scales. So, looking here
at a nineteen forty one paper titled an Ancient Military
(10:48):
Contact between Romans and Chinese by Homer H. Dubs, this
paper lays out the scenario. So, looking at Chinese histories
of the time period, we have this situation where allegedly
the Protector General of the Chinese Western Frontier Regions in
Chinese Turkestan named Chin Tang ventures into Sogdia or Sogdiana
(11:14):
to put down a Hun warlord whose whose name is
difficult to pronounce. To be to be clear, we think
it's I was reading something it sounded maybe it's like giorjur,
and I think you were finding it, maybe more like
with more of a C sound. But maybe the it's
somewhere between a J and a C that our lips
(11:34):
can't quite form. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
In his paper, Dubs spells his name c H I
H c H I H like Chi Chi, and but
I've seen the name spelled elsewhere in the scientific paper
that I'm going to talk about later, which is going
to disagree with this hypothesis being put forward by Dubbs,
they anglicize his name j z H j z H
so I'm I think it is that Chi Chi or
(11:58):
something like that.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Ye. Either way, you pronounced that he was definitely a
rising figure in this sort of region where different powers met.
He'd previously killed a Chinese envoy and he was then
invited by the King of Sogdia to come and help
deal with some nomadic threats that they were facing. But
he also was seemingly amassing power, demanding tributes from tribes
(12:23):
under Chinese protection, and generally just become an increasing threat
to Chinese interests in the region.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
He was trying to set up his own thing.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Yeah, and so the Protector General here gathers his troops
along with some auxiliary forces, and he sets out to
attack this new city that this warlord is set up.
And it's here we learned from these various accounts sent
back to the Hunt Emperor that they encountered something perhaps strange.
They saw strange soldiers fighting on behalf of the Hunt
(12:51):
warlord that would have been basically would have mounted to
like a more than one hundred foot soldiers lined up
on either side of the city gate in some sort
of fish scale formation. They apparently included illustrations, and I
hope I'm inferring this correctly. But I don't think the
illustrations themselves survived. I think what survived are histories written
(13:13):
later based in part on these illustrations that were sent back.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
Yes, it is a weirdly indirect method of information we're
getting here. But Dubbs does explain in his paper here
that the information about what this military formation looks like
comes from a Chinese text called the History of the
Former Han Dynasty that itself says it got its information
(13:39):
about this from paintings of the battle that were sent
that were sent back to the Imperial court, and so
somebody who saw the battle allegedly painted what it looked like,
and then it is described in this history. The paintings
are described as having more than one hundred foot soldiers quote,
(13:59):
lined up on either side of the gate in a
fish scale formation. So that is the particular visual detail
in the description of the painting of the battle that
Dubs is trying to explain here, with the fish scale
formation of the soldiers. What does that mean? It is
taken to refer to shields, which I guess is our
(14:20):
broader point here.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
That's right, that's right. Dubs contends that what they're talking
about with fish scale formation is a shield wall, and
not just any shield wall, he argues, but that of
a Roman shield wall, the formation known as the testudo
or tortoise that Romans would utilize. And his argument is
(14:45):
that these were surviving Roman soldiers from the Battle of
Ki who were now long since employed as foreign mercenaries.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Now, this probably is a good place to flag. We've
already alluded to this, but a good place to flag
again that Dubbs's proposal here is highly speculative and relies
on a bunch of assumptions that are not strongly in evidence.
It's an interesting idea, but it's far from certain or
certainly not as certain as Dubbs will claim it is
(15:16):
by the end of his paper. And also, you know,
not to say that it isn't worth talking about. But
this is one of those ideas where this has come
up on the show before, where it's like a proposal
of something that's really radically interesting and unique and might
gain a kind of epistemic advantage from that, like it's, oh,
(15:37):
it's so cool. The idea that the ancient Chinese and
the ancient Romans happened to may have happened to meet
each other in battle at one point, and we've got
a theory explaining how that could have happened. That would
be such an interesting idea. The mind kind of wants
it to be true and thus views any claim of
evidence on behalf of it maybe unfairly favorably. So just
(16:00):
to keep that in mind as we continue discussing it.
Certainly is worth talking through this idea, but it's one
of the many examples of don't let the cool idea
overwhelm your epistemics.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
That's right, if true, it's amazing, but don't abbreviate that
to just it's amazing or it's amazing and probably true.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
No, no, Now.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
In the second episode we do We're gonna get, We're
gonna come back and discuss shield walls and particularly the
test Tuto in greater detail. But just a reminder here
if you're not picturing what we're talking about. This was
a shield wall formation that the Romans use that generally
featured both a front and a top of overlapping protective
shields in a layer something that does look like scales,
(16:55):
and this would and sometimes the sides are well sides,
sometimes all side, depending on the description, would be covered
as well. It made use of the Roman scutum shield,
which show was these big, kind of like semi cylindrical
but otherwise kind of rectangular shields that the Roman soldiers had.
(17:15):
And it's also worth stressing that this was not the
default Roman shield formation, but this is one that they
could use in cases where they're having to endure sustained
heavy projectile fire, such as while approaching walls during a siege,
that sort of thing.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
Yeah, that's right, So imagine, Yeah, you're trying to maneuver
around at the bottom of the wall of your enemy's fortifications.
It makes sense to form this tight interlocked shield formation
above your heads because they're going to be throwing stuff
down at you.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Right, But does it make sense to use it all
the time? No, and we'll get into some of the
reasons why in the next episode. But it is certainly
iconic of the Romans. The Romans did use it. You
see it pop up in Roman depictions of their own troops. Lubbs.
His contention here is that while other forces use shield
wall formations, only the Romans use shields big enough to
(18:06):
generate on effect that could be described as looking like
fish scales, and he also contended that quote, the only
professional soldiers at the time of whom regular formations are
recorded were Greeks and Romans, and then he makes the
argument that Greek shields were round, and he argues too
small to create the sort of shield formation, so it
(18:26):
absolutely had to be the Romans. And therefore what we
have here is direct military conflict between Roman troops granted
no longer serving the Roman Empire or Republic, and soldiers
of the Hun dynasty.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Now, based on just everything we've talked about so far,
this is a really interesting suggestion. So the facts we're
combining are the ancient Chinese historical account based on paintings
of the battle, which again I think we don't have
the paintings, but we have the description of the formation
of soldiers with these shields interlocked like fish scales, and
the fact that that would pretty well describe certain types
(19:04):
of shield maneuvers that were done by the ancient Romans,
and that their shields in particular would have been good
at creating the effect to described, And also the fact
that we know from the first century BCE a large
contingent of Romans were captured by the Parthian Empire after
this battle. In southeastern Turkey, and it says that they
(19:28):
were sent east and that's all we know about them
after that. So, on one hand, just recognizing all these
these little kind of unexplained details otherwise just hanging out
there in histories maybe something you wouldn't even really take
notice of as notable or in need of explanation otherwise,
and seeing how, oh they kind of could fit together,
especially you know they're in the right kind of timeline
(19:50):
to fit together. That's kind of interesting. That isn't kind
of ingenious observation. On the other hand, it's the sort
of thing where like as we were just saying, like
it's it's so kind of ingenius that you just want
to fall in love with it and forget how many
assumptions you're taking on early on, like this is based
on this very loose description of a battle third hand
(20:11):
from a painting. And also we don't actually know that
Romans were employed by this nomadic ruler, that they ever
made it to that particular place. All that we know
is they were captured after a battle hundreds of miles away,
and it's said the last we're told of them in
Roman and Greek histories is that they were captured and
they were sent somewhere east. So big leaps being made,
(20:35):
But it is a charming idea.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, and it's possible, but do we
actually have the evidence for it, And yeah, that's where
we often come up empty here. Additionally, Dubs hypothesized that
the captured soldiers were then moved further east and settled
along the border of the Han Empire itself, and they
were settled in this area where, of course, then the
(20:59):
the troops end up intermarrying with the local population. This
area comes to be known as lee Chen, which essentially
means legion. Dubs argues, and he argues that we can
still see evidence of this lineage here today in the
genetics of the local population here.
Speaker 3 (21:19):
Yes, and so this is sort of the secondary growth
of this hypothesis about the idea of Roman soldiers in
this battle, which again we're not sure of. That just
an interesting idea, it's hard to prove. So there's that idea,
and then there's the second idea that the Roman mercenaries
form the ancestors of the Leechen people, and the lee
(21:40):
Chien are a real people that exist today. Many of
them live in a place called Yongchang, which is a
county in China, in Gansu Province, and so they are
real people. And this has been sort of connected to
individual observations of morphological traits among some of the lee
Chi and people that are said to look European like.
(22:02):
Sometimes there will be a Lechian person who has who
has like green eyes or blonde hair or something. And
this has been connected to this idea and in many
ways I believe has been capitalized on for sort of
tourism interest.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
Yeah. Yeah, there's some interesting articles talking about the degree
to which the locals have revved up interest in this
concept and maybe you know, erected some statues and some
buildings and put on some costumes appealing to tourists who
want to come and see this place where you know,
a lost legion came to rest. And maybe this in
(22:39):
this idea of oh, there's an intermingling here of Chinese
and ancient Roman cultures and blood and it seemed to
have it seems to have been a very popular idea,
not only in the West but also in China. And
this sort of seemed to really like pick up steam
in the nineties. And I would I would I assume
(23:00):
like maybe reached like its peak. In twenty fifteen, that's
when we saw the release of a very expensive looking
movie titled well this is at least its English release title,
dragon Blade, starring none other than Jackie Chan and then
co starring John Cusack and Adrian Brody. Whoa yeah, both
Western actors playing Romans, with Cusack playing the good guy
(23:23):
Roman and Adrian Brody playing the bad guy Roman. If
nothing else, look up a picture of Adrian Brody's hair
in this motion picture. It is amazing.
Speaker 3 (23:34):
Oh, it's like this big, beautiful brunette bouffont, just like
puffed out. I guess this has got to be a wig.
That can't be his real hair.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
I assume it's just too big, it's too glorious. I mean,
he looks like he looks like an anime character come
to life here. Oh amazing.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Yeah, Adrian Brody's big, big hair. I've never wow. So
that's funny. But also it's funny. John Cusack just seems
like weird casting for a Roman mercenary.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Yeah yeah, I mean by yeah, yeah, by by a
number of standards. I think you can make a make
a fair argument that that's the case. I don't know
if you would have been my casting choice. But but
you know, I don't know this movie, which I haven't seen,
so I can't really vouch for the quality here. I
just looked at the stills, I looked at the trailer.
This isn't like a period of Chinese cinema that I've
(24:26):
seen much of. But you know, it does show you
just how exciting this concept is that you're like, let's
make a movie out of that. Let's let's get let's
get some big names from from around the world. Let's
make you know, this big international venture out of it.
To some extent.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
Oh, I'm having a brainstorm. Okay, combining our sort of
like weird house cinema unlikely casting's recent discussions regarding virtuosity
and the Roman theme. What if the two actors here
had been Russell Crow and Denzel Washington, that would have
been great. We'll bring in both from the too Gladiat movies.
All right, they've already got the Roman bona fides, and
(25:03):
here they are in northwestern China, strutting to stay alive.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Yeah, and either one could play the villain, like, we
have clear evidence that either one of them could pull
it off. But back to the underlocking hypothesis here, So yeah,
we want to be clear there are a lot of
problems with it before you even get into any discussion
of genetics. The big one, of course, is lack of evidence.
Dubbs himself, you know, bases his hypothesis on extremely little
(25:30):
literary evidence. You know, if you were thinking game of
telephone when we were talking about the evidence. I think
that's fair. I mean, to a certain extent, all history
is a game of telephone, but this especially sounds like one.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
Yeah, I would agree with that. Again, Dubbs's paper is
an interesting read for a speculative history paper written in
the nineteen forties. It's actually interesting for multiple reasons. Number one,
like it is cool to kind of follow the way
he put together these different pieces of evidence and all that.
(26:02):
But it's also a lesson in how the mind works
in a way, because Rob, you and I were talking
about this off mic, like noticing if you just go
along the paper, it's kind of funny how he just
like step by step, leverages multiple it is reasonable to
assumes into it is certain that these are the legionaries
of Crassus.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Yeah, yeah, he at least the way it's written, it
sounds like he's just very convinced to this idea by
the end of it, and as it turns out, like
other folks of his time and shortly thereafter, most of
them disagreed with it, at least to some degree. I
was looking at a twenty eleven paper published in the
Journal of Asian History by historian Christopher A. Matthews, which
(26:48):
an historian here who ultimately presents his own hypothesis that well,
maybe the soldiers could have been Greek. And basically he
just presents this as a quote more probable hypothesis, getting
into like details of the shield observations and so forth.
But in it he also provides a good overview of
how other synologists and historians of Dubbs's own time reacted
(27:10):
to the paper. And basically, there were some who accepted
that this passage indicates foreign troops, okay, fair enough, but
disputed the idea that they were Romans. Others accepted only
parts of the theory. Some of them also did that
kind of thing where what you see in histories where
a controversial hypothesis will be just mentioned without judgment, to
(27:31):
just say, well, Homer dubs such and such, and then
they move on to the next or included as a footnote.
That sort of thing.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
Often happens if it's like ancillary to the main point
you're making. It's like I don't have time to argue
for or against this. I just need to acknowledge that
I know somebody said.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
It right right, and then others just dismissed it completely,
saying that this is fiction or it's just not probable
at all. Now, another thing we talked earlier about the
vast distances involved here, and even even couching all of
this in the vast distances between those two empires, it's
still tempting to sort of oversimplify the vast amount of
(28:08):
space we're talking about. So the distance between Hern Turkey
and Yongchan, China is five four hundred and thirty six
kilometers or roughly three three hundred and seventy seven miles,
And Joe included a map for you other folks. You
can you can get a map showing this distance by
just doing a Google search. But we're talking about a
(28:28):
huge expanse of territory here.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
Yeah, Dubs gets them part of the way there by
accepting the history, saying that, okay, they're captured by the Parthians,
and then we're told in histories that they were sent
east from here to I think it says that they
were sent to the region of Margiana, which is a
region in Central Asia overlapping parts of modern day Afghanistan, Turkmenistan,
(28:55):
and Uzbekistan. And after that, of course, there are no
more Roman or Greek records of what happens to these soldiers,
what happens to the prisoners. It just says they were
taken out to Margiana. So dubs gets them from the
battlefield to weigh at the other side of the Parthian
Empire over there. That gets them part of the way.
That still doesn't get them all the way to where
(29:16):
this ancient battle described in the Chinese histories would have been.
And then that does not get them all the way
to Yongchang County, right, So there's a bunch of steps
along the way that you just have to fill in
and say, assume this happened.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Yeah, And it's not to say these are impossible distances
and that's not And you have to acknowledge there are
other accounts of people traveling great distance in ancient times,
you know, on up through medieval times and so forth.
And you know, some of these are also have an
air of myth making and a legend about them. But
you know it's not impossible. But still the greater the distance,
(29:55):
there's less likelihood and there are more problems in getting
them from point A to point B. Yeah, and then
there's the genetics based take on the whole situation.
Speaker 3 (30:13):
Right, So, Rob, you asked me to look into this,
and I went digging around. The best study I could
find of the genetic evidence concerning specifically the question of
the Roman mercenary theory of the genetic origins of the
Lechian people. The best study I could find on that
was a two thousand and seven paper published in the
(30:35):
Journal of Human Genetics by Joe at All called testing
the hypothesis of an Ancient Roman soldier origin of the
Lechian people in Northwest China a Y chromosome perspective. And
this paper has a bunch of authors, a majority of
which are affiliated with Lango University in China, also has
(30:55):
one author from the Chinese Academy of Science Institute of
Genetics in and the authors start off this paper by
addressing the hypothesis we've been talking about, so they sort
of lay out what Dubs claims in his classic paper
and how that idea has been developed historically since then.
The main thing they're looking at is the claim that
(31:18):
the le Chien people of yung Chang County and Gansu Province,
Northern China are descended from a group of Roman mercenaries
that settled in the region in the first century BCE.
This story that we've been talking about of the Roman
mercenaries that went east is often told to explain the
fact that some people, not most, but some in the
(31:39):
area of Yongchang County in Gansu Province have what appear
to be European looking physical features, such as blonde hair
or maybe blue or green eyes. But the authors note
that apart from any direct contradictory physical evidence, this hypothesis
of the Roman legionary origin of the Leechian people has
(32:03):
been challenged by a number of scholars for a variety
of reasons. One is a lack of strong archaeological evidence
to support it. It would be one thing if you
had a bunch of ancient Roman artifacts there, I mean,
that would be kind of interesting, But that's not the case.
The best thing I could find in terms of archaeological
evidence were just sort of indirect inferences, and then also
(32:24):
the fact that this hypothesis rests on a lot of
speculative assumptions. So the authors here set out to investigate
by comparing the genetic evidence. They write, quote, single nucleotide
polymorphisms or SNPs and short tandem repeat loci on the
non recombining region of the human Y chromosome have been
(32:46):
widely used to trace the origin and migratory events of
modern paternal genetic lineages. Therefore, why chromosome polymorphisms in our
study were used to investigate the paternal genetic landscape of
the lee Chien and to provide genetic evidence for a
suggested origin of the Lechian people. So, in this study,
the authors took blood samples of two hundred and twenty
(33:09):
seven unrelated men from four different ethnic populations of northwest China.
The study featured thirty nine Tibetans, forty nine Wikers, eighty
seven Lechians, and fifty two Yugurs, who are apparently closely
related to the Lechian people. They also compared the information
collected from this analysis to Y chromosome patterns in other
(33:31):
populations around the world. What did they find well, they
found that seventy one point three percent of the Y
chromosomes from the Lechian people belonged to a haplogroup called
three M one two, which is a specific East Asian lineage.
The Lechian people actually had the greatest frequency of this
haplogroup of any of the four groups tested from northwestern China,
(33:56):
So ultimately, the Lechian people were genetically close mostly related
to other Chinese populations, particularly the Han Chinese people, but
also to Mongolians and the Yugurs. Also, the authors say
that genetically the Lechian people were found to be quite
distinct from Central Asian and West Eurasian populations, which they
(34:17):
say is incompatible with the hypothesis that Roman soldiers made
up the bulk of their paternal ancestry. So that doesn't
necessarily rule out the idea that somebody from Europe or
from the Roman Empire could have come to this region
long ago, but it really does. It doesn't fit at
all with the idea that these people as an ethnic
(34:39):
group or as a culture were descended from a settlement
of Roman mercenaries. Quote failure to find an apparent link
between the Lechian people and ancient Roman soldiers in this
study might be either because long distance migration and intermarriage
have erased earlier genetic signatures, or because the Lechians are
just a general population in north in China. The authors
(35:01):
also they get ahead of another thing that does pop
up later. I've read in various news articles people will
keep trying to resurrect this hypothesis, particularly by saying, but
look at these individual cases of local people in Yongchang
with European looking features, or look at maybe these individuals,
(35:24):
a handful of individuals that have done genetic testing, and
maybe they show more Central Asian or West Eurasian ancestry.
Could they be descended from Roman soldiers, even if the
le Chien people in general are not. It's hard to
ever like completely rule out that sort of possibility. But
the authors of this paper also point out that a
captured legion of Roman soldiers turned Roman mercenaries turned settlers
(35:48):
in northern China is not the only way to explain
some people in Yongchang having what look like European features
or even some European genetic lineage. All throughout history, people
were moving around in ways that were not documented in
exciting narrative histories and you know, mentioned in like royal
(36:08):
royal decrees about battles and things like that. The author's
right quote. Along the ancient Silk Road in North China,
it is common to see people with Caucasian morphological traits,
which is also a classical trait of Chinese minority ethnic
groups in Shinjung, like the Wigers. Therefore, we cannot trace
a Lechian origin only from morphological traits. And this area
(36:32):
was indeed around the path of the ancient Silk Road.
So that's another thing here that somewhat undermined some of
the claims people make for this Roman legionary hypothesis. You know,
that's not the only way people from further west could
have ended up in this region hundreds or thousands of
years ago.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
It's just one of the more exciting stories of how
it could happen, as like the Lost Legion, just as
more appealing, as opposed to like the Lost Silk Merchant's
brother in law not as exciting, but could easily be
a factor in anything like this.
Speaker 3 (37:06):
Yeah, there was trade, there was some travel, economic transactions,
and along the way there was some genetic exchange.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
Yeah, so I think that the loss of merchant's brother
in law would also make for a nice movie, so
and you could probably would probably be cheaper.
Speaker 3 (37:21):
Yeah, let me actually back that up. It's a counter
narrative to the way people might be thinking about this.
It's like, oh, I want the I want the legionaries
settling and China thing to be real. Isn't it actually
more interesting to think about sort of non military examples
of cultural ad mixing in the ancient world and people
are traveling and you know, not as like a like
(37:43):
an armed band who train and travel together and you
know they're fighting through the Instead, it's like smaller groups
of people, maybe even individual people, just trying to survive
and get by in an unfamiliar culture in the ancient
world without even having the kind of the technology link
and stuff that we have today that make transportation and
communication across distance easy. Just trying to imagine that sort
(38:06):
of thing in the ancient world is is fascinating, you know,
imagining just one lost trader or a small group of
traders from one edge of the Eurasian continent getting ending
up in the other and settling down there. Like what
leads to that? What is what is the life of
those people.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
Like, yeah, yeah, I mean it's that kind of story
that on one level, it's it's it's more relatable because
it deals with like everyday life and everyday experience. Is though,
you know, a in a setting that is that is
also fantastic and intriguing, you know, outside of like the
military setting, which in ways is like easier to imagine
because we've in part because we've seen it depicted so much,
(38:47):
but I think also a reality that is a little
further from many of our experiences, you know, you know,
especially if we've never actually been in a military of
one form or another, and certainly not in an ancient military.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
On the other hand, it is also interesting to think
about ancient military tactics being sort of like lifted up
and take transplanted around to places where they were not familiar,
where that was not normally what the armies did. And
so thinking about a testudo formation with this wall of
shields appearing in a place where that was not what
the other armies were used to seeing it that that's
(39:21):
interesting as well, and I think that's good fodder for
continuing our look at shields and shield walls.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's the age of Empires thought experiment, right,
And it's also a thought experiment that is not without
context in the real world. We certainly do have a situations,
certainly with the arrival of Europeans and the Americas, where
you have combatants going up against combatants that they have
never encountered before, and in some cases weapons they have
(39:51):
never encountered before. So you know, it's an interesting thought
experiment from multiple points of view. One more thing I
want to bring up, though, is that if you look
up articles about what we've been discussing here, you will
find locals from yong Chung County dressed up, yeah, sort
of mock Roman military attire. These are quite amusing images.
(40:17):
And again you know they're you know, get those tourism dollars.
I understand it, like it totally makes sense. I understand
the economic incentive here. But I have to say, shields
are all wrong. This I would you could easily say, well, this,
this hypothesis cannot be correct because the shields and the
illustrations are round. They're not slightly cylindrical and rectangular at all.
Speaker 3 (40:42):
That's such a good point. I didn't even notice that
the rectangular profile of the shields is like the core
of what he bases the hypothesis on.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:51):
Yeah, and then here here we got the round ones.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Yeah, but the two seem to be eating it up
in these photos, so yeah, yeah, more power. Then all right,
Well we'll go ahead and cap this one here, but yes,
we'll be back in the next episode. This will probably
be just a two parter, but in the next episode
we'll get more into a discussion of shield, shield walls
and shield tactics. In the meantime, will remind you that
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and
(41:14):
culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short
form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside
most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film
on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
Here's thanks, as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app.
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listening to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
The West
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
In this episode, I'd like to take us back to
the year thirty six VCE. So at this point we
have two of the most powerful kingdoms of the day
ruling over their respective spheres of influence. So in the
West we have the Roman Republic on the cusp of
collapse into the Roman Empire, and there at the time
(00:38):
in control of much of the Mediterranean coast, including all
or significant portions of the Italian Peninsula Sicily, Sardinia, Hispania, Gaul, Ireicum, Macedonia, Greece,
Asia Minor Syria, Judea, Cyprus, Crete, and parts of coastal
northern Africa. And then in the East we have the
(01:00):
Chinese Han dynasty controlling an even a larger territory that
consisted of much of modern day China, with a significant
expansion into western regions of this area. So each empire
was the most consequential of its day within its sphere
of influence, though they were hardly mirror images of each other.
The Roman Republic was in a very fragile state on
(01:21):
the verge of collapse into the Roman Empire, and it's
going to continue to experience threats to its stability from
that point onward. While the Han dynasty was somewhat consolidated
and stable, with a complex bureaucracy in place to solidify
its emperor's rule, it's also worth stressing that the Han
dynasty also clearly had longevity on its side at this point,
(01:44):
having existed from around two p six BCE. Interestingly enough,
each was ruled to a certain extent by some form
of unofficial triumvirate at the time, Rome by the first
Triumvirate of Caesar, Crassus and Pump and the Han Empire
was sometimes administered by something like triumvirate, most specifically in
(02:07):
the form of the three Excellencies who would run things
of the emperor happened to be very young. But again,
the Roman situation was an unsteady alliance of the day,
and the Chinese version we're seeing here was more of
a baked in aspect of imperial rule. At some point,
I'd like to come back and explore the idea of
rule by three in general is kind of like to
(02:29):
what extent it works or doesn't work in human governance
and so forth. Now, why are we talking about the
Romans and the Han dynasty. Obviously we're going to get
to contemplations of and hypotheses, maybe even wild hypotheses, about
how they might have come into contact with each other.
And I have to acknowledge something that I remember playing
(02:50):
as a kid. Maybe you played this when you're younger
as well. I think it's still around in various forms,
but the Age of Empire's real time strategy video games.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Yeah, I remember that. I didn't play it much, but
I remember it was popular among like my friends when
I was in middle school, and it did seem cool
because you could make historical empires or peoples that never
would have really had reason to have much interaction with
each other. You could make them clash.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Yes, yeah, and so it was. It was you know,
I haven't played in a long time, so I can't
really do a deep analysis of it, but you know,
at least on the surface, it was interesting that you
were generating interest about these various times and places by
putting them in oftentimes unreal proximity to each other, like
very unreal, like there's a river between the two of them.
(03:39):
And then engaging in combat. And in my experience, it
was like, well, what would happen if whichever empire I
picked a command fell to, I don't know, the Aztecs,
because I could never play these things correctly. I would
just feel overwhelmed and would inevitably be destroyed. But again,
in these games, it makes it seem and I'm you know,
and it's an artificial construct, you know, it could make
(04:00):
it seem as if well, there's really not that much
distance between these two empires in time or in space,
but in this particular instance, talking about the Han Chinese
and the Romans, the distance between the two empires, particularly
for this day and age, was quite vast.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Especially with other empires in between.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
That's right, Yeah, there were at least two major empires
in between as well. We'll mention here. So the Roman Roads,
the famous Roman Roads, did not directly link Roman China.
There was trade along the Silk Road that unofficially, I guess,
did sort of stitch the two together. There was definitely
trade awareness and perhaps a distant military awareness I've read,
(04:46):
but each existed well outside of each other's sphere of
influence and in between them. Yeah, as we're discussing here,
you had various Central Asian kingdom's nomadic groups, and a
particular note to what we'll be discussing here, you had
the Parthian Empire, which lasted from two forty seven u
BCE to two twenty four CE, and this empire controlled
(05:09):
modern day Iran and much of Mesopotamia and was heavily
invested in the Silk Road. This empire was preceded by
the Solucid Empire and ultimately succeeded by the Susanian Empire,
which we've talked about on the show before. You can
look up various maps of what these territories looked like.
I found one from a bit later for our notes here, Joe,
(05:31):
and you know, I encourage folks to look up on
I think the one we're looking at here is from
one hundred CE, so not one hundred percent accurate of
what we're talking about, but it gives like sort of
a basic shape, and you get to see a sizable
amount of territory between these two empires.
Speaker 3 (05:48):
Just to be clear for the folks at home, you're
talking about a map representing one hundred CE, not from.
Speaker 4 (05:53):
The year right.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Correct. This is a modern map that has been you know,
augmented to represent the you know, the rough boundary zone
of these different kingdoms and empires.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
Right, because the interesting thing being, at the time, probably
no one person could have combined a map with all
the geographical knowledge to represent the land masses between like
Portugal to Korea as we have here.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Yeah. Yeah, and the and distant kingdoms, distant empires were
truly distant, and there might just not be much known
about them at all. And more would of course be
known about your immediate neighbors, neighbors that you probably had
to deal with in terms of trade, in terms of
various military conflicts. So on the Roman side of things,
the Parthian Empire was a far greater immediate concern, and
(06:38):
even beyond then you had the Kushan Empire. And for
the Chinese it was, you know, essentially the reverse, though
their relationships were more but with the more immediate Kushan
were more cooperative. Apparently, conflict with various nomadic groups were
more of a common threat for these two, and so
contact between the Roman and Han empires basically remained a
(07:01):
distant one, handled through intermediaries among the Parthians and the Kashans,
as well as generally through the Silk Road, but their
knowledge of each other again was incomplete, even as their
respective interests continued to creep out closer and closer to
each other. And it's this is one of the I
think the fascinating things about this historical scenarios. It's so
(07:21):
different from the interconnected world that we know today, where
you know, there are places that are still very distant
to us for various reasons, and it may not even
be purely geographical distance. It could be informational distance and
cultural distance and so forth, and various other factors could
be involved. But like this was a time where something
(07:42):
like two kingdoms away it almost didn't exist. It almost
took on maybe almost kind of mythical energy. Now that's
not to say there were not at least some recorded
attempts at direct contact. One of them is mentioned in
the book China History by British historian John Key. Though
it occurred this occurs sometime after the period we're looking at,
(08:03):
This would be ninety seven CE, and this is when
the Chinese sent a mission to tashin a distant realm
with an apparently insatiable appetite for Chinese silk. According to
Qi and he points out that this was likely Rome,
or at least its easternmost provinces, but the mission ends
up being detained in Parthia, likely by parties with a
(08:25):
vested interest in preventing any direct trade between Rome and
the Han dynasty, because there's simply too much money to
be made as the middleman in trade between these two.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
Right, If you are currently making money as the station
house in the middle of the exchange, you don't want
to connect the parties on either side of you directly.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Right, So that seems to be at least one of
the stumbling blocks that occurred whenever direct communication was really attempted.
It's possible that there's something else in the history books
that I didn't come across, in which there was an
attempted connection. But as far as I know, not much
ever came together. But if we look to the world
(09:03):
of highly hypothetical interpretations of ambiguous literary data, it's possible
we could maybe find something right. And that's what we're
going to be talking about a little bit here today. Let's,
first of all, let's look to fifty three BCE. So
(09:23):
I mentioned the Roman triumvirate, of which Roman general and
statesman Crassus was a member. He assumed Syria as is
Roman province, but he apparently wanted more, perhaps perhaps in particular,
he wished to rival the military successes of Caesar and Pompey,
so he launched a military campaign against the Parthian Empire
that suffered from refusal to cooperate with allies, as well
(09:45):
as a deliberate misinformation campaign against his incursion. As a result,
his forces were outmatched at the Battle of Kari. This
was this would be modern day Heron and what is
now Turkey, and they suffered a disastrous defeat. Crassus himself
lost his life. Later tellings of this would claim that
(10:06):
the Parthians poured molten gold down his throat. I think
we mentioned this in a previous episode, but this was
likely a later Roman fiction. I think most historians contend.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
But absolutely true that the Romans did not do well there.
I think some of the troops escaped, but the majority
of them were either killed or taken prisoner.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Right, So that's fifty three PCE. Fast forwarding now to
thirty six PC. This is where we're getting to our
outside hypothesis here. This is where we get into this
mysterious affair of shields like fish scales. So, looking here
at a nineteen forty one paper titled an Ancient Military
(10:48):
Contact between Romans and Chinese by Homer H. Dubs, this
paper lays out the scenario. So, looking at Chinese histories
of the time period, we have this situation where allegedly
the Protector General of the Chinese Western Frontier Regions in
Chinese Turkestan named Chin Tang ventures into Sogdia or Sogdiana
(11:14):
to put down a Hun warlord whose whose name is
difficult to pronounce. To be to be clear, we think
it's I was reading something it sounded maybe it's like giorjur,
and I think you were finding it, maybe more like
with more of a C sound. But maybe the it's
somewhere between a J and a C that our lips
(11:34):
can't quite form. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
In his paper, Dubs spells his name c H I
H c H I H like Chi Chi, and but
I've seen the name spelled elsewhere in the scientific paper
that I'm going to talk about later, which is going
to disagree with this hypothesis being put forward by Dubbs,
they anglicize his name j z H j z H
so I'm I think it is that Chi Chi or
(11:58):
something like that.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Ye. Either way, you pronounced that he was definitely a
rising figure in this sort of region where different powers met.
He'd previously killed a Chinese envoy and he was then
invited by the King of Sogdia to come and help
deal with some nomadic threats that they were facing. But
he also was seemingly amassing power, demanding tributes from tribes
(12:23):
under Chinese protection, and generally just become an increasing threat
to Chinese interests in the region.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
He was trying to set up his own thing.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Yeah, and so the Protector General here gathers his troops
along with some auxiliary forces, and he sets out to
attack this new city that this warlord is set up.
And it's here we learned from these various accounts sent
back to the Hunt Emperor that they encountered something perhaps strange.
They saw strange soldiers fighting on behalf of the Hunt
(12:51):
warlord that would have been basically would have mounted to
like a more than one hundred foot soldiers lined up
on either side of the city gate in some sort
of fish scale formation. They apparently included illustrations, and I
hope I'm inferring this correctly. But I don't think the
illustrations themselves survived. I think what survived are histories written
(13:13):
later based in part on these illustrations that were sent back.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
Yes, it is a weirdly indirect method of information we're
getting here. But Dubbs does explain in his paper here
that the information about what this military formation looks like
comes from a Chinese text called the History of the
Former Han Dynasty that itself says it got its information
(13:39):
about this from paintings of the battle that were sent
that were sent back to the Imperial court, and so
somebody who saw the battle allegedly painted what it looked like,
and then it is described in this history. The paintings
are described as having more than one hundred foot soldiers quote,
(13:59):
lined up on either side of the gate in a
fish scale formation. So that is the particular visual detail
in the description of the painting of the battle that
Dubs is trying to explain here, with the fish scale
formation of the soldiers. What does that mean? It is
taken to refer to shields, which I guess is our
(14:20):
broader point here.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
That's right, that's right. Dubs contends that what they're talking
about with fish scale formation is a shield wall, and
not just any shield wall, he argues, but that of
a Roman shield wall, the formation known as the testudo
or tortoise that Romans would utilize. And his argument is
(14:45):
that these were surviving Roman soldiers from the Battle of
Ki who were now long since employed as foreign mercenaries.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Now, this probably is a good place to flag. We've
already alluded to this, but a good place to flag
again that Dubbs's proposal here is highly speculative and relies
on a bunch of assumptions that are not strongly in evidence.
It's an interesting idea, but it's far from certain or
certainly not as certain as Dubbs will claim it is
(15:16):
by the end of his paper. And also, you know,
not to say that it isn't worth talking about. But
this is one of those ideas where this has come
up on the show before, where it's like a proposal
of something that's really radically interesting and unique and might
gain a kind of epistemic advantage from that, like it's, oh,
(15:37):
it's so cool. The idea that the ancient Chinese and
the ancient Romans happened to may have happened to meet
each other in battle at one point, and we've got
a theory explaining how that could have happened. That would
be such an interesting idea. The mind kind of wants
it to be true and thus views any claim of
evidence on behalf of it maybe unfairly favorably. So just
(16:00):
to keep that in mind as we continue discussing it.
Certainly is worth talking through this idea, but it's one
of the many examples of don't let the cool idea
overwhelm your epistemics.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
That's right, if true, it's amazing, but don't abbreviate that
to just it's amazing or it's amazing and probably true.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
No, no, Now.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
In the second episode we do We're gonna get, We're
gonna come back and discuss shield walls and particularly the
test Tuto in greater detail. But just a reminder here
if you're not picturing what we're talking about. This was
a shield wall formation that the Romans use that generally
featured both a front and a top of overlapping protective
shields in a layer something that does look like scales,
(16:55):
and this would and sometimes the sides are well sides,
sometimes all side, depending on the description, would be covered
as well. It made use of the Roman scutum shield,
which show was these big, kind of like semi cylindrical
but otherwise kind of rectangular shields that the Roman soldiers had.
(17:15):
And it's also worth stressing that this was not the
default Roman shield formation, but this is one that they
could use in cases where they're having to endure sustained
heavy projectile fire, such as while approaching walls during a siege,
that sort of thing.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
Yeah, that's right, So imagine, Yeah, you're trying to maneuver
around at the bottom of the wall of your enemy's fortifications.
It makes sense to form this tight interlocked shield formation
above your heads because they're going to be throwing stuff
down at you.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Right, But does it make sense to use it all
the time? No, and we'll get into some of the
reasons why in the next episode. But it is certainly
iconic of the Romans. The Romans did use it. You
see it pop up in Roman depictions of their own troops. Lubbs.
His contention here is that while other forces use shield
wall formations, only the Romans use shields big enough to
(18:06):
generate on effect that could be described as looking like
fish scales, and he also contended that quote, the only
professional soldiers at the time of whom regular formations are
recorded were Greeks and Romans, and then he makes the
argument that Greek shields were round, and he argues too
small to create the sort of shield formation, so it
(18:26):
absolutely had to be the Romans. And therefore what we
have here is direct military conflict between Roman troops granted
no longer serving the Roman Empire or Republic, and soldiers
of the Hun dynasty.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Now, based on just everything we've talked about so far,
this is a really interesting suggestion. So the facts we're
combining are the ancient Chinese historical account based on paintings
of the battle, which again I think we don't have
the paintings, but we have the description of the formation
of soldiers with these shields interlocked like fish scales, and
the fact that that would pretty well describe certain types
(19:04):
of shield maneuvers that were done by the ancient Romans,
and that their shields in particular would have been good
at creating the effect to described, And also the fact
that we know from the first century BCE a large
contingent of Romans were captured by the Parthian Empire after
this battle. In southeastern Turkey, and it says that they
(19:28):
were sent east and that's all we know about them
after that. So, on one hand, just recognizing all these
these little kind of unexplained details otherwise just hanging out
there in histories maybe something you wouldn't even really take
notice of as notable or in need of explanation otherwise,
and seeing how, oh they kind of could fit together,
especially you know they're in the right kind of timeline
(19:50):
to fit together. That's kind of interesting. That isn't kind
of ingenious observation. On the other hand, it's the sort
of thing where like as we were just saying, like
it's it's so kind of ingenius that you just want
to fall in love with it and forget how many
assumptions you're taking on early on, like this is based
on this very loose description of a battle third hand
(20:11):
from a painting. And also we don't actually know that
Romans were employed by this nomadic ruler, that they ever
made it to that particular place. All that we know
is they were captured after a battle hundreds of miles away,
and it's said the last we're told of them in
Roman and Greek histories is that they were captured and
they were sent somewhere east. So big leaps being made,
(20:35):
But it is a charming idea.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, and it's possible, but do we
actually have the evidence for it, And yeah, that's where
we often come up empty here. Additionally, Dubs hypothesized that
the captured soldiers were then moved further east and settled
along the border of the Han Empire itself, and they
were settled in this area where, of course, then the
(20:59):
the troops end up intermarrying with the local population. This
area comes to be known as lee Chen, which essentially
means legion. Dubs argues, and he argues that we can
still see evidence of this lineage here today in the
genetics of the local population here.
Speaker 3 (21:19):
Yes, and so this is sort of the secondary growth
of this hypothesis about the idea of Roman soldiers in
this battle, which again we're not sure of. That just
an interesting idea, it's hard to prove. So there's that idea,
and then there's the second idea that the Roman mercenaries
form the ancestors of the Leechen people, and the lee
(21:40):
Chien are a real people that exist today. Many of
them live in a place called Yongchang, which is a
county in China, in Gansu Province, and so they are
real people. And this has been sort of connected to
individual observations of morphological traits among some of the lee
Chi and people that are said to look European like.
(22:02):
Sometimes there will be a Lechian person who has who
has like green eyes or blonde hair or something. And
this has been connected to this idea and in many
ways I believe has been capitalized on for sort of
tourism interest.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
Yeah. Yeah, there's some interesting articles talking about the degree
to which the locals have revved up interest in this
concept and maybe you know, erected some statues and some
buildings and put on some costumes appealing to tourists who
want to come and see this place where you know,
a lost legion came to rest. And maybe this in
(22:39):
this idea of oh, there's an intermingling here of Chinese
and ancient Roman cultures and blood and it seemed to
have it seems to have been a very popular idea,
not only in the West but also in China. And
this sort of seemed to really like pick up steam
in the nineties. And I would I would I assume
(23:00):
like maybe reached like its peak. In twenty fifteen, that's
when we saw the release of a very expensive looking
movie titled well this is at least its English release title,
dragon Blade, starring none other than Jackie Chan and then
co starring John Cusack and Adrian Brody. Whoa yeah, both
Western actors playing Romans, with Cusack playing the good guy
(23:23):
Roman and Adrian Brody playing the bad guy Roman. If
nothing else, look up a picture of Adrian Brody's hair
in this motion picture. It is amazing.
Speaker 3 (23:34):
Oh, it's like this big, beautiful brunette bouffont, just like
puffed out. I guess this has got to be a wig.
That can't be his real hair.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
I assume it's just too big, it's too glorious. I mean,
he looks like he looks like an anime character come
to life here. Oh amazing.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Yeah, Adrian Brody's big, big hair. I've never wow. So
that's funny. But also it's funny. John Cusack just seems
like weird casting for a Roman mercenary.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Yeah yeah, I mean by yeah, yeah, by by a
number of standards. I think you can make a make
a fair argument that that's the case. I don't know
if you would have been my casting choice. But but
you know, I don't know this movie, which I haven't seen,
so I can't really vouch for the quality here. I
just looked at the stills, I looked at the trailer.
This isn't like a period of Chinese cinema that I've
(24:26):
seen much of. But you know, it does show you
just how exciting this concept is that you're like, let's
make a movie out of that. Let's let's get let's
get some big names from from around the world. Let's
make you know, this big international venture out of it.
To some extent.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
Oh, I'm having a brainstorm. Okay, combining our sort of
like weird house cinema unlikely casting's recent discussions regarding virtuosity
and the Roman theme. What if the two actors here
had been Russell Crow and Denzel Washington, that would have
been great. We'll bring in both from the too Gladiat movies.
All right, they've already got the Roman bona fides, and
(25:03):
here they are in northwestern China, strutting to stay alive.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Yeah, and either one could play the villain, like, we
have clear evidence that either one of them could pull
it off. But back to the underlocking hypothesis here, So yeah,
we want to be clear there are a lot of
problems with it before you even get into any discussion
of genetics. The big one, of course, is lack of evidence.
Dubbs himself, you know, bases his hypothesis on extremely little
(25:30):
literary evidence. You know, if you were thinking game of
telephone when we were talking about the evidence. I think
that's fair. I mean, to a certain extent, all history
is a game of telephone, but this especially sounds like one.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
Yeah, I would agree with that. Again, Dubbs's paper is
an interesting read for a speculative history paper written in
the nineteen forties. It's actually interesting for multiple reasons. Number one,
like it is cool to kind of follow the way
he put together these different pieces of evidence and all that.
(26:02):
But it's also a lesson in how the mind works
in a way, because Rob, you and I were talking
about this off mic, like noticing if you just go
along the paper, it's kind of funny how he just
like step by step, leverages multiple it is reasonable to
assumes into it is certain that these are the legionaries
of Crassus.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Yeah, yeah, he at least the way it's written, it
sounds like he's just very convinced to this idea by
the end of it, and as it turns out, like
other folks of his time and shortly thereafter, most of
them disagreed with it, at least to some degree. I
was looking at a twenty eleven paper published in the
Journal of Asian History by historian Christopher A. Matthews, which
(26:48):
an historian here who ultimately presents his own hypothesis that well,
maybe the soldiers could have been Greek. And basically he
just presents this as a quote more probable hypothesis, getting
into like details of the shield observations and so forth.
But in it he also provides a good overview of
how other synologists and historians of Dubbs's own time reacted
(27:10):
to the paper. And basically, there were some who accepted
that this passage indicates foreign troops, okay, fair enough, but
disputed the idea that they were Romans. Others accepted only
parts of the theory. Some of them also did that
kind of thing where what you see in histories where
a controversial hypothesis will be just mentioned without judgment, to
(27:31):
just say, well, Homer dubs such and such, and then
they move on to the next or included as a footnote.
That sort of thing.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
Often happens if it's like ancillary to the main point
you're making. It's like I don't have time to argue
for or against this. I just need to acknowledge that
I know somebody said.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
It right right, and then others just dismissed it completely,
saying that this is fiction or it's just not probable
at all. Now, another thing we talked earlier about the
vast distances involved here, and even even couching all of
this in the vast distances between those two empires, it's
still tempting to sort of oversimplify the vast amount of
(28:08):
space we're talking about. So the distance between Hern Turkey
and Yongchan, China is five four hundred and thirty six
kilometers or roughly three three hundred and seventy seven miles,
And Joe included a map for you other folks. You
can you can get a map showing this distance by
just doing a Google search. But we're talking about a
(28:28):
huge expanse of territory here.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
Yeah, Dubs gets them part of the way there by
accepting the history, saying that, okay, they're captured by the Parthians,
and then we're told in histories that they were sent
east from here to I think it says that they
were sent to the region of Margiana, which is a
region in Central Asia overlapping parts of modern day Afghanistan, Turkmenistan,
(28:55):
and Uzbekistan. And after that, of course, there are no
more Roman or Greek records of what happens to these soldiers,
what happens to the prisoners. It just says they were
taken out to Margiana. So dubs gets them from the
battlefield to weigh at the other side of the Parthian
Empire over there. That gets them part of the way.
That still doesn't get them all the way to where
(29:16):
this ancient battle described in the Chinese histories would have been.
And then that does not get them all the way
to Yongchang County, right, So there's a bunch of steps
along the way that you just have to fill in
and say, assume this happened.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Yeah, And it's not to say these are impossible distances
and that's not And you have to acknowledge there are
other accounts of people traveling great distance in ancient times,
you know, on up through medieval times and so forth.
And you know, some of these are also have an
air of myth making and a legend about them. But
you know it's not impossible. But still the greater the distance,
(29:55):
there's less likelihood and there are more problems in getting
them from point A to point B. Yeah, and then
there's the genetics based take on the whole situation.
Speaker 3 (30:13):
Right, So, Rob, you asked me to look into this,
and I went digging around. The best study I could
find of the genetic evidence concerning specifically the question of
the Roman mercenary theory of the genetic origins of the
Lechian people. The best study I could find on that
was a two thousand and seven paper published in the
(30:35):
Journal of Human Genetics by Joe at All called testing
the hypothesis of an Ancient Roman soldier origin of the
Lechian people in Northwest China a Y chromosome perspective. And
this paper has a bunch of authors, a majority of
which are affiliated with Lango University in China, also has
(30:55):
one author from the Chinese Academy of Science Institute of
Genetics in and the authors start off this paper by
addressing the hypothesis we've been talking about, so they sort
of lay out what Dubs claims in his classic paper
and how that idea has been developed historically since then.
The main thing they're looking at is the claim that
(31:18):
the le Chien people of yung Chang County and Gansu Province,
Northern China are descended from a group of Roman mercenaries
that settled in the region in the first century BCE.
This story that we've been talking about of the Roman
mercenaries that went east is often told to explain the
fact that some people, not most, but some in the
(31:39):
area of Yongchang County in Gansu Province have what appear
to be European looking physical features, such as blonde hair
or maybe blue or green eyes. But the authors note
that apart from any direct contradictory physical evidence, this hypothesis
of the Roman legionary origin of the Leechian people has
(32:03):
been challenged by a number of scholars for a variety
of reasons. One is a lack of strong archaeological evidence
to support it. It would be one thing if you
had a bunch of ancient Roman artifacts there, I mean,
that would be kind of interesting, But that's not the case.
The best thing I could find in terms of archaeological
evidence were just sort of indirect inferences, and then also
(32:24):
the fact that this hypothesis rests on a lot of
speculative assumptions. So the authors here set out to investigate
by comparing the genetic evidence. They write, quote, single nucleotide
polymorphisms or SNPs and short tandem repeat loci on the
non recombining region of the human Y chromosome have been
(32:46):
widely used to trace the origin and migratory events of
modern paternal genetic lineages. Therefore, why chromosome polymorphisms in our
study were used to investigate the paternal genetic landscape of
the lee Chien and to provide genetic evidence for a
suggested origin of the Lechian people. So, in this study,
the authors took blood samples of two hundred and twenty
(33:09):
seven unrelated men from four different ethnic populations of northwest China.
The study featured thirty nine Tibetans, forty nine Wikers, eighty
seven Lechians, and fifty two Yugurs, who are apparently closely
related to the Lechian people. They also compared the information
collected from this analysis to Y chromosome patterns in other
(33:31):
populations around the world. What did they find well, they
found that seventy one point three percent of the Y
chromosomes from the Lechian people belonged to a haplogroup called
three M one two, which is a specific East Asian lineage.
The Lechian people actually had the greatest frequency of this
haplogroup of any of the four groups tested from northwestern China,
(33:56):
So ultimately, the Lechian people were genetically close mostly related
to other Chinese populations, particularly the Han Chinese people, but
also to Mongolians and the Yugurs. Also, the authors say
that genetically the Lechian people were found to be quite
distinct from Central Asian and West Eurasian populations, which they
(34:17):
say is incompatible with the hypothesis that Roman soldiers made
up the bulk of their paternal ancestry. So that doesn't
necessarily rule out the idea that somebody from Europe or
from the Roman Empire could have come to this region
long ago, but it really does. It doesn't fit at
all with the idea that these people as an ethnic
(34:39):
group or as a culture were descended from a settlement
of Roman mercenaries. Quote failure to find an apparent link
between the Lechian people and ancient Roman soldiers in this
study might be either because long distance migration and intermarriage
have erased earlier genetic signatures, or because the Lechians are
just a general population in north in China. The authors
(35:01):
also they get ahead of another thing that does pop
up later. I've read in various news articles people will
keep trying to resurrect this hypothesis, particularly by saying, but
look at these individual cases of local people in Yongchang
with European looking features, or look at maybe these individuals,
(35:24):
a handful of individuals that have done genetic testing, and
maybe they show more Central Asian or West Eurasian ancestry.
Could they be descended from Roman soldiers, even if the
le Chien people in general are not. It's hard to
ever like completely rule out that sort of possibility. But
the authors of this paper also point out that a
captured legion of Roman soldiers turned Roman mercenaries turned settlers
(35:48):
in northern China is not the only way to explain
some people in Yongchang having what look like European features
or even some European genetic lineage. All throughout history, people
were moving around in ways that were not documented in
exciting narrative histories and you know, mentioned in like royal
(36:08):
royal decrees about battles and things like that. The author's
right quote. Along the ancient Silk Road in North China,
it is common to see people with Caucasian morphological traits,
which is also a classical trait of Chinese minority ethnic
groups in Shinjung, like the Wigers. Therefore, we cannot trace
a Lechian origin only from morphological traits. And this area
(36:32):
was indeed around the path of the ancient Silk Road.
So that's another thing here that somewhat undermined some of
the claims people make for this Roman legionary hypothesis. You know,
that's not the only way people from further west could
have ended up in this region hundreds or thousands of
years ago.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
It's just one of the more exciting stories of how
it could happen, as like the Lost Legion, just as
more appealing, as opposed to like the Lost Silk Merchant's
brother in law not as exciting, but could easily be
a factor in anything like this.
Speaker 3 (37:06):
Yeah, there was trade, there was some travel, economic transactions,
and along the way there was some genetic exchange.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
Yeah, so I think that the loss of merchant's brother
in law would also make for a nice movie, so
and you could probably would probably be cheaper.
Speaker 3 (37:21):
Yeah, let me actually back that up. It's a counter
narrative to the way people might be thinking about this.
It's like, oh, I want the I want the legionaries
settling and China thing to be real. Isn't it actually
more interesting to think about sort of non military examples
of cultural ad mixing in the ancient world and people
are traveling and you know, not as like a like
(37:43):
an armed band who train and travel together and you
know they're fighting through the Instead, it's like smaller groups
of people, maybe even individual people, just trying to survive
and get by in an unfamiliar culture in the ancient
world without even having the kind of the technology link
and stuff that we have today that make transportation and
communication across distance easy. Just trying to imagine that sort
(38:06):
of thing in the ancient world is is fascinating, you know,
imagining just one lost trader or a small group of
traders from one edge of the Eurasian continent getting ending
up in the other and settling down there. Like what
leads to that? What is what is the life of
those people.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
Like, yeah, yeah, I mean it's that kind of story
that on one level, it's it's it's more relatable because
it deals with like everyday life and everyday experience. Is though,
you know, a in a setting that is that is
also fantastic and intriguing, you know, outside of like the
military setting, which in ways is like easier to imagine
because we've in part because we've seen it depicted so much,
(38:47):
but I think also a reality that is a little
further from many of our experiences, you know, you know,
especially if we've never actually been in a military of
one form or another, and certainly not in an ancient military.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
On the other hand, it is also interesting to think
about ancient military tactics being sort of like lifted up
and take transplanted around to places where they were not familiar,
where that was not normally what the armies did. And
so thinking about a testudo formation with this wall of
shields appearing in a place where that was not what
the other armies were used to seeing it that that's
(39:21):
interesting as well, and I think that's good fodder for
continuing our look at shields and shield walls.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's the age of Empires thought experiment, right,
And it's also a thought experiment that is not without
context in the real world. We certainly do have a situations,
certainly with the arrival of Europeans and the Americas, where
you have combatants going up against combatants that they have
never encountered before, and in some cases weapons they have
(39:51):
never encountered before. So you know, it's an interesting thought
experiment from multiple points of view. One more thing I
want to bring up, though, is that if you look
up articles about what we've been discussing here, you will
find locals from yong Chung County dressed up, yeah, sort
of mock Roman military attire. These are quite amusing images.
(40:17):
And again you know they're you know, get those tourism dollars.
I understand it, like it totally makes sense. I understand
the economic incentive here. But I have to say, shields
are all wrong. This I would you could easily say, well, this,
this hypothesis cannot be correct because the shields and the
illustrations are round. They're not slightly cylindrical and rectangular at all.
Speaker 3 (40:42):
That's such a good point. I didn't even notice that
the rectangular profile of the shields is like the core
of what he bases the hypothesis on.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:51):
Yeah, and then here here we got the round ones.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Yeah, but the two seem to be eating it up
in these photos, so yeah, yeah, more power. Then all right,
Well we'll go ahead and cap this one here, but yes,
we'll be back in the next episode. This will probably
be just a two parter, but in the next episode
we'll get more into a discussion of shield, shield walls
and shield tactics. In the meantime, will remind you that
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and
(41:14):
culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short
form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside
most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film
on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
Here's thanks, as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app.
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listening to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
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