Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
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 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 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 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,
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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Especially with other empires in between.
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, 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 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, 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.
Just to be clear for the folks at home, you're talking about a map representing one hundred CE, not from.
The year right.
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.
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.
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
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 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 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 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, 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 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.
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.
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 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 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
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 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.
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.
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 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 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 can't quite form. Yeah.
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 something like that.
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 under Chinese protection, and generally just become an increasing threat to Chinese interests in the region.
He was trying to set up his own thing.
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 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 later based in part on these illustrations that were sent back.
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 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, 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 broader point here.
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 that these were surviving Roman soldiers from the Battle of Ki who were now long since employed as foreign mercenaries.
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 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, 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 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.
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.
No, no, Now.
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, 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. 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.
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.
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 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
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.
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 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 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 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 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, But it is a charming idea.
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 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.
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 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. 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.
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 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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 here they are in northwestern China, strutting to stay alive.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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
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 huge expanse of territory here.
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, 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 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.
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, 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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.
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.
Yeah, there was trade, there was some travel, economic transactions, and along the way there was some genetic exchange.
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.
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 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 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.
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, 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.
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 interesting as well, and I think that's good fodder for continuing our look at shields and shield walls.
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 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. 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.
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.
Yeah.
Yeah, and then here here we got the round ones.
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 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.
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.
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.
The West