What’s in a Text?: Intentional and Affective Fallacies and the Logical Fallacy of Arguments from Silence

Posted on by Wolfgang Childerglas
Creative Writing, Geography, Literary & Linguistics, Medieval history,, Performing arts, Regional History, Social History, Society & Culture, Travel, Visual Arts, World history,

Exegesis: Relegating the author In literary and artistic aesthetics the intentional fallacy occurs when readers or viewers use factors outside the text or visual work (such as biographical information) to evaluate its merits, rather than ignoring these “external” factors and relying solely on the textual or visual evidence of the novel, play, poem, painting, etc. to assess the work in question (what’s actually in the text and nothing outside). This key precept of the New Criticism school declares that a poem (or other work of art) does not belong to its author, it is (as stated by the term’s originators WK Wimsatt and MC Beardsley) “detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it”1⃞. Authorial intention is a non-consideration in the assessment of the work. The text or work has an objective status and its meaning belongs solely to the reading or viewing public. The reader’s task in literature, advocates of New Criticism assert, is to eschew subjective or personal aspects such as the lives and psychology of authors and literary history and focus entirely on close reading and explication of the text (A Glossary of Literary Terms (4th edition, 1981), edited by M.H. Abrams).

The intentional fallacy, elaborated in Wimsatt’s 1954 The Verbal Icon

The intentional fallacy doctrine has a corollary in the affective fallacy which adheres to the same principles. Wimsatt and Beardsley affirmed that evaluating a poem by its effects—especially its emotional effects—upon the reader, is an erroneous way of approaching the task. Giving rein to the emotions a work of art evokes in you, negates an appreciation of “the (work’s) inherent qualities and craftsmanship” that an objective analysis permits (Prince Kumar, ‘Understand Affective Fallacy from Example’, LitforIndia, 23-Dec-2023, www.litforindia.com).

(source: cornerstoneduluth.org)

Semantic autonomy, Intentionalism, Anti-intentionalism: The intentional and affective fallacies as prescriptive “rules” of hermeneutics held sway from the 1940s to the 1970s, however this is not to say that there was no pushback from scholarly dissenters. Proponents (primarily American) of what is called “Reader-response theory” reject the claims of New Criticism of this prescribed mode of interpreting and critiquing a work of literature. Some of these objected to the fallacy’s nothing outside the text rigidity for constricting exploration of all possibilities of a work’s meanings. Critic Norman Holland frames it in a psychoanalytical context, the reader, he affirms, will react to a literary text with the same psychological responses he or she brings to events in their daily lives, ie, “the immediate goal of interpretation is to fulfil (one’s) psychological needs and desires” (‘Psychological Reader-response Theory’, Nasrullah Mambrol, Literary Theory and Criticism (2016), www.literariness.org). Theorist ED Hirsch in his “Objective Interpretation” essay also took issue with the expositors of the intentional fallacy thesis, arguing that on the contrary authorial intent (intentionalism) was integral to a full understanding of the work…the only meaning that is permanent and valid is that of the author in question, the reader should confine him or herself to interpreting what the author is trying to say (E.D. Hirsch, Jr, Validity in Interpretation, 1967) .

𖠔 : 𖠔 : 𖠔 : 𖠔 : 𖠔

A quite different kind of fallacious argument is the argument from silence (Latin: argumentum ex silentio). This arises when a conclusion or inference is drawn based on an absence of statements in historical documents and source materials…the argument seeks not to challenge or rebut specific things an author includes in a book or document, but is critical of the author for something they should have said but didn’t! The most common instances of the argument from silence in practice relate to biblical debates and controversies, but a contemporary classic example of a non-theological, historical nature, one generating considerable heated discourse, concerns the 13th century merchant and explorer Marco Polo and the famous book of his travels in the East.

Medieval Venezia at the time of Marco Polo (source: Bodleian Library, Oxford)

Medieval world travelogue guru?: Known by various names including Description of the World (Divisament du monde), Book of the Marvels of the World, Il libro di Marco Polo detto il Milione, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, or simply The Travels of Marco Polo, the book is one of the most celebrated tomes in the annals of literature dealing with the experiences of travellers to distant and unknown lands. The story, told and retold in numerous languages over centuries, presents Marco and his father Niccolò and uncle Maffeo embarking on an epic road trip along the Silk Road to the court of the Great Khan in Khanbaliq (Beijing). The book recounts Marco’s travels in Cathay (North China) and Manji (South China), among other Eastern lands. The consensus among most historians is that Signor Polo, despite a tendency to exaggerate and embellish the tales of his travels2⃞, did nonetheless journey to China as he claimed in the book. The publication of Did Marco Polo Go to China? by Frances Wood in 1995 controversially swam against this tide. Wood infers serious doubts about Polo’s achievements, suggesting that despite his being away from his native Italy for the best part of a quarter-of-a-century, he never reached his intended destination China. According to Wood, he got only as far as Constantinople and the Black Sea where he accumulated all of his information on Chinese society and other Asian lands (his source material for the “Travels”) from picking the brains of visiting Persian merchants.

A page from the Polo travelogue

Doubting “Marco’s millions”: What made Wood so convinced that Marco Polo never visited China? Firstly, there is the book’s puzzling itinerary, it proceeds in a disjointed, incoherent fashion, is not uniformly chronological, has some odd detours and gets some geographical place names in China wrong. Then, while acknowledging The Travels of Marco Polo contains references to porcelain (from Fujian province), coal, rice-wine, paper currency and other items, Wood hones in on the fact that the Venetian traveller failed to mention certain other quintessentially Chinese things—namely the Great Wall of China, tea, chopsticks, cormorant fishing and the practice of foot-binding—in the pages of his “Travels’. Wood also picks up on Polo’s failure to learn Chinese during his sojourn in the Middle Kingdom. Allied to these omissions was the absence of Polo’s3⃞ name in any official Chinese document of the period, which Wood believed, further incriminated Marco as the perpetrator of a fraud.

A crumbling section of the not-so-great wall in north China built prior to Polo’s time (photo: John Man, The Great Wall)

Wood herself is perpetrating a pattern of reasoning which is problematic by recourse to an argument from silence. As Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard in The Routledge Companion to Epistemology (2010) (ISBN0-415-96219-6Routledge pp. 64–65) note, “arguments from silence are, as a rule, quite weak; there are many examples where reasoning from silence would lead us astray.” Academic critics have been quick to pinpoint the shortcomings and misconceptions in Wood’s argument. There are, they counter, manifestly valid reasons why Polo would not refer to the Great Wall, for one, it was largely not there in the period of his residency in China! The impressive edifice of the Great Wall as we think of it was primarily a product of the Ming Dynasty (from 1368, three-quarters of a century after the Polos’ stay)…what there was of the not-so-Great Wall prior to that was a much more modest, unprepossessing sight (“a discontinuous series of derelict, pounded earth ramparts”) (‘F. Wood’s Did Marco Polo Go To China?’, A Critical Appraisal byI. de Rachewiltz, http://openresearch–repository.anu.edu.au). With the matter of the Chinese penchant for tea-drinking, perhaps Polo didn’t think the topic simply sufficiently noteworthy to rate a mention4⃞. The question of the omission of foot-binding, chopsticks and Polo’s linguistic ignorance of Chinese in the travelogue can all be accounted for. China and the royal court was under Mongol control (Yuan Dynasty) in Marco’s time, accordingly Polo moved in those circles, tending not to mix with the (Han) Chinese population. and so lacked the motivation (or opportunity) to learn Chinese. Likewise, he wouldn’t have encountered many upper class Chinese women in their homes, this was the strata of society that practiced female foot-binding, not the Mongols. Again, with chopsticks, not a utensil of choice for the Mongols who Polo tended to fraternise with (Morgan, D. O. (1996). Marco Polo in China-Or Not [Review of Did Marco Polo Go to China?, by F. Wood]. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 6(2), 221–225. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25183182). As for “the Travels’” silence on fishing with cormorants, the activity was not a widespread phenomena in China during the Yuan era, confined to the remoter areas of Sichuan Province (‘Cormorant Fishing in China’, Sally Guo, China Travel (Upd. 04-April-2021), www.chinatravel.com).

MP (source: caamadi.com/de/marco-polo-in-venice)

Filtered Marco Polo – Rustichello et al: And there’s another line of thought when considerating the book’s glaring omissions, inconsistencies and inaccuracies that Frances Wood doesn’t seem to have factored into her thesis…The Travels of Marco Polo, the published book we read today, is a different beast in form and content to the original article from the late 1290s. In fact the original manuscript which Polo dictated to his amanuensis, an imaginative romance writer Rustichello de Pisa —who had licence to inject his own theatrical flourishes and flavour into Marco’s original story—was lost early on, so “the Travels” have gone on an untraceable and interminable journey through “dozens of translations of translations, none of which are necessarily accurate” (‘The Travels of Marco Polo: The True Story of a 14th-Century Bestseller’, Anna Bressanin, BBC, 09-Jan-2024, www.bbc.com). Of the 54 extant manuscripts (out of around 150 distinct copies in all languages), no two copies are entirely alike with “improvements” and edits made by each copyist and translator. We should also remember that Marco was in prison, relying on his memory to recount a multitude of events and experiences, some of which stretched back over 20 years, hardly surprising then if readers have to contend with the recollections of a not entirely reliable narrator (‘Marco Polo’s book on China omits tea, chopsticks, bound feet’, Peter Neville-Hadley, South China Morning Post, 04-Oct-2020, www.amp.scmp.com).

The Marco Polo saga has spawned a long history of film and television versions with romantic adventure taking precedence over story accuracy

Heavily redacted archives: The issue of Polo’s claim to have been an official in Kublai Khan’s service—and in particular governor of Yangzhou—was seized on by Dr Wood who pointed out that Marco’s name does not appear in any historical official Chinese archives. Rather than being necessarily proof of Marco fabricating a presence in China as Wood assumes, other factors may explain the discrepancy…no other Italian merchants known to have visited medieval China are mentioned in any Chinese sources, even the Papal envoy to the Great Khan’s court, Giovanni de Marignolli, doesn’t rate a mention (‘Marco Polo was not a swindler. He really did go to China’, Science News, 16-Apr-2012, www.sciencedaily.com). Another factor germane to this is the fact that the Ming (Han) Dynasty that succeeded the Mongol-dominated Yuan Dynasty initiated the practice of erasing the records of earlier non-Han officials (Morgan).

(source: LibriVox)

One particularly vocal critic of Did Marco Polo Go To China?, Sinologist Hans Ulrich Vogel from the University of Tübingen, produced a research paper demonstrating that Marco’s descriptions of currency, salt production and revenues from the salt monopoly in China were of a standard of accuracy and uniqueness of detail5⃞, that produces a very high level of proof that Polo had to have been in China, close to the wheels of power, to be privy to such comprehensive knowledge (www.sciencedaily.com).

Chinese salt production (source: Wellcome Images)

The “logical fallacy of weak induction”: Frances Wood’s iconoclastic book was certainly an attention-grabber, both for medieval scholars and Sinologists and for the general public, causing a furore upon its publication in 1995 and spawning several TV documentaries. China and the world of the Great Khan is a central tenet of the Marco Polo story, making it unthinkable to most scholars, almost a sacrilege, to suggest that the legendary Venetian traveller never set foot in the Middle Kingdom! The weight of the counter-argument unleashed against Wood’s thesis throws a spotlight on the hazards of trying to “treat the absence of evidence as evidence itself”, as Steven Lewis summarises the fallacious nature of the argument from silence (‘The Argument from Silence”, Steven Lewis, SES, www.ses.edu).

(image: silk–road.com)

Frances Wood, Did Marco Polo go to China? (1995, Secker & Warburg, London)

1⃞ Wimsatt and Beardsley’s 1946 ‘Intentional Fallacy’ essay to some extent has its antecedents in the earlier debate between CS Lewis and EMW Tillyard, published as The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (1939), in which Lewis argued that an author’s own personality and biography has negligible to zero impact on the literary text, while Tillyard enunciated the contrary position: that an author’s own imagination and story can have an indelible influence on a work of literature

 2⃞   and there had been doubters even in Marco’s time and later about some of his more wilder and fantastic claims, earning him the epithet Il Milione or “the Millions”) (aka “Marchus Paulo Millioni”). Wood’s particular slant on Polo’s book follows the lead of earlier German Mongolists

3⃞ who had claimed to have been an emissary in the emperor’s service

4⃞ Wood herself concedes that Rustichello may have edited out references to tea on the grounds of it being “of no interest to the general public”

5⃞ and corroborated by Chinese documents

Dilmun, the Lost Bronze Age Civilisation in the Gulf

Posted on by sabinebuena
Ancient history, Archaeology, Geography, Regional History
Modern Bahrain (image: worldatlas.com)

The culmination of archaeological excavations on the island state of Bahrain during the 20th century (see endnote) saw the emergence of a fully-formed Bronze Age city that had been buried for 4,000 years. The Saar settlement, as it is known, was found to comprise two sections, a residential zone and some distance away a “honeycomb” cemetery. Archaeologists working at the site described Saar as having all the elements of a modern city including houses, restaurants, commercial outlets and a place of worship [Sylvia Smith, ‘Bahrain digs unveil one of oldest civilisations’, BBC News, 20-May-2013, www.bbc.com].

Excavated sites on Bahrain (image: archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/)

The great Qal’at tell: Saar is the not the only Bahraini site to yield evidence of ancient civilisation. Located at the northern point of the island is Qal’at–al-Bahrain (Fort of Bahrain), a vast tell (artificial mound) 18-hectare in size, which when excavated revealed three early Dilmun cities (dating to 2,800BC) and one later Greek city (200BC), all built on top of one another!(ᗩ) Like Saar, Qal’at–al-Bahrain had multiple human uses, public, residential, religious as well as military, and was in all likelihood the capital of the ancient Dilmun state. There are also approximately 170,000 burial mounds, in Bahrain occupying some 5% of the of the island (Smith)(ᗷ)…including the royal tombs at A’ali which are 15 metres in height.

The Fort , Qal’at al-Bahrain (source: UNESCO World Heritage Centre)

The archaeological finds pieced together testify to the existence of an ancient civilisation known as Dilmun (also rendered as Telmun), which means in the Akkadian language “the place where the sun rises”. The Dilmun region in antiquity—populated by an East Semitic people—stretched over an area comprising Bahrain, the islands of Failaka (today part of Kuwait) and Tarout (now part of Saudi Arabia) and a coastal strip on the East Arabian mainland.

Mesopotamia, the Gulf, Dilmun (image: peterborougharchaeology.org/)

Dilmun as entrepôt for north and south: Dilmuth is mentioned in Near Eastern historical sources, in Sumerian economic texts of the Fourth Millennium BC, written on cuneiform clay tablets, which identify Dilmun as a regional commercial centre [‘Dilmun’, Encyclopedia Britannica, www.britannica.com]. Seen from the early Mesopotamian civilisations’ perspective, the key strategic location of Dilmun was central to trade. Sumer (and Babylon) wanted the luxury commodities produced by the Indus Valley civilisations (Meluha) – spices, precious stones, ivory, etc. But to facilitate trade with the Indian merchants and secure these highly desirable goods, the Sumerians sought to avoid the overland route which took them through a habitually hostile Persia…the sea route via the Gulf and Dilmun allowed Sumer to bypass Persian territory altogether [‘The Sumerian Connection’, (Jon Mandaville), Saudi Aramco World, (1980), www.archives.aramco.org]. By this circumstance Dilmun was able to establish itself as the hub for trade between Mesopotamia and South Asia. Dilmun merchants at one point maintained a monopoly over the supply of copper, a precious commodity produced in the mines of Oman (then called Magan), also much in demand in the cities of Mesopotamia as a metal of improved durability for weapons, utensils and tools(ᑕ). Dilmun also had commercial ties with other cities in the Near East, with Elam in Iran/Iraq, Alba in Syria and Haitian in Turkey (Smith).

“Boats from the land of Dilmun carried the wood”, inscription on a relief of Ur-Nanshe (c.2550–2500 BC)

By some time around 2,050 BC an independent kingdom of Dilmun was at the apex of its powers. Control over the Persian/Arabian Gulf trading routes had made Dilmun a very prosperous state. Agriculture played its part in Dilmun’s commercial ascent as well. The countryside was fertile land both for the farming of livestock and the growing of diverse crops due to the presence of artesian springs.

Early Dilmun burial mounds (photo: Danish Gulf Expedition/Moesgaard Museum)

Decline of Dilmun: From the mid-Second Millennium Dilmun started to enter a decline. Beginning before 1,500 BC the kingdom(ᗪ) is conquered by the first of a series of dominant regional powers – the Sealand Dynasty, followed by the Middle Assyrian Empire, the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the Kessite Dynasty (Neo-Babylonian Empire). Dilmun was further weakened after 1,000 BC by the flourishing of piracy in the Gulf. By 800 BC it is no longer a trading power, having entered a Hellenistic period, it becomes Tylos. By the time of the fall of Babylon, 539 BC, the Dilmun civilisation had been abandoned.

Saar site

Dilmun in the Sumerian creation myth: In Mesopotamian mythology Dilmun held special significance to Sumerians, referred to regularly in texts as a paradisal place to the south…a pure, virginal and pristine land which the (Sumerian) god Enki provides with abundant fresh water, a place where its inhabitants are no longer plagued by the ravages of disease and old age [‘Paradise Found? The Archaeology of Bahrain’ www.peterborougharchaeology.org]. The heavenly characterisation of Dilmun has led some scholars to hypothesise that arguably it may be the location of the Biblical Garden of Eden(ᗴ).

Endnote: The key pioneering work on the location and unearthing of Dilmun civilisation was undertaken by archaeologists Geoffrey Bibby and Prof Peter Glob in the 1950s. Bibby and Glob led a Danish expedition which was the first to excavate the ruins of the ancient civilisation at the Qal’at and Saar sites and date it to the early Dilmun era.

Dilmun excavations (photo: cphpost.dk)

(ᗩ) there is also a Portuguese fort at the Qal’at site built during their occupancy of Bahrain in the 16-17th centuries

(ᗷ) prompting one academic to conjecture that perhaps as many as 20,000 people lived in Dilmun at the ancient civilisation’s peak [C.E. Larson, Life and Land Use on the Bahrain Islands (1983)]

(ᑕ) Dilmun itself exported dates and pearls, the latter especially prized for their quality, thought to be the result of the mixing of salt-water and submarine spring-waters (www.ngwa.org)

(ᗪ) Virtually nothing is known of the Dilmun dynasties or rulers other than the names of some of the kings, garnered from discovered cuneiform inscriptions (eg, Yagli-El, Ilī-ippašra)

(ᗴ) also echoed in the great epic poem of the late Second Millennium, the Gilgamesh Epic

The Terra Septemtrionalis Incognita✱ of Thule: Greek Mythology, Puzzle Piece for Geographers and Inspiration for Nazis

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Ancient history, Geography, Political geography, Regional History, Society & Culture, Travel

✱ “unknown northern land”

Hecataeus of Miletus’ world map (ca. 500 BC)

The ancients, the Greeks and Romans, perceived the world of their day as one with the Mediterranean at its centre, surrounded by the conjoined land masses of Europe, Africa and Asia, comprising what the Greeks called oikouménē, the known, inhabited or inhabitable parts of the worldⓐ. This envisaged world was “a curious place where legends and reality could co-exist” [Vedran Bileta, “3 Legendary Ancient Lands: Atlantis, Thule, and the Isles of the Blessed”, The Collector, 03-Nov-2022, www.thecollector.com]. The Greeks believed that at the northernmost extremity of the existing world lay a fabled island called Thuleⓑ. The originator of this belief was 4th century BC Greek explorer Pytheas of Massalia (now Marseille, Fr.) who claimed to have visited and discovered Thule on a voyage beyond Britain to the northern sea and the Arctic. Pytheas introduced the idea of Thule—far distant and encompassed by drift-ice and possessed of a magical midnight sun—to the geographic imagination. Other ancient writers enthusiastically took up Pytheas’ fantastical notion, notwithstanding that the account of his journey (On the Ocean) had been lost to posterity…Pliny the Elder (1st century AD) described Thule as “the most remote of all those lands recorded”; Virgil (1st century BC) called the island Ultima Thule, (“farthermost Thule”, ie, “the end of the world”).


Thule, as Tile  (1539 map) shown (with surrounding sea-monsters) as located northwest of the Orkney islands

Seeking Thule: The loss of Pytheas’ primary source text, the description of his voyage, led countless generations that followed him to speculate as to where the exact location of Thule might be. Many diverse places have been misidentified as Thule…the Romans thought it was at the very top of Scotland, in the Orkneys; Procopius (6th century AD Byzantine historian), Scandinavia; early medieval clerics located it in Ireland while both the Venerable Bede and Saxon king Alfred the Great asserted that Iceland was really Pytheas’s Thule, as did the famous 16th century cartographer Mercator. Other candidates advanced over the millennias include Greenland, Norway, the Faroe Islands, Shetland, “north of Scythia”, Smøla (Norway) and Saaremaa, an Estonian island.

Smøla island (Norway)

Other conjectures on Thule’s whereabouts have been meaninglessly vague, eg, Petrarch (14th century Italian humanist scholar): Thule lay in “the unknown regions of the far north-west”, supposedly inhabited by blue-painted residents (Roman poets Silius Italicus and Claudian), a probable conflation with the Picts of northern Britain. Thule, from as early as the 1st century AD on, “became more of an idea than an actual place, an abstract concept decoupled from the terrestrial map, simultaneously of the world and otherworldly”…an emblem of mystical isolation, liminal remoteness, a real discovered place and yet unknown” (F. Salazar, “Claiming Ultima Thule”, Hakai Magazine, 08-Sep-2020, www.hakaimagazine.com).

The Thule neighbourhood? (image: worldatlas.com)

Thule has continued to attract the interest of explorers right up to modern times. Continent-hopping scholar-explorer Sir Richard Burton visited Iceland, writing it up as the real “Thule”. Famed Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen having explored the Arctic region, produced an account of Pytheas’s ancient Arctic expedition, hypothesising that Thule was in fact a Norwegian off-shore island that the Greek voyager had identified [Nansen F., In Northern Mists, Vols I & II, (1969)]. Greenlandic-Danish explorer and Eskimologist Knud Rasmussen underlined the case for Greenland as the location by naming the trading post he founded in NW Greenland “Thule” or “New Thule” (later renamed in the Inuit language, “Qaanaaq”)ⓒ.

Thule Society, emblem

Thule Society: In the aftermath of World War 1 Thule provided stimulus of a very different kind for extreme-right racist nationalists in Germany. An emerging Munich-based secret occultist and Völkisch group named itself after Pythea’s mythical northern island. The Thule Society (Thule-Gesellschaft) propagated a form of virulent anti-Semitism which fed early Nazism in Bavaria, it also preached Ariosophy (an outgrowth of Theosophy), a bogus ideology preoccupied with visions of Aryan racial superiority, a key component of the later Nazis’ ideological frameworkⓓ. Out of the Thule Society came the ultranationalist Germany Workers’ Party (DAB)which in a short time transformed into the National Socialist Workers Party (Nazi Party). A number of Thulists (eg, Hess, Frank, Rosenberg) became prominent in the Nazi leadership during the Third Reich [David Luhrssen, Hammer of the Gods: The Thule Society and the Birth of Nazism (2012)].

Endnote: Hyperborea’s remote utopia Greek mythology throws up a parallel legend to that of Thule in the Hyperboreans. These were mythical eponymous people living in Hyperborea (hyper = “beyond”, boreas = “north wind”ⓔ). Their homeland was perpetually sunny and temperate (despite lying within a cold, frigid region), and Hyperboreans were divinely blessed with great longevity, the absense of war and good health…in other words, a utopian society [‘Hyperborea’, Theoi Project – Greek Mythology, www.theoi.com]. As with Thule, locating this paradisiacal northern land has proved elusive to pinpoint with the ancient scribes and geographers agreeing only that it lies somewhere on the other side of the Riphean Mountains (which themselves have been variously located). Homer described Hyperborea as being north of Thrace, some other classical geographers had it beyond the Black Sea, vaguely somewhere in Eurasia, perhaps in the Kazakh Steppes. Herodotus (5th century BC) had it in the vicinity of Siberia, while for Pindar (fl. 5th century BC) it was near the Danube. Apollonius of Rhodes (3rd century BC) identified the Hyperboreans with the Celts and Britain, Plutarch (fl. 1st century AD) , with Gaul.

Hyperborea, imagined (image: greek-mythology.org)

ⓐ which, they believed, itself was surrounded by an unbroken chain or body of water

ⓑ a belief shared by the Romans who saw Thule as the extreme edge of orbis terrarum

ⓒ from 1953 to 2023 the northernmost US Air Force base (NW Greenland) was called the Thule Air Base

ⓓ Thule was symbolically important to the right wing nationalists, a pseudo-spiritual home of Aryanism, further “proof” of the mythic origins of the “Germanic race”

ⓔ Hyperborean = “inhabitant of the extreme north”

Liqian, China: Settlement Site of Rome’s Lost Legion? Theory, History and Myth

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Ancient history, Geography, International Relations, Military history, Regional History

Chinese accounts of antiquity from The Book of the Later Han record the first contact between the Chinese and Roman empires as taking place in AD 166 (an event corroborated by the Roman historian Publius Annius Florus). This initial diplomatic contact of the two empires resulted from a visit of a Roman emissary—authorised by Emperor Marcus Aurelius—to Emperor Huang and the Chinese Western Han Dynasty court. Trade links were subsequently established, Chinese silk for upper class Romans and Roman glassware and high-quality cloth for the Chinese.

Book of the Later Han

Communications blocked by Parthian rivalry: This initial encounter was an initiative on the part of the Romans but earlier than this the Han Chinese had tried, unsuccessfully, to make direct contact with Rome. In AD 97 the Han Chinese general, Ban Chao, despatched ambassador Kan (or Gan) Ying on a journey to Rome(α)…upon reaching Mesopotamia from where he intended to travel by sea to his ultimate destination, Kan Ying was dissuaded from continuing by the Parthians’ exaggerated advice that the sea voyage could take up to two years to complete. Parthia had a vested interest in thwarting the forging of a Sino-Roman mutually-beneficial nexus which might negatively impact Parthian profitability from the lucrative Silk Road [‘The First Contact Between Rome and China, www.silkroad.com].

The Silk Road: (source: MPI/Getty Images)

The Silk Road: The natural route for expansion, Rome eastward and China westward, was along the Silk Road…with Roman eyes obsessively coveting Chinese silk, the premier fabric of the ancient world, and China Han rulers also keen to exchange for Roman goods, the incentives were present, but direct contact between the two great ancient empires did not eventuate(Ⴆ). Standing in the way were a host of obstacles – the distance between them was vast and over inhospitable terrain; another hostile, competing empire, Parthia, occupied the middle space on the Silk Road. Roman-Chinese trade depended therefore on intermediaries, “the people of Central Asia—most notably the Sogdians, as well as the Parthians, and merchants from the Roman client states of Palmyra and Petra—act(ing) as the middlemen” [‘Ancient Rome and Ancient China: Did They Ignore Each Other?’, Vedran Bileta, The Collector, 08-Nov-2022, www.thecollector.com].

Romani indu Sinae? In the 1940s and 50s there emerged one dissenting voice to the scholarly consensus that Romans never made it to ancient China. An American Sinologist Homer H Dubs, lecturing in Chinese at Oxford University, wrote a series of articles on the subject of Roman and Chinese contacts in the Han period, culminating in his controversial 1957 book, A Roman City in Ancient China, which made the startling claim that legionnaires not only reached China but established a Roman settlement on the western fringes of the Han empire.

Battle of Carrhae (source: wikio.org)

Dubs’ “lost Roman legion”:hypothesis: In 53 BC a Roman army under the powerful Marcus Licinius Crassus was on the receiving end of a crushing defeat in the Battle of Carrhae at the hands of Parthian heavy cavalry and archers led by Spahbed (commander) Surena in southern Turkey. The Roman legions lost massive numbers of men, either killed (including its leader Crassus) or captured, in one of the Roman Empire’s worst-ever military disasters. The Roman prisoners-of-war, numbering, according to Plutarch, 10,000, were apparently carted off to Central Asia where reportedly they were married off to local women(ƈ).

Dragon Blade, (2015) 🎥 starring Jackie Chan, a fictionalised movie very loosely based on the Roman legion story

This is where Dubs and his outlier theory comes in…the Oxford professor proposed that 100–145 of the Romans ended up fighting for the Xiongnu(ԃ) against a Chinese Han army in another battle some 17 years later. The Battle of Zhizhi (36 BC), in modern-day Kazakhstan, resulted a victory for the Han Chinese, with the Xiongnu chieftain Zhizhi Chanyu among the dead. Dubs contended that these 100-odd Roman legionnaires fought in the battle, his evidence of this was a Chinese source for the battle, Ban Gu, who referred to 100 or so foot-soldiers of the enemy who employed a strange, fish-scale formation in fighting, interpreted by Dubs as a reference to the Romans’ famous phalanx defence, the testudo (tortoise) formation of interlocking shields. Dubs speculated that the captured Roman soldiers found themselves POWs once again, this time of the Chinese who transported the 100 Roman captives back to the Chinese Empire where they were resettled in Li-jien(ҽ) (later called “Liqian”), located on the edge of the Gobi Desert in modern-day Gansu Province.

Roman testudo formation

Descendants of Roman legionnaires in a Gansu village? Gene testing: Professor Dubs’ controversial theory has drawn the attention of historians, researchers, archeologists, anthropologists and even geneticists over the years, but not widespread support. Detractors have generally debunked the theory, stressing the lack of tangible archeological or historical evidence for a Roman settlement in Liqian, no findings of habitation found, eg, no Roman coins or weapons.

Some residents of contemporary Liqian village (Yongchang), noted for their green or blue eyes, fair-coloured hair and non-Chinese facial features, underwent genetic testing in 2005 which gave some credence to the Roman link theory…a DNA finding of 56% Caucasian. Further DNA testing in 2007 deflated those hopes however, showing that 77% of the villagers’ ‘Y’ chromosomes were limited to east Asia. Researchers from nearby Lanzhou University have pointed out that it was standard practice for the Roman military to employ foreign mercenaries (Europeans and Africans) for their campaigns Moreover, the demonstration that a significant block of the Liqian respondents have foreign origins doesn’t prove that they were necessarily Roman. Professor Yang Dongle (Beijing Normal University) concurred with this view, noting that inter-racial marriage along the Silk Road was far from uncommon. Yang added that research has confirmed that Liqian County was settled a good seventy years earlier than the Roman POWs are supposed to have got there [Matthew Bossons, ‘The Vanished Roman Legion of Ancient China’, That’s, (Nov. 2018), www.thatsmag.com; ‘Finding the lost Roman legion in NW China’, New China TV (video), 2015].

Villager Cai Junnian (aka “Cai Luoma”) with his green eyes and atypical Chinese complexion has become something of a poster boy for the Liqian Roman ancestry claims (photo: Natalie Behring)

Endnote: Constructing a “Roman world” to exploit the rural legend The dubiousness of the connexion aside, the media attention generated by the DNA tests and the distinctive look of the Liqian Rong has prompted proactive locals to exploit the tourist angle for what it’s worth. There’s been a concerted effort to try to capitalise on the alleged Roman ancestry in Yongchang County – in a kind of “Disneyfication” elements of neoclassical architecture have popped up in the village, a Romanesque pavilion with Doric-style columns, public statues of ancient Romans, etc. Zhelaizhai (or Lou Zhuangzi) village, as Liqian was renamed, is now marketed by Chinese tourist operators as “Liqian Ancient City”.

Statues of Roman legionnaires at the Jinshan Temple visitors’ centre

(α) or as the Chinese called Roman Empire, Da Chi’en, also rendered as Daqin (“Great Qin”)

(Ⴆ) ancient Latin writers regularly referred to Roman travellers journeying east to a country they called Serica (ser = silk)…its thought that by this that they meant the Central Asian lands, possibly including northwestern China. The name Serica, to some Romans may alternately have been a collective description for a bunch of south and east Asian countries including China and even India

(ƈ ) though, according to Pliny the Elder, the legionnaires were stationed at Margiana on the Silk Road to guard Parthia’s eastern frontier

(ԃ) a nomadic tribal confederation of Hunnic peoples

(ҽ) Dubs postulates that this was the most ancient Chinese name for Rome [H.H.Dubs, ‘A Roman City in Ancient China’, Greece and Rome, Vol. 4, Issue 2, Oct. 1957, pp.139-148]