The Tochari (; , from the Ancient Greek exonym ), also called the Tukharas () or Tukhars (from the Sanskrit exonym [stem form] and the Classical Persian exonym or [singular]), were an ancient people of Bactria, a historical region in Central Asia roughly corresponding to northern Afghanistan and parts of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
The Tochari were sometimes thought to be a branch of the Turkic peoples,: “Meanwhile Bactria submitted to the Tochari of Western writers (Sanskrit, Tukhāra). They have been sometimes supposed to have been a branch of the Turkish tribes, while the Hiung-nu have been seen as Mongols, the forerunners of the Hūnas and Chionites. It was a section of the Tocharians who later followed the Greeks across the Hindu-kush and created the great Kushan empire in North India.” but are now generally considered to have been part of the Yuezhi,: “This time the nomads were the Yue-che (Yüe-czi), who, according to one authority (Tolstov), could be the same as the Greater Getae or Massagetae. It was probably a group of tribes, undoubtedly of Indo-European origin, one of which were the Tokhars who gave their name to Bactria (Tokharistan).” a group of Indo-European-speaking tribes mentioned by Chinese sources. The Tochari settled in the eastern parts of Bactria in the 1st century BCE.
Name is the Latin exonym, derived from Ancient Greek (), while () is the stem form of the Sanskrit exonym, and () or () is the singular of the Classical Persian exonym.
The word (), which appears in the name of what seems to be a district of Merv mentioned by Yaqut al-Hamawi, may be a Classical Persian plural of () using the suffix ().
The English word was first used as a synonym of Tochari and is still occasionally used as such. In the early 20th century, after the discovery of Indo-European manuscripts in the Tarim Basin, the name was applied instead to the speakers of the so-called Tocharian languages. The use of Tocharians to refer to the Tarim Basin populations is now widely regarded as a misnomer.: "In fact, we know that the Yuezhi used Bactrian, an Iranian language written in Greek characters, as an official language. For this reason, Tocharian is a misnomer; no extant evidence suggests that the residents of the Tocharistan region of Afghanistan spoke the Tocharian language recorded in the documents found in the Kucha region."
Interpretations of the name While most scholars currently identify the Tochari mentioned in Greco-Roman sources with a branch of the Yuezhi who settled in Bactria in the 1st century BCE, alternative interpretations have been proposed. Igor V. Piankov has argued that Tochari was originally not an ethnonym but a socio-political designation referring to the sedentary component of a society dominated by a nomadic component. According to this view, neighboring peoples perceived the term as the name of a distinct people and mistakenly applied it to the entire group (sedentary and nomadic). Piankov suggests that this semantic shift contributed to later historiographical difficulties concerning the relationship between the Tochari, the Yuezhi, and the Kushans, as well as to the later application of the name to populations of the Tarim Basin.
History The Tochari settled in the eastern parts of Bactria in the 1st century BCE. In his Geographica (8.11.2), Strabo mentions, incidentally only, the overthrow of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom by nomadic tribes from the north who conquered Bactria from the Greeks: the Asii, Pasiani, Tochari, Sacaraucae and others.
The Tochari are also mentioned by Pliny the Elder and in Ammianus Marcellinus's Rerum gestarum (23.6.57).
By Procopius' time, the Tochari appear to have temporarily fallen out of historical notice, which explains why Procopius discusses the Ephthalites, or White Huns, without referring to the Tochari.: "By the time of Procopius, the Tochâri seem for a time to have escaped from memory; hence he speaks of the Ephthalitæ or White Huns apparently without mentioning the Tochâri."
However, in medieval sources, the name Tokharistan (Classical Persian: or ; ) supplanted that of Bactria, which seems to indicate that the Tochari, more numerous though less dominant, had gradually superseded the Ephthalites.: "The Tochâri, more numerous, though less energetic, seem, however, to have gradually superseded the newer race, so that in mediæval times we again find them giving their name to the country of Tochâristan." The name Tokharistan appears before Islam in Bactrian as () on the 2nd-century silver dish of Nukunzuk and on two 5th-century Bactrian documents, a name which the Tochari gave to the areas they settled but which was likely limited initially to Bactria's eastern parts.
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