ABSTRACT The name Yancai belongs to a group of ancient historical forms that may preserve not only geographical information, but also a deeper linguistic layer. Chinese historical tradition recorded this name in connection with the northwestern spaces of the Han-period world — a zone where steppe polities, aquatic landmarks, long-distance routes, and changing ethnopolitical names formed a complex field of contact. The present study approaches Yancai not as a simple transcription of a distant ethnonym, but as a possible hydronymic ethnonym: a name in which a body of water, a territory, and its population were perceived by Chinese tradition as a single historical designation. Of particular importance is the fact that the early Chinese source associates Yancai with a vast body of water described as a great lake or the Northern Sea. This aquatic marker becomes the starting point for a new etymological interpretation. The method of the study is based on verification analysis: the semantic motivation of the presumed donor descriptor is tested through historical geography, East Iranian lexical material, the minimal paleogeographical evidence required for the Aral Sea, Old Chinese phonological reconstructions, and the Sarmato-Aorsi-Alanic historical context. This approach makes it possible to distinguish the historical identification of Yancai with the Aorsi-Alanic sphere from the etymological explanation of the early Chinese form itself. As a result, Yancai is treated as a linguocultural trace of early contact between Chinese historiographical knowledge and the East Iranian world of the Aral region. The proposed hypothesis explains not only the form of the name, but also the logic of the Chinese report: a country located by a great body of water could have been named after a local geographical descriptor, later obscured by more direct ethnopolitical designations of the Alanic type. Keywords: Yancai; 奄蔡; Han historical geography; Western Regions; hydronymic ethnonym; Chinese transcriptional tradition; East Iranian substrate; Sarmato-Alanic milieu; Aorsi; Alans; Aral region; Aral Sea; Ossetic etymology; phonetic approximation; cultural transfer; verification analysis.
Taymuraz Kokoyti (Sun,) studied this question.