Iranian military lexis in old chinese of the Shang, Zhou, and Han eras

The present monograph continues the series of studies entitled "The Old Iranian Origins of Chinese Lexis" and turns to one of the most complex strata of the Old Chinese vocabulary—the lexis of military affairs. Whereas the preceding issues of the series examined sacral-mantic, religious, philosophical, and chariot-technological terms, the present work transfers the analysis into the sphere of violence, weapons, wounding, flight, destruction, death, and prestigious forms of armament. The military sphere in the ancient world was rarely merely technical. It united material culture, social status, frontier contacts, power, metallurgy, horse breeding, chariotry, and the professional skills of the military elite. For this reason, individual military terms may preserve traces of those contacts that were later no longer perceived as external: the word received a Chinese graphic form, entered the written tradition, and became part of the internal lexicon. At the center of the study lies the following question: could certain terms of the Old Chinese military vocabulary preserve traces of an Old Iranian, Eastern Iranian, or more broadly Central Asian contact milieu? Where does the boundary pass between internal Chinese motivation, chance consonance, substratal inheritance, and an adstratal weapon term? The material of the study consists of the sinographs 戕 (qiāng, "to inflict harm, to kill"), 斧 (fǔ, "axe, battle-axe"), 發 (fā, "to shoot, to release"), 烕 / 滅 (miè, "to destroy, to extinguish"), 傷 (shāng, "to wound"), 逃 (táo, "to flee, to escape by flight"), 錕鋙 / 昆吾 (kūn yǔ / kūn wú, "Kunwu sword"), 鏑 (dí, "arrowhead"), and 殁 / 沒 (mò, "to die, to disappear, to sink"). They are considered not as borrowings proved in advance and not as a mechanically assembled list, but as separate cases requiring sequential verification in their own historical, graphic, semantic, and phonetic contexts. The work does not aim to derive Old Chinese military affairs from an external source. Its task is narrower: to verify whether deeply Sinicized terms that had fully entered Chinese writing could preserve traces of ancient language contacts. Such an approach makes it possible to view military lexis as part of a broader history of cultural synthesis, in which an external impulse receives a Chinese form, a Chinese development, and its own place within ancient Chinese political, ritual, and military culture.