Taiysu pälskanoym sanai ṣaryompa śāyau karttse-śaulu-wärñai snai tserekwa snai nāte.
"Thus did I always think: "I will live well, the whole of my life, with one lover: no force, no deceit."
Excerpt from Tocharian love poem, ca ~500 AD. The Tocharians were something as unusual and counter-intuitive as a Indo-European, light-skinned, fair-haired, often blue-eyed people (i. e. "European" looks) living in western China in antiquity. Since early antiquity and before the Turko-Mongolian expansions of the first millenium AD, the great Eurasian steppe was to a large degree filled with various Indo-European ("Aryan") peoples, from the Scythes and the Sarmates of the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the Caspian all the way to these Tocharian peoples of north-eastern modern China. Nurtured by the ever-so-vibrant Silk Road, the steppe peoples saw great trade and were exceptional - historically unsurpassed by far - in the art of mounted (equestrian) warfare. This is a characteristic shared by all folk of the steppe, not just the Indo-Aryans; it is hard to imagine the Mongolian conquests without their outstanding mounted archery).
This Indo-European
expansion probably originated in the European parts of the Eurasian
steppe: the prevailing hypothesis describes the northern Black Sea coast
as a plausible urheimat. However, from the first
millenium AD, the ethnic-genetic make-up of the great Eurasian steppe
shifted into becoming predominated by Turkic and Mongolian peoples. The
Indo-european steppe peoples were conquered, assimilated or otherwise
neutralized by the successful campaigns of conquest by, among many
others, Huns, Oghuz Turks and, lastly, Mongols. After the Mongol empire
disintegrated in the 14th century and the Oghuz became the Ottomans and
settled permanently in Anatolia, no serious military threats have been
presented to neighboring nations of the steppe from within it, and the
age of the steppe empire is since then shrouded in mysterious history,
never to come back.
