The War Over Blood Sweating Horses

The Han and Greek clash for the "heavenly horses"

Bust of a Han horse, 1 century BC, San Diego Museum of Art. Source: Wikimedia.

In the previous newsletter, we talked about Zhang Qian’s remarkable journey that led to the discovery of the Silk Road. If you recall, he embarked on a risky journey through the Gobi desert, searching for the Yuezhi. His journey hadn’t even begun when the Xiongnu, who controlled the route through the Gobi desert, captured him. In his thirteen-year journey to the Ferghana Valley and back, Zhang Qian spent ten of them as a prisoner of the Xiongnu.

After he escaped from the Xiongnu, Zhang traveled through the dangerous Taklamakan desert and arrived at a city that he termed Dayuan. This city was the famous Alexandria Eschate, a Greco-Bactrian town in the Ferghana Valley. What were Greeks doing in the Ferghana Valley (modern-day Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan) thousands of miles away from Greece?

In this newsletter, we’ll explore the origins of the Greeks in Central Asia and learn more about the unique hor…