Yuezhi

(noun)

An ancient Indo-European people who originally settled in the grasslands of the eastern Tarim Basin, part of modern China.

Related Terms

Examples of Yuezhi in the following topics:

  • Expansion and Decline of the Kushan Empire

    • The Kushans were one of five branches of the Yuezhi confederation, an Indo-European nomadic people.
    • The Yuezhi lived in the grasslands of eastern Central Asia's Tarim Basin, in modern-day Xinjiang, China (possibly speaking varieties of Indo-European languages), until they were driven west by the Xiongnu in 176-160 BCE.
    • The Yuezhi reached the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, located in northern Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, around 135 BCE, and displaced the Greek dynasties that resettled to the southeast in areas of the Hindu Kush and the Indus basin, in present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  • Decline of the Maurya Empire

    • Throughout the first century BCE, the Indo-Greeks progressively lost ground to the Indians in the East, and the Scythians, the Yuezhi, and the Parthians in the West.