Hey guys I've been feeding my Roman history addiction lately by reading about the battle of Carrhae. We know that tens of thousands of Ronan legionaries under Marcus Crassus were slaughtered by the Parthians in 53 BCE. We also know that about 10,000 Romans were captured by the Parthians. Records disappear of these men following the battle.
Now for my main inquiry, I find this extremely interesting. Please note that I am going to copy from this article: https://m.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/romans-china-lost-legions-carrhae.html
*About 17 years after Carrhae, the battle of Zhizhi was fought as a Chinese army under Chen Tang and the Han Dybasty assaulted a border town known today as Taraz, located in Kazakhstan near the border of Kyrgyzstan. Chinese historians note that the defenders held their shields in a “fish scale” pattern. The fight for the town was intense but the Chinese prevailed.
Chinese were so impressed by these foreign warriors that they put them into another border town, this time guarding the border between China and Tibet as Tibetan raids were not uncommon around this time. Anywhere from 100 to 1,000 or more soldiers established themselves in this town that was known by the Chinese as Liqian/Li-Jien, which is pronounced as “legion”. These men were known to use tools such as tree trunk counterweight construction devices, and to reinforce the area into a square fort, a common site in the Mediterranean but quite rare in Asia.
It seems these Romans lived peacefully in Liqian, and 2,000 years later we have DNA evidence that over 50% of the villagers in modern day Liqian have Caucasian ancestry including green and blue eyes, increased average height and other distinguishing characteristics such as distinctly Roman noses*
Sorry for the lengthy post, can anybody verify the information here?
If this is true I think it's an incredible story. A true measure of East vs West at the battle of ZhiZhi and an amazing journey for those Romans that may have been involved!
You'll find more than a few threads on this sub (here's one, though there are others) that deal with this strangely common myth. I don't know much about it but I can tell you that the article you're looking at is absurd and riddled with ridiculous ideas and turns of phrase (really, the Parthians had a "semi-professional army" with "the most elite horse archers the world had ever seen at the time?" Are you kidding me?). There's all kinds of problems with the "article," not only a poor understanding of what happened at Carrhae but also of DNA evidence and even of Roman cult practice (the cult of Mithras does not appear until the 2nd and 3rd Centuries, A.D.) but I find the connection between the words Liqian and "legion" particularly amusing. The author of the "article" apparently does not know Latin and assumes that the Romans spoke English, because Latin legio cannot possibly be mistaken for English "legion" even in the oblique cases. Latin "g" is always hard and the paradigm of legio, legionis, f. yields exactly zero forms that would ever be pronounced remotely like English "legion." The "evidence" provided by that "article" is almost entirely nonsense and generally not even correct...