What do Europeans mean by calling China "Cyrus"?

China and European Mediterranean countries, located at the east and west ends of Eurasia, respectively represent the eastern and western cultures. They are separated by a vast inland region of Europe and Asia, which is now the Central Asia region west of Xinjiang in the northwest of China. The long traffic between China and the West began in a very early historical period. As the national treasure of China, silk was quite developed in the Yin and Zhou Dynasties and was deeply loved by the surrounding ethnic groups. Grassland nomads who have no fixed abode are scattered outside the Eurasian civilization circle. They act as disseminators of two civilizations and promote cultural exchanges between countries located at the east and west ends of Eurasia. China silk was introduced to the west, first from the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea to the grassland in the northern Mediterranean.

According to historical data, the first head of state of China to visit western countries may be Zhou Mugong, the leader of the Western Zhou Dynasty in 10 century BC. At that time, he set out from the Central Plains, traveled westward to the northwest, arrived at some clans and tribes in Central Asia, and presented silk as a national gift to the countries he visited. This may be the earliest history of silk being introduced to the west. It was not until the second century BC that Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty sent Zhang Qian to the Western Regions that the Oasis Silk Road from Xinjiang to West Asia was opened. What people usually call the Silk Road is centuries later than the Grassland Silk Road.

In the eighth century BC, the so-called "Great Migration" movement appeared in Greece, that is, from ancient agriculture to commercial colonization. One of them went north through Heiles and went deep into the whole Black Sea coast. These ancient Greeks often traded with the Skettians on the northern shore of the Black Sea. Skettians not only traded grain, wool and slaves, but also resold goods from the Far East. In the famous Homer epic Odyssey, he wrote: "From the threshold to the inner room, there is a soft front edge on the chair." These silks may have been exchanged with the Skettians.

Although the Greeks began to use silk very early, and called China "Cyrus" (that is, the country producing silk), they knew nothing about the origin of this magical silk because they were far from the sea and had a long journey. As a result, westerners attach fantastic myths about silk to the people of Central Asia, and make all kinds of absurd guesses about the distant "Ju Lushi State" and the origin of silk with their imagination, which also leads to all kinds of misunderstandings about silk.

The Greeks in the fifth century BC thought that Ju Lushi was "nearly twenty feet tall, too ordinary, with red hair and blue eyes and a loud voice, and lived for more than 200 years." Some scholars believe that the Cyrillic people referred to here may refer to the ethnic groups in the east of Central Asia, that is, the ancestors of the Uighurs in Xinjiang and the middlemen of the silk trade, rather than the Han people in China.

In a.d. 1 century, the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder mentioned "the country of Ju Lushi" in his Natural History, saying that the country was "famous for its silk in the forest". Silk is born in trees. You can comb it into silk when it is wet. "It can be seen that Europeans at that time thought that silk came from trees.

A Greek geographer named Poggi Pojinias put forward a more bizarre speculation: the silk used by Ju Lushi people came from a bug called Seir. This insect is about twice the size of a beetle, and spins silk like a spider weaving a web under a tree. Spiders have eight legs, so does this insect. Cyrus built houses to raise this insect in winter and summer, and wrapped its feet with filaments spit out by the insect. First, I raised millet for four years, and then I raised green reeds in the fifth year. Green reeds are the favorite of this insect. Because of overeating, the worm died of multiple blood cracks, and the body was silk. "This kind of' big beetle' who loves to eat green reeds is an imagination of silkworms in the second century AD.

In the 4th century AD, the Greeks came up with a kind of "wool tree" that can produce silk: there are sheep in the forest, and some people often irrigate them, combing them into fine silk threads, half like wool fibers and half like sticky silk.

Around the 6th century AD, several Indian monks hid China's silkworm eggs in walking sticks and smuggled them from western China to Byzantium in eastern Rome. Since then, the silk industry has appeared in Europe. Only then did they understand that "the silk maker is an ant." Silk is naturally spit out of the mouth without manpower. Insects are raised with mulberry leaves. "After the 6th century, the name" Cyrus "gradually disappeared.