The Lost Roman Legion

Carras (current Harrán, Turkey), May 8, 53 a. C. The battle of Carras is over. General Marco Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Rome (and one of the richest in the history of the world) and one of the triumvirs together with Caesar and Pompey has not only lost the battle, but also his lifetime.

But for a part of those of his legionnaires who survived a new life began that would give them immortality in the form of legend. The unlikely yet credible story of the Lost Legion began.

The so-called Lost Legion, and which has never been certified by history - we only have indications that point in that direction - would be a set formed by part of the Roman prisoners taken by the Parthians after the Battle of Carras, and who would have ended their days settling in China imperial.

How did this transfer of people between so separated lands and cultures take place at a time when long journeys were not frequent?

Contacts between China and Rome in classical times of the latter empire existed, and products such as Chinese silk reached the Eternal City. Even in earlier times, the conquests of Alexander the Great made it possible for Greek coins to be found in lands as far away as India. The world, already at that time, was big, but smaller than we imagine.

As I was saying, after the Roman defeat, the Parthians captured about 10,000 Roman prisoners, so the question quickly arose: what to do with them?

At the time, prisoners of war suffered various fates: slavery, being sacrificed to the gods of the victors or simply killed, or re-employed as their own troops. The Parthians clung to the latter option.

However, you do not have to be an expert in military matters to imagine that it is not wise to confront troops made up of prisoners against their former comrades in arms... so the usual thing at the time was to transfer the soldiers to a different front, at the opposite end of the empire, and the Parthians did that too.

Much more recently, American soldiers who landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, discovered Korean soldiers framed in the ranks of the axis ...

The main attraction of the captured Romans was that they were the best infantry of the time: disciplined, trained, and highly capable. Orodes II, the Parthian king, did not think twice, so he assigned them to the furthest eastern border of the empire, the province of Bactria, present-day Afghanistan.

In this way, any temptation to desertion by these troops would be eliminated with the impossibility of returning home.

It is already here, from the moment of his capture and destination to the east of the Parthian Empire, where history gives way to mere indications that have not been fully certified, and to legend.

The trail of these combatants was lost to such an extent that, although the peace agreement signed after the The war between the Parthians and the Romans foresaw the return of these prisoners, their trace had already been lost from the everything.

And this is so because, possibly, they were taken prisoner again after another battle, this time against the nomadic tribes that circulated through the bordering territories of the Parthian Empire.

According to the American historian and sinologist (China expert) Homer Hasenpflug Dubs, this "lost legion" would be mentioned in the chronicles of the Chinese Han dynasty in 36 BC. C.

Chinese sources detail how, in the pursuit of some Hun nomads, they arrived at a very peculiar fortress, in a quadrangular shape and with walls of wood. The troops that met the Chinese were, as these chronicles describe, very well organized, made up of by highly disciplined and hardened infants, and who were organized in a strange formation resembling scales of fish.

These descriptions fit, first, with the palisades of a Roman military camp and, second, with a formation of testudo, the famous Roman tortoise that gave high protection to the soldiers that formed it.

While the nomads of the steppes fought horse, the troops that faced the Chinese were fighting on foot, a significant and curious detail.

The Chinese chronicle speaks of about 1,000 prisoners that they took among the soldiers described, which leads us to wonder what happened to the remaining 9,000, and where these 1,000 come from.

Probably the thousand taken prisoner by the Chinese had been taken prisoner, in turn, by the Huns, or deserted voluntarily joining their forces. ranks in case the Parthians decided to eliminate them, or to improve their lives, since it is to be imagined that as prisoners of the Parthians they would not be very well treaties.

Everything we can say in this regard is pure and simple conjecture. They are the "lost years" of the lost legion (worth the redundancy).

Be that as it may, and impressed by the courage and experience of those soldiers, the Chinese decided to enlist them in their side, so they settled them in their territory.

And that is well documented in it chronicle China, which indicates that those thousand foreign fighters were resettled in the Province from Gansu, where they would found the city of Li Jien.

There they would have settled definitively, mixing with the population local and having offspring.

What evidence supports this theory?

We have from archaeological remains (coins, remains of a wooden palisade -something rare in imperial China, where they worked with other elements such as clay-, or a legionnaire's helmet) to traces of DNA in the local population that would point in that direction.

As for archaeological remains, as I have said before, commercial contacts between China and Rome were not rare, so it would be possible to hypothesis that it was a trading post where Roman items arrived. However, this does not explain the wooden palisade.

Nor does it explain that the local population has an average height higher than the rest of the country, and traits such as lighter skin, blond and red hair, or green or blue eyes. A genetic study carried out in 2005 reveals European ancestry in a large percentage of the local population.

There are also about a hundred tombs in the city that contain the remains of men of around 1.80 meters, very tall for that time and place.

We have one more clue that allows us to intuit the Roman past of this Chinese population: his name, Li Jien, would be a deformation phonetics from the word "legion", and it was the name by which Rome was known in China ...

Thus, the last resting place of the lost legion of Crassus would be another Rome, this one, in the heart from China.

Fotolia photos: ASuruwataRi / Rudall30

Themes in The Lost Roman Legion