So welcome back to the third week of the class. This week we're going to be laying a lot of groundwork, so bear with me. Having a more solid grasp of the early history of Tibet will help us grapple more directly with Sino-Tibetan issues as they emerge in the later

imperial period. So the title of this class is Myths, Prehistory, and the

Emergence of the Yarlung Dynasty. The Yarlung Dynasty is in effect a

militaristic tribal confederation that formed in the Yarlung River Valley in

the 6th century AD, which then grew into the Tibetan Empire in the 7th century.

And most of the rulers of the Yarlung Dynasty are mythological, but the

myths and legends of proto-imperial Tibet tell us a great deal about how

Tibetans view their own past, as well as how aspects of the Tibetan Empire were

formed and administered. Now first, today I'm going to be using the terms

historical and pre-historical a lot in this lecture, and I want to clarify what

I mean when I say that, when I say historical and pre-historical, so that

we're all on the same page. Now when academics use those terms in

historical area studies, the study of the history of a particular region or ethnic

group, what they're usually referring to is the introduction of writing. With

writing comes a significant number of benefits, including the ability to

maintain a strong centralized administration, to govern larger areas of

land, to expand education, and that kind of thing. But more important for

historians, writing allows people to have written correspondence, to write legal

documents, and to keep records. And that's what allows historians really to do their

work. So when I say pre-historical Tibet, I'm referring to Tibetan-speaking regions

before the introduction of a written script in the early 7th century AD. Now

at its height in the late 8th century, under the Emperor Trisong Detsen, who's

an actual historical figure, the Tibetan Empire was one of the major military

powerhouses in Inner Asia, and the territory administered by Trisong

Detsen was actually quite vast, stretching from Gilgit, Kashgar, and Leh

in the east, through most of modern-day Nepal and Assam in the south, and a great

deal of modern Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan in the east. And that brought some

Tibetans into conflict with Arabs, with the Umayyads and Abbasids in the west,

and more than anyone else, that pushed them into conflict with the Tang

dynasty. And in the 8th century, the Tibetan Empire posed a significant

threat to the Tang Empire, so much so that in 763, the Tibetan army briefly

occupied Chang'an, the Tang capital, for 15 days, which is very brief as far as

invasions go, but it emphasizes the fact that the military threat to the Tang

Western frontier was very real. So the question that we're gonna be exploring

over the next two weeks is how, within just 150 years, how did a tribal

confederacy, ruling over little more than a single river valley in central

Tibet, grow into one of the major political and military powers in Central

Asia? And then, in the mid-ninth century, how and why did it all come apart? Why

did the Empire so suddenly collapse in the 840s? But the story starts, as

stories often do, at the beginning, with the earliest historical records we have

and with oral histories, which were later written down and preserved. And a number

of these are myths that pertain to the origins of Tibet and the Tibetan people.

You encountered one of the most common in Kapch'in, the so-called story of the

the ape and the ogres, which is something that you'll see referred to

relatively frequently. And just to recap that a little bit, the legend is based

on post-10th century sources, the most famous of which is probably the mirror

illuminating the royal genealogies, the Garapsawai Melong, which was probably

written in the 14th century, so it's already rather late. But in the

narrative, primordial Tibet was once a vast inland sea, and eventually the

waters receded into the the lakes and river valleys that we find today on the