Asiatic Quarterly Review (Full Title: The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, and Oriental and Colonial Record): Volume XIII, No. 26 [‎511r] (146/238)

China, the Avars, and the Franks.
359
Arabs call Europeans ‘Nassara’( = Nazarenes or Christians),
but educated Arabs call them ‘Afrangh’and ‘Ouroubaween.’
About the beginning of the Mohamadan era, ‘ Afrangh ’
means the people who came from France or near it : it is
taken from the word ‘ Frank.’ ” I know nothing of Arabic,
but it is plain that Sine and Ourouba are followed by some
plural particle, yien, ween, akin to that in “ fellah Arabic for ‘peasant’. It was used by British officials to refer to agricultural workers or to members of a social class employed primarily in agricultural labour.
Some sinologues have imagined that Fuh-lin may stand
for 7ro\iv (the city, or Constantinople) ; others for Beth
lehem, because the Patriarch of Jerusalem was hard by.
To me it appears that Frank is the only word we can
reasonably accept, and to this day it appears in folangki,
piling, falansi, and other forms. I have proved this else
where.
Returning now to the opening words of this paper, I
may observe that if Attila, who succeeded in 433 and died in
453, “ insulted and vanquished the Khan of the Geougen,
negotiating an alliance with the Empire of China,” he must
have either himself been the ruler of the Ytleh-pan, or he
must have passed back eastwards through Sogd and then
through the Yiieh-pan country in order to do it. In 437
the Ytieh-pan sent a mission to North China, and in 448
they offered to assist China against the Geougen. Chinese
history gives most precise details of the alternate alliances and
fights between the Geougen and the Chinese (Tobas) during
this period, mentioning distinctly the part which the Tartar
States between Kokonor and Hi took in the war, and the
embassies which came from Sogd (said by the Chinese to
be 1,600 miles west of the Ylieh-pan), and other Turkestan
steppe States under the rule of Hiung-nu Princes. More
over, as Attila had his hands full in Europe, and China had
hers full with the Geougen, it is hard to see how Attila
could have vanquished China’s enemy, the Geougen, and
concluded an alliance with China, without Sogd (Aral
region), Ytieh-pan (Balkash region), or China being aware
of it; in any case, it could only have been North or Tartar
China, South China being as much hidden from the Yiieh-