Tocharians

The Tocharians or Tokharians ( ; ) were speakers of the Tocharian languages, a group of Indo-European languages known from around 7,600 documents from the 6th and 7th centuries, found on the northern edge of the Tarim Basin (modern-day Xinjiang, China). The name "Tocharian" was given to these languages in the early 20th century by scholars who identified their speakers with a people known in ancient Greek sources as the Tókharoi (), who inhabited Bactria from the 2nd century BC. This identification is now generally considered erroneous, but the name "Tocharian" remains the most common term for the languages and their speakers. Their endonym is unknown, although they may have referred to themselves as the Agni, Kuči, and Krorän or as the Agniya and Kuchiya known from Sanskrit texts.

The origins of these people are uncertain. Links have been proposed with the Andronovo and Afanasievo cultures, as well as the Tarim mummies found in the eastern Tarim dated to the 2nd millennium BC. However, genetic analysis has revealed that the Tarim mummies were unrelated to Afanasievo, although contemporaneous populations in Dzungaria to the north did show Afanasievo ancestry and might possibly have spoken Tocharian.