Yamatai
Generations of Japanese historians, linguists, and archeologists have debated where Yamatai was located and whether it was related to the later Yamato (大和国).
This history describes ancient Wa based upon detailed reports of 3rd-century Chinese envoys who traveled throughout the Japanese archipelago:Going south by water for twenty days, one comes to the country of Toma, where the official is called mimi and his lieutenant, miminari.
...As a special gift, we bestow upon you three pieces of blue brocade with interwoven characters, five pieces of tapestry with delicate floral designs, fifty lengths of white silk, eight taels of gold, two swords five feet long, one hundred bronze mirrors, and fifty catties each of jade and of red beads.
Tsunoda 1951:1) The Book of Sui (traditional Chinese: 隋書), finished in 636 CE, records changing the capital's name from the Yamatai recorded in the Book of Wei, to Yamadai (traditional Chinese: 邪靡堆, Middle Chinese: /jia muɑ tuʌi/; interpreted as Yamato (Japanese logographic spelling 大和):Wa is situated in the middle of the great ocean southeast of Baekje and Silla, three thousand li away by water and land.
The old records say that it is altogether twelve thousand li distant from the borders of Lelang and Daifang prefectures, and is situated east of Kuaiji and close to Dan'er.
The first Japanese books, such as the Kojiki or Nihon Shoki, were mainly written in a variant of Classical Chinese called kanbun.
This gradually formalized over the 600s and 700s into the Man'yōgana system, a rebus-like transcription that uses specific kanji to represent Japanese phonemes.
The "Birth of the Eight Islands" section phonetically transcribes Yamato as 夜麻登, pronounced in Middle Chinese as /jiaH mˠa təŋ/ and used to represent the Old Japanese morae ya ma to2 (see also Man'yōgana#chartable).
For instance, the name Yamato is sometimes spelled as 山 (yama, "mountain") + 蹟 (ato, "footprint; track; trace").
According to the Chinese record Twenty-Four Histories, Yamatai was originally ruled by the shamaness Queen Himiko.
During the Asuka period (538-710) when Japanese place names were standardized into two-character compounds, the spelling of Yamato was changed to 大倭, adding the prefix 大 ("big; great").
The early Japanese texts above give three spellings of Yamato in kanji: 夜麻登 (Kojiki), 耶麻騰 (Nihon Shoki), and 山蹟 (Man'yōshū).
In contrast, the Man'yōshū uses Japanese kun'yomi readings of yama 山 "mountain" and ato 跡 "track; trace".
The third syllable of Yamatai is written in one variant with 壹 "faithful, committed", which is also financial form of 一, "one", and more commonly using 臺 "platform; terrace" (cf.
297 Wei Zhi, was writing about recent history based on personal observations; Fan Ye, author of the ca.
The Wei chih account of the Wo people is chiefly concerned with a kingdom which it calls Yeh-ma-t'ai, Middle Chinese i̯a-ma-t'ḁ̂i, which inevitably seems to be a transcription of some early linguistic form allied with the word Yamato.
Tōdō Akiyasu reconstructs two pronunciations for 䑓 – dai < Middle dǝi < Old *dǝg and yi < yiei < *d̥iǝg – and reads 邪馬臺 as Yamai.
Generations of historians have debated "the Yamatai controversy" and have hypothesized numerous localities, some of which are fanciful like Okinawa (Farris 1998:245).
General consensus centers around two likely locations of Yamatai, either northern Kyūshū or Yamato Province in the Kinki region of central Honshū.
The question of whether the Yamatai Kingdom was located in northern Kyushu or central Kinki prompted the greatest debate over the ancient history of Japan.
This has been a continuing debate over the past 200 years, involving not only professional historians, archeologists and ethnologists, but also many amateurs, and thousands of books and papers have been published.
In 1989, archeologists discovered a giant Yayoi-era complex at the Yoshinogari site in Saga Prefecture, which was thought to be a possible candidate for the location of Yamatai.
The recent archeological discovery of a large stilt house suggests that Yamatai-koku was located near Makimuku in Sakurai, Nara (Anno.
