from Rome to Tibet may have been a Turkic language, since kaiser (emperor) entered Turkic through contact with the Byzantine Empire, where Caesar (Καῖσαρ) was an imperial title. Some think the medium for this transmission may have been via Mongolian Kesar. The Mongols were allied with the Byzantines, whose emperor still used the title. Numismatic evidence and some accounts speak of a Bactrian ruler Phrom-kesar, specifically the Kabul Shahi of Gandhara, which was ruled by the Turkic king Fromo Kesaro ("Caesar of Rome"), who was father-in-law of the king of the Kingdom of Khotan around the middle of the 8th century CE. In early Bon sources, From Kesar is always a place name, and never refers, as it does later, to a ruler. In some Tibetan versions of the epic, a king named Phrom Ge-sar or Khrom Ge-sar figures as one of the kings of the four directions – the name is attested in the 10th century and this Phrom/Khrom preserves an Iranian form (*frōm-hrōm) for Rūm/Rome. This eastern Iranian word lies behind the Middle Chinese word for (Eastern) Rome (, Fólín), namely Byzantium (phrōm-from<*phywət-lyəm>). A. H. Francke thought the Tibetan name Gesar derived from Sanskrit. S.K. Chatterji, introducing his work, noted that the Ladakh variant of Kesar, Kyesar, in Classical Tibetan Skye-gsar meant 'reborn/newly born', and that Gesar/Kesar in Tibetan, as in Sanskrit signifies the 'anther or pistil of a flower', corresponding to Sanskrit kēsara, whose root 'kēsa' (hair) is Indo-European. Gesar and the Kingdom of Ling In Tibet, the existence of Gesar as a historical figure is rarely questioned. (; Some scholars there argued he was born in 1027, on the basis of a note in a 19th-century chronicle, the Mdo smad chos 'byung by Brag dgon pa dkon mchog bstan pa rab. Certain core episodes seem to reflect events recorded at the dawn of Tibetan history: the marriage to a Chinese princess is reminiscent of legends concerning king Songtsän Gampo's alliance marriage with Princess Wencheng in 641, for example. Legends variously place him in Golok, between Dotō and Domé, or in Markham, Kongpo, Tanak, Öyuk or the village of Panam on the Nyang River. Given that the mythological and allegorical elements of the story defy place and time, the historicity of figures in the cycle is indeterminate. Though the epic was sung all over Tibetan-speaking regions, with Kham and Amdo long regarded as the centres for its