Central Asia in World History Read online

  Central Asia in

  World History

  Central Asia in

  World History

  Peter B. Golden

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Golden, Peter B.

  Central Asia in world history / Peter B. Golden.

  p. cm.

  Summary: “This work traces the history of the nomadic steppe tribes and sedentary

  inhabitants of the oasis city-states of Central Asia from pre-history to the present.

  Particular focus is placed on the unique melting pot cultures that this region has

  produced over millennia”—Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-19-533819-5 (pbk.)—ISBN 978-0-19-515947-9 (hardcover: alk. paper)

  1. Asia, Central—History. 2. Asia, Central—Civilization.

  3. Asia, Central—Strategic aspects. 4. Geopolitics—Asia, Central—History.

  I. Title.

  DS329.4.G598 2011

  958—dc22 2010020626

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  Printed in the United States of America

  on acid-free paper

  Frontispiece: A Kyrgyz grandmother with her grandchildren.

  The Kyrgyz, like other Central Asian nomads, have a rich

  history of rug making and embroidery.

  ITAR-TASS

  For Sylvia

  Contents

  Editors’ Preface

  INTRODUCTION A Layering of Peoples

  CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Nomadism and Oasis City-States

  CHAPTER 2 The Early Nomads: “Warfare is Their Business”

  CHAPTER 3 Heavenly Qaghans: The Türks and Their Successors

  CHAPTER 4 The Cities of the Silk Road and the Coming of Islam

  CHAPTER 5 Crescent over the Steppe: Islam and the Turkic Peoples

  CHAPTER 6 The Mongol Whirlwind

  CHAPTER 7 The Later Chinggisids, Temür, and the Timurid Renaissance

  CHAPTER 8 The Age of Gunpowder and the Crush of Empires

  CHAPTER 9 The Problems of Modernity

  Pronunciation Guide

  Chronology

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Websites

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Editors’ Preface

  This book is part of the New Oxford World History, an innovative series that offers readers an informed, lively, and up-to-date history of the world and its people that represents a significant change from the “old” world history. Only a few years ago, world history generally amounted to a history of the West—Europe and the United States—with small amounts of information from the rest of the world. Some versions of the “old” world history drew attention to every part of the world except Europe and the United States. Readers of that kind of world history could get the impression that somehow the rest of the world was made up of exotic people who had strange customs and spoke difficult languages. Still another kind of “old” world history presented the story of areas or peoples of the world by focusing primarily on the achievements of great civilizations. One learned of great buildings, influential world religions, and mighty rulers but little of ordinary people or more general economic and social patterns. Interactions among the world’s peoples were often told from only one perspective.

  This series tells world history differently. First, it is comprehensive, covering all countries and regions of the world and investigating the total human experience—even those of so-called peoples without histories living far from the great civilizations. “New” world historians thus share in common an interest in all of human history, even going back millions of years before there were written human records. A few “new” world histories even extend their focus to the entire universe, a “big history” perspective that dramatically shifts the beginning of the story back to the big bang. Some see the “new” global framework of world history today as viewing the world from the vantage point of the Moon, as one scholar put it. We agree. But we also want to take a close-up view, analyzing and reconstructing the significant experiences of all of humanity.

  This is not to say that everything that has happened everywhere and in all time periods can be recovered or is worth knowing, but that there is much to be gained by considering both the separate and interrelated stories of different societies and cultures. Making these connections is still another crucial ingredient of the “new” world history. It emphasizes connectedness and interactions of all kinds—cultural, economic, political, religious, and social—involving peoples, places, and processes. It makes comparisons and finds similarities. Emphasizing both the comparisons and interactions is critical to developing a global framework that can deepen and broaden historical understanding, whether the focus is on a specific country or region or on the whole world.

  The rise of the new world history as a discipline comes at an opportune time. The interest in world history in schools and among the general public is vast. We travel to one another’s nations, converse and work with people around the world, and are changed by global events. War and peace affect populations worldwide as do economic conditions and the state of our environment, communications, and health and medicine. The New Oxford World History presents local histories in a global context and gives an overview of world events seen through the eyes of ordinary people. This combination of the local and the global further defines the new world history. Understanding the workings of global and local conditions in the past gives us tools for examining our own world and for envisioning the interconnected future that is in the making.

  Bonnie G. Smith

  Anand Yang

  Central Asia in

  World History

  INTRODUCTION

  A Layering of Peoples

  Historically, Central Asians had no all-embracing term for the region or its peoples. The ties of clan, tribe, status, locale, or religion were the primary components of Central Asian identities, and these were often multi-layered. For its large nomadic population, political delimitations were of little consequence. Control over people brought control over territory.

  For millennia a bridge between East and West, China, India, Iran, the Mediterranean lands, and more recently Russia have influenced Central Asia, the meeting ground of shamans, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians, and Muslims, among others. Its shifting ethnic, linguistic, political and cultural borders encompassed two interacting yet fundamentally different lifeways, each inhabiting different ecological niches: the settled folk of its oases an
d the nomads of the steppes. Ancient and medieval observers considered it marginal to “civilization.” Modern historians have deemed it the “heartland” or “pivot” of Eurasian history because it produced the largest empires of premodern times.

  Central Asia occupies approximately one-seventh of Earth’s landmass, some eight million square miles. Today, western Central Asia, overwhelmingly Muslim, consists of the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union: Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, historically called “Western Turkestan1.” Soviet policy determined the names and borders of the modern states, attempting, for the first time in history, to tie politically delineated territories to specific ethno-linguistic groups—often defining them according to political needs. Muslim Central Asia also includes Xinjiang (also called “Eastern Turkestan”) in China, with its indigenous Uighur and other Turko-Muslim populations. Today, much of the region between the Amur Darya River and Xinjiang, once largely Iranian-speaking, is Turkic in language, a linguistic shift that has been in progress for 1500 years, creating a “Turko-Persian” cultural world. Southward, Afghanistan, tied to its northern neighbors by ethnicity and language, is a microcosm of this mix.

  Eastern Central Asia, largely Buddhist, comprises Mongolia, divided today into the Republic of Mongolia, the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region of China, and Manchuria. Tibet, linguistically distinct from Central Asia, has, at various times, played a critical role in Central Asian affairs.

  The forest-steppe zones between the Volga and western Siberia contain substantial Muslim Turkic populations with historical and cultural roots in Central Asia. Politically and culturally, Central Asia, an exporter of peoples, has also extended into Hungary, Ukraine, Russia, and the Middle East.

  The steppe, a mix of prairie, desert and semi-desert extending from Hungary to the Altay Mountains and the Manchurian forests, is Central Asia’s dominant ecological zone. Although snow-covered for more than a third of the year, its rich grasslands support large herds. Alongside the seas of grass, baking deserts, punctuated by oases, are the most common feature, especially in the south. The aridity of the region is so great that in the early twentieth century Sir Aurel Stein, the British-Hungarian explorer, could still smell the pungency of materials excavated from a well-preserved medieval “rubbish heap” in Lop Nor (eastern Xinjiang).2 The melt off from snow-covered mountains produces rivers that, in summer’s heat, turn into puddles or parched riverbeds. Erosion and desiccation are an ongoing problem.

  Remarkably, plant life survives in the deserts, blooming in the spring and lying dormant during the long summers and winters. Agriculture flourishes in the oases nourished by rivers, such as the Zeravshan, Amu Darya, and the Syr Darya. The latter two flow into the Aral Sea (actually a large lake), now sadly polluted. Rivers are partially ice-covered for more than half of the year and often longer. Unlike the great civilizations of China, India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, riverbanks are relatively sparsely populated and do not serve as arteries of commerce and communication. Mongolia’s Orkhon, Selenge, and Kerulen rivers were associated with the great steppe empires, but played no major economic role in them. Except for fishing, the nomads never exploited the rivers. Water travel usually meant fording a river on inflated rafts made from animal hides.

  The interaction of the steppe-dwellers with neighboring agrarian states has shaped much of our knowledge of Central Asia. The accounts coming from settled societies are culturally biased against the nomads who dwelt in “the inhospitable land of the Barbarians.”3 Ancient Persian tradition contrasted Turan, the fierce Iranian (and later Turkic) world of nomads beyond the Amu Darya, and Iran (historically also termed “Persia”), as the struggle between good and evil.4 Many of the Chinese words that designated these peoples are customarily translated into English as “barbarian,” but these terms were actually far more nuanced, ranging in meaning from “vassal” and “foreign” to the less charitable “barbarous.”5 Chinese historians made no attempt to hide their revulsion at the nomads’ “primitive” customs, cuisine, and clothing of animal hides, fur, and felt.

  However, archaeological finds show that some nomads lived rich, even luxuriant lives, often confirmed by the same scornful contemporary observers. They lined their fur garments, necessary for the cold, with silk obtained from China and other precious textiles from Iran. They made extensive use of gold and gilded objects in their finery. The ceremonial costume of the “Golden Man” largely made from gold or decorated with golden articles, replete with a high golden headdress (such high headdresses were also common among women well into medieval times—indeed some archaeologists think that the so-called “Golden Man” may actually be a warrior priestess), shows that “Barbarian” clothing, an early, all-gold version of a top hat and tails, was anything but primitive.6 Nomads had a rich tradition of oral poetry, song and music. Some scholars credit them with the invention of bowed musical instruments, such as the violin, derived perhaps from the ancestor of the qobïz still played by Central Asian peoples such as the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz today. The oldest example of a “horse-head fiddle,” called morin khuur in Mongol, dating to the seventh or eighth century was found in warrior’s burial site in Mongolia in 2008.7

  Some 4,000 gold objects covering the remains of this high-ranking Saka, along with gold, silver, bronze, and wooden utensils, were found in a gravesite in southeastern Kazakhstan. Today, the “Golden Man” has become a national symbol of Kazakhstan. Courtesy of the Institute of Archaeology of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan

  The themes of “barbarism” and the “noble savage” are common in the writings of ancient and medieval authors describing what they perceived as an alien world. In reality, the nomads were no more bloodthirsty or covetous of gold or silks than their “civilized” neighbors. Life on the steppe was harsh, but many nomads felt theirs was a superior existence to those who spent a lifetime in backbreaking labor on the soil. Urban Central Asia, with its rich and cosmopolitan culture and its agrarian and commerce-oriented economy, had a symbiotic relationship with its nomadic neighbors, often serving as the connecting bond between steppe and sown.

  A key theme of Central Asian history is the movement of peoples and languages and the creation of new ethnic entities. Languages are usually grouped into “families” indicating origins in a common linguistic, but not necessarily biological, source. Two language families, Indo-European and Altaic, dominate the history of Central Asia. The Indo-Europeans formed a linguistic community that lived in the Black Sea steppes around 4500 to 4000 BCE. By 3000 or 2500 BCE, this community began to break up, with groups moving into central, south, and west Asia and the northern Mediterranean.8 Their linguistic descendants extend from the Indic speakers of South Asia (Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, and many other languages in the Indian subcontinent) and Iranian speakers of Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (Persian, Tajik, Pashtun, and other Iranian languages) to the British Isles and include all of the languages of Europe except for Basque, Finnish, Estonian, and related Finnic languages, and Hungarian, its distant relative.

  Altaic was located in Southern Siberia, eastern Mongolia, and Manchuria. Its members include Turkish and various Turkic tongues spoken in Central Asia, such as Uzbek, Kazakh, and Uighur, as well as Mongolian found in various forms in Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, and adjoining areas of China and Russia, including the Kalmyk people in the Volga region. Manchu (now nearly extinct) and the smaller Tungusic peoples of Manchuria constitute the eastern branch. Some scholars would include the ancestors of Korean and Japanese in the Altaic “family.” Others not only reject this connection, but also contest the idea that Altaic constitutes a language family. Rather, they argue, the parallels between the different Altaic languages are merely the result of centuries of interaction and lexical borrowing.9

  As the history of Central Asia amply demonstrates, medieval and modern “peoples” are often the product of many ethnic and linguistic layers mixed over time and brought together with no small
measure of political calculation, especially in modern times. The means by which a language spread is not always clear. Conquest, mass migration, and the total displacement of one people by another is one model. Another is marked by gradual infiltration, interaction, and resultant bilingualism. Migrating groups are themselves often the products of extensive ethnic and linguistic interaction. With each new movement, the ethnic name and the changing language associated with that name will be passed on to another grouping, in a relay-race fashion. The result is that peoples bearing the same name and speaking forms of a common language may actually have multiple and diverse origins. The movement of peoples has produced an intricate mosaic. The ethno-linguistic map that we see today is merely a snapshot, at a given point in time, of blendings that have been taking place over millennia. The creation of peoples is an ongoing process.

  The two strings of the Kazakh and Kyrgyz qobïz are made of horsehair. Shamans played this instrument as part of their healing ceremonies. Commission mongole pour l’UNESCO © UNESCO

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Rise of Nomadism and Oasis City-States

  Modern human beings (Homo sapiens), whose origins lie in Africa, entered Central Asia about 40,000 years ago during the Ice Age, probably in pursuit of game. By about 10,000–8000 BCE, with climate conditions resembling those of today, perhaps 500,000 humans out of a global population of about 10 million inhabited Central Asia-Siberia. There were several migration routes, one via the Middle East, another going to East Asia, and others from there to Central Asia. Agriculture developed by 6000 BCE. It may have originated both locally and through the movement of agriculturalists from other areas, in particular the Middle East and Europe, who came to the southwestern fringe of Central Asia (modern Turkmenistan). They grew wheat and barley. Development was discontinuous; settlements were abandoned.