Central Asia in World History Page 18

  An independent republic is established in East Turkestan

  1991

  Soviet Union collapses; Commonwealth of Independent States, which included formerly Soviet Central Asian republics, forms; Mongol People’s Republic, long a Soviet satellite, declares its independence as the Republic of Mongolia

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Also written “Turkistan.” Turkistân is a Persian word meaning “country of the Turks.”

  2. Sir Aurel Stein, Ruins of Desert Cathay vol. 1(1912; repr. New York: Dover, 1987) 393.

  3. Ruth I. Meserve, “The Inhospitable Land of the Barbarians,” Journal of Asian History 16 no. 1 (1982): 51–89.

  4. Richard N. Frye, The Heritage of Persia (Cleveland-New York: World Publishing, 1963) 38–39.

  5. John K. Fairbank, “A Preliminary Framework” in The Chinese World Order, ed. J. K. Fairbank (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 9–10; Lien-sheng Yang, “Historical Notes on the Chinese World Order” in Fairbank, The Chinese World Order, 20–22; Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), xxi–xxv, 320–362. Marc S. Abramson, Ethnic Identity in Tang China (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) thoroughly explores the complexities of Chinese notions of ethnic boundaries.

  6. Vladimir N. Basilov, Nomads of Eurasia, trans. Mary F. Zirin (Seattle: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles Country in association with University of Washington Press, 1989), 23–26. On Scythian attire, see S. A. Iatsenko, Kostium drevnei Evrazii. Iranoiazychnye narody (Moscow: Vostochnaia Literatura, 2006), 47–102. On the “Golden Man” as “Golden Woman,” see Jeannine Davis-Kimball with Mona Behan, Warrior Women: An Archaeologist’s Search for History’s Hidden Heroines (New York: Warner Books, 2002), 96–107.

  7. Tsagan Törbat et al., “A Rock Tomb of the Ancient Turkic Period in the Zhargalant Khairkhan Mountains, Khovd Aimag, with the Oldest Preserved Horse-Head Fiddle in Mongolia-A Preliminary Report” Bonn Contributions to Asian Archaeology 4 (2009), 373–374.

  8. David Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel, and Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 5, 11–13, 41–42, 46–59, 81–84, 99–101; J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 442–463.

  9. Alexander Vovin, “The End of the Altaic Controversy” Central Asiatic Journal 49 no. 1 (2005), 71–132; Christopher I. Beckwith, Koguryo: The Language of Japan’s Continental Relatives (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 164–165, 184–194.

  CHAPTER 1

  1. David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 191–192, 200, 211.

  2. Anthony, The Horse, 221–224, 460–462; Robert Drews, Early Riders: The Beginnings of Mounted Warfare in Asia and Europe (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1–2, 65–98, on the military revolution in the Eurasian steppes and the Near East.

  3. Adrienne Edgar, “Everyday Life among the Turkmen Nomads,” in Jeff Sahadeo and Russell Zanca, eds., Everyday Life in Central Asia Past and Present (Bloomington; Indiana University Press, 2007), 38–44.

  4. Owen Lattimore, The Inner Asian Frontiers of China (The American Geographical Society, 1940; repr., Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1988), 522.

  5. Anthony, The Horse, 460.

  6. Lien-Sheng Yang, “Historical Notes on the Chinese World Order” in John K. Fairbank (ed.), The Chinese World Order (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 33. On Byzantine strategy, see Edward N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire (Cambridge, MA.-London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2009), 415–418.

  7. See the remarkable quantity of goods studied by E. H. Schaefer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’ang Exotics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963; repr. 1985).

  8. Hugh Pope, Sons of the Conquerors. The Rise of the Turkic World (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2005), 316.

  9. Colin Thubrun, Shadow of the Silk Road (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), 102.

  10. Quintus Curtius, History of Alexander, trans. and ed. John C. Rolfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936; repr., 1985), 162–165.

  11. Mahmûd al-Kâšγarî, The Compendium of Turkic Dialects: Dîwan Luyat at-Turk, vol. 1, trans. and ed. Robert Dankoff in collaboration with James Kelly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982–1985), 273. “Tatsïz türk bolmas, bashsïz börk bolmas.”

  12. Denis Sinor, “Samoyed and Ugric Elements in Old Turkic,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 3–4 (1979–1980), 768–773, and “The Origin of Turkic Balïq ‘Town’,” Central Asiatic Journal 25 (1981), 95–102. Sinor has suggested that this word comes from the Ugric languages. There are a number of Ugric loan words in Turkic, although why the Turks would have borrowed this term from the hunting-gathering Ugric peoples is unclear.

  CHAPTER 2

  1. Elena E. Kuzmina, The Prehistory of the Silk Road, ed. Victor Mair (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 88–98.

  2. Vera S. Rastorgueva and Dzhoi I. Edel’man, Etimologicheskii slovar’ iranskikh iazykov, (Moscow: Vostochnaia Literatura, 2000-ongoing), 1: 222.

  3. The subject remains hotly debated. See Edwin F. Bryant and Laurie L. Patton, eds., The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History (New York: Routledge, 2005) and Thomas R. Trautmann, ed., The Aryan Debate (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005).

  4. See A. Shapur Shahbazi, “The History of the Idea of Iran” in Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis and Sarah Stewart, eds., Birth of the Persian Empire: The Idea of Iran, vol. 1 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 100–111.

  5. Michael Witzel, Linguistic Evidence for Cultural Exchange in Prehistoric Western Central Asia in Sino-Platonic Papers 129 (December 2003): 13.

  6. Herodotus, The History, trans. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 289.

  7. Strabo, The Geography of Strabo, vol. 5, trans. H. L. Jones (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 1944), 264–269.

  8. Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian: Han Dynasty, vol. 2, trans. Burton Watson, 2nd rev. ed. (Hong Kong: Columbia University Press, 1993), 245.

  9. Herodotus, The History, trans. Grene, 129–130.

  10. See Justin J. Rudelson, Oasis Identities (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 66–68.

  11. Frank L. Holt, Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 86.

  12. Nicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 186–188.

  13. Sima Qian, trans. Watson, 129, 143.

  14. Sima Qian, trans. Watson, 130, 134.

  15. Sima Qian, trans. Watson, 143–144, notes the fondness of the Xiongnu for Chinese silk and foodstuffs, particularly grains, and their insistence that they be given “the right measure and quality.”

  16. Sima Qian, trans. Watson, 140–141.

  17. Sima Qian, trans. Watson, 143.

  18. Sima Qian, trans. Watson, 146.

  19. Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History, trans. James Ward (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 28–32.

  20. David Christian, “Silk Roads or Steppe Roads? The Silk Roads in World History,” Journal of World History 11, no. 1 (2000): 1–26.

  21. Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 36.

  22. Juha Janhunen, Manchuria: An Ethnic History (Helsinki: The Finno-Ugrian Society, 1996), 187.

  23. For the most recent arguments in favor of this connection, see M Érdy, “Hun and Xiong-nu Type Cauldron Finds Throughout Eurasia” Eurasian Studies Yearbook 67 (1995), 5–94; D.C. Wright, “The Hsiung-nu-Hun Equation revisited” Eurasian Studies Yearbook 69 (1997), 77–112; E. Pulleyblank, “Tribal Confederations of Uncertain Identity. Hsiung-nu” in H.R. Roemer (ed.), History of the Tu
rkic Peoples in the Pre-Islamic Period. Philologiae et Historiae Turcicae Fundmenta, I (= Philologiae Turcicae Fundmenta, III) (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 2000), 60; Étienne de la Vaissière, “Huns et Xiongnu,” Central Asiatic Journal 49, no. 1 (2005): 3–26.

  CHAPTER 3

  1. They appear to have spoken a Mongolic language, see Alexander Vovin, “Once Again on the Tabgač Language” Mongolia Studies 29 (2007): 191–206.

  2. Károly Czeglédy, “From East to West: The Age of Nomadic Migrations in Eurasia,” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 3 (1983), pp. 67–106; Étienne de la Vaissière, “Is There Any Nationality of the Hephthalites?” Bulletin of the Asia Institute 17 (2003): 119–132.

  3. R. C. Blockley, ed. and trans., The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the Later Roman Empire: Eunapius, Olympiodorus, Priscus and Malchus, vol. 2 (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1981, 1983), 344–345.

  4. Türk is used to denote the specific Turkic people bearing this name. Turk and Turkic are generic terms encompassing all the peoples speaking a Turkic language.

  5. S. G. Klyashtornyi, “The Royal Clan of the Türks and the Problem of Early Turkic-Iranian Contacts,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 47 no. 3 (1994): 445–448.

  6. Liu Mau-tsai, Die chinesischen Nachrichten zur Geschichte der Ost-Türken (T’u-küe), vol. 1 (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1958): 5–6, 40–41.

  7. Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009): 4, 6, 8–10.

  8. See The History of Theophylact Simocatta, trans. Michael Whitby and Mary Whitby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986): 188–190. Theophylact accuses the “European Avars” of having falsely adopted this famous name.

  9. Liu, Die chinesischen Nachrichten, vol. 1, 87.

  10. The History of Menander the Guardsman, ed. and trans. R. C. Blockley (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1985), 44–47.

  11. Menander, ed. and trans. Blockley, 111–127, 173–175.

  12. Liu Mau-tsai, Die chinesischen Nachrichten, vol. 1, 13.

  13. The Life of Hiuen Tsang By the Shaman Hwui Li. With an introduction containing an account of the works of I-tsing, by Samuel Beal, Trubner’s Oriental Series (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1911), 42.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Si-Yu-Ki. Buddhist Records of the Western World, vol. 1, trans. Samuel Beal (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1900) 28.

  16. Yihong Pan, Son of Heaven and Heavenly Qaghan: Sui-Tang China and its Neighbors (Bellingham, Washington, 1997) 179–182, 191.

  17. Christopher I. Beckwith, The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) 28–64.

  18. Talât Tekin, Orhon Yazıtları. Kül Tigin, Bilge Kagan, Tunyukuk (Istanbul: Yıldız, 2003) 82.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Talât Tekin, Orhon Yazıtları (Ankara: Türk Dil Kurumu, 2006). See pp. 19–42 for the Kül Tegin inscription and pp. 44–70 for the Bilge Qaghan inscription.

  21. The Shine Usu inscription in Takao Moriyasu and Ayudai Ochir, eds., Provisional Report of Researches on Historical Sites and Inscriptions in Mongolia from 1996 to 1998 (Osaka: The Society of Central Asian Studies, 1999) 183.

  22. Colin Mackerras, The Uighur Empire According to the T’ang Dynastic Histories (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1972) 122.

  23. Vladimir F. Minorsky, “Tamîm ibn Bahr’s Journey to the Uyghurs,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 12 no. 2 (1948): 275–305.

  24. Judith G. Kolbas, “Khukh Ordung, a Uighur Palace Complex of the Seventh Century,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 15 no. 3 (November 2005): 303–327.

  25. I. V. Kormushin, Tiurkskie eniseiskie epitafii. Teksty i issledovaniia (Moscow: Nauka, 1997): 121–122.

  26. Ibn al-Faqîh, Kitâb al-Buldân, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden: Brill, 1885) 329.

  CHAPTER 4

  1. Al-Muqadassî, Ahsan at-Taqâsîm fî Ma’rîfat al-Aqâlîm. Descriptio imperii moslemici auctore Schamso’d-dîn Abdollah Mohammed ibn Ahmed ibn abî Bekr al-Bannâ al-Basschârî al-Mokaddesî, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden: Brill, 1877; 2nd ed. 1906), 324–325.

  2. Étienne De la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders. A History, trans. James Ward (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 148–152.

  3. For samples of these letters, see W. B. Henning, “The Date of the Sogdian Ancient Letters,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 12 no. 3–4 (1948), 601–616; Nicholas Sims-Williams, “Towards a New Edition of the Sogdian Ancient Letters: Ancient Letter I” in Les Sogdiens en Chine, ed. Étienne de la Vaissière and Eric Trombert (Paris: Ecole Française d’Extrême Orient, 2005), 181–193; and Nicholas Sims-Williams, “The Sogdian Ancient Letters,” http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/sogdlet.html.

  4. Si-Yu-Ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World, vol. 2, trans. Samuel Beal (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1900), 43–44.

  5. Si-Yu-Ki, vol. 2, trans. Beal, 318–319; Hans Wilhelm Haussig, Die Geschichte Zentrasiens und der Seidenstrasse in vorislamischer Zeit (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983), 68.

  6. Si-Yu-Ki. vol. 2, trans. Beal, 309, 315–316.

  7. Sir Aurel Stein, On Central Asian Tracks (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), 56.

  8. Yutaka Yoshida, “On the Origin of the Sogdian Surname Zhaowu and Related Problems,” Journal Asiatique 291/1–2 (2003): 35–67.

  9. Narshakhî, The History of Bukhara, trans. Richard N. Frye, (Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1954), 9–10.

  10. Narshakhî, trans. Frye, pp.30–31.

  11. Étienne de la Vaissière, Samarcande et Samarra. Élites d’Asie Centrale dans l’empire Abbaside (Paris: Association pour l’avancement des études iraniennes, 2007), 69–70, 86.

  12. Richard N. Frye, Ancient Iran (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1984), 351–352.

  13. B. Marshak, Legends, Tales, and Fables in the Art of Sogdiana (New York: Bibliotheca Persica, 2002), 17, 65–67.

  14. W. B. Henning, “Sogdian Tales,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 11 no. 3 (1945): 485–487.

  15. The Life of Hiuen Tsang By the Shaman Hwui Li. With an introduction containing an account of the works of I-tsing, by Samuel Beal, Trubner’s Oriental Series (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1911), 45.

  16. Edouard Chavannes, Documents sur les Tou-kiue (Turcs) Occidentaux (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient, 1941; repr. Taipei: Ch’eng Wen Publishing, 1969), 135.

  17. Chavannes, Documents, 33 n.5; B. G. Gafurov, Tadzhiki (Moscow: Nauka, 1972), 284.

  18. Al-Bîrûnî, Al-Athâr al-Baqiyya ‘an Qurûn al-Khâliyya, Chronologie orietalischer Volker, ed. C. Eduard Sachau (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1929), 234–235.

  19. Chavannes, Documents, 139.

  20. Chavannes, Documents, 133 n.5.

  21. Chavannes, Documents, 148.

  22. Frantz Grenet, Étienne de la Vaissière, “The Last Days of Panjikent,” Silk Road Art and Archaeology 8 (2002): 167–171; and Sogdiiskie dokumenty s gory Mug, ed. and trans. V. A. Livshits (Moscow: Vostochnaia Literatura, 1962), 2: 78–79.

  23. Al-Tabarî, The History of al-Tabarî: The End of Expansion, vol. 25, ed. Ehsan Yar-Shater, trans. Khalid Yahya Blankenship (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 143–149.

  24. Jonathan Bloom, Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper on the Islamic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 38–40, 42–45.

  25. Al-Bîrûnî, Al-Athâr, ed. Eduard Sachau, 36, 48.

  CHAPTER 5

  1. Rashîd al-Dîn, Die Geschichte der Ouzen des Rašîd ad-Dîn, ed. and trans. Karl Jahn (Vienna: Hermann Böhlaus Nachf., 1969), 23–25.

  2. Hudûd al-’lam: The Regions of the World, 2nd ed., trans. Vladimir Minorsky, ed. C. E. Bosworth, E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series, new series, 11 (London: Luzac, 1970), 96–97.

  3. Al-Câhiz [Al-Jâhiz:], Hilâfet Ordusunun Menıbeleri ve Türkler’in Fazîletleri, ed. Turkish trans. Ramazan een (Ankara: Türk Kültürünü Aratirma Enstitüsü, 1967), 68.

  4. Anal
yzed in Omeljan Pritsak, Die bulgarischen Fürstenliste und die Sprache der Protobulgaren (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1955).

  5. Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Ja’far Narshakhî, The History of Bukhara, trans. Richard N. Frye, (Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1954), 34.

  6. Jürgen Paul, “Islamizing Sûfis in Pre-Mongol Central Asia,” in E. de la Vaissière, ed., Islamisation de l’Asie centrale, Studia Iranica 39 (Paris: Association pour l’avancement des études iraniennes, 2008): 297–317. Contrary to earlier scholarship, Paul argues that Sûfîs did not play a significant role in Islamizing the Central Asian Turks until the Mongol era.

  7. Ibn al-Athîr, Al-Kâmil fî’l-Ta’rîkh: Chronicon quod perfectissimum inscribitur, ed. C. J. Tornberg (Leiden, 1851–76; repr. Beirut, 1965–66 with different pagination), 9: 520.

  8. W. Barthold, Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion, trans. T. Minorsky, ed. C. E. Bosworth (London, 1968), 312.

  9. Al-Utbi, The Kitab i Yamini. Historical Memoirs of the Amír Sabaktagin, and the Sultán Mahmúd of Ghazna, trans. Rev. James Reynolds (London: Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland, 1858), 140.

  10. C. E. Bosworth, The Ghaznavids: Their Empire in Afghanistan and Eastern Iran 994: 1040 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1963), 115–116.

  11. Yûsuf Khâss Hâjib, Wisdom of Royal Glory (Kutadgu Bilig): A Turko-Islamic Mirror for Princes, trans. Robert Dankoff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 49.

  12. Ibid., 48.

  13. Ibid., 48–49.

  14. Mahmûd al-Kâšγgarî, The Compendium of Turkic Dialects. Dîwân Luγāt at-Turk, ed. and trans. Robert Dankoff in collaboration with James Kelly (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 1982–1985), 1: 109, 364; 2: 184–185.

  CHAPTER 6

  1. On the rise of the Qara Khitai, see Michal Biran, The Empire of the Qara Khitai in Eurasian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 19–47.