Download PDF | Empires of the Silk Road - A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present - Christopher I. Beckwith, Princeton University Press 2020.
501 Pages
PREFACE
This book presents a new view of the history of Central Eurasia and the other parts of the Eurasian continent directly involved in Central Eurasian history. Originally I planned to write a sketch of the essential topical elements of a history of Central Eurasia, without much of a chronological narrative. Having in mind the French tradition of writing professionally informed but readable essays for an educated general audience, with minimal annotation, I imagined it with the title Esquisse d’une histoire de l’Eurasie centrale. In the actual writing, the people and events insisted on following their proper order and I found myself giving a basic outline of the political and cultural history of Central Eurasia within the context of a history of Eurasia as a whole, sometimes with extensive annotation, only occasionally involving reexamination of primary sources.!
Nevertheless, I have kept my original main goal foremost in my mind: to clarify fundamental issues of Central Eurasian history that to my knowledge have never been explained correctly or, in some cases, even mentioned. Without such explanation, it would continue to be impossible to understand the ebb and flow of history in Eurasia as anything other than the fantasy and mystery that fill most accounts. Mysteries are intriguing, and sometimes they must remain unsolved, but enough source material is available to explain much of what has been mysterious in Central Eurasian history without resorting to the “usual suspects.”
In this connection there is a widespread opinion that few sources exist for Central Eurasian history and consequently little can be said about it. That is a misconception. An immense body of source material exists on the history of Central Eurasia, especially in its connections with the peripheral civilizations.’ Because that history covers a span of four millennia, and as there is acorrespondingly large secondary literature on some of the topics within that area and period, to do it any sort of justice would require a series of massive tomes that could be produced only by a team of scholars, not by one writer working alone with attendant limitations on knowledge, skills, energy, and time. The only way a single individual could manage to produce a book on such a huge topic would be by pulling back and taking a big-picture approach— a very broad perspective—which, as it happens, is what interests me.
In general, therefore, this book is not a highly focused treatment of any specific topics, individuals, political units, periods, or cultures (not even of the Central Eurasian Culture Complex, which deserves a book of its own), with the partial exception of those that are of particular interest to me. It is also not an exhaustive account of events, names, and dates, though the observant reader will note that I have tried to provide that information for all important events and people, even though I sometimes have had to go to surprisingly great lengths to find it. Finally, it is not a source study or a comprehensive annotated bibliography. In recent years a number of excellent studies have been published on some of the most notable people, places, periods, and other topics, with full annotation and references, and I recommend them to interested readers.
What I have done is to reexamine the more or less unitary received view of Central Eurasians and Central Eurasian history and attempt to revise it. The notes are therefore largely devoted to discussion of selected points I felt needed further comment or investigation. Whatever detail I have been able to squeeze into the narrative or the topical sections is there mostly because it seemed important to me at the time and I did not want to leave it out. That means I have left out many things that are undoubtedly important but did not seem crucial to me at the time, or that I simply overlooked. I originally did not intend to include more than absolutely minimal annotation, to keep my focus on the argument. As one can see, it did not end up quite that minimal. Habits are difficult to repress, and apparently I like notes that go into detail on interesting topics. (Some long notes, which are mainly of interest to specialist scholars, would cause congestion in the main text, so I have placed them in a separate notes section at the end.)
However, this book does not go to the other logical extreme either. It is not a general theory of history, and I do not intend to imply any such theory in it. There are many recent works of this type, but my book is not one of them. I also do not examine in any detail the many theories—or, rather, vari-ants of the one current theory—of Central Eurasian state formation that have been published in the past few decades, though they are discussed briefly in the epilogue. Neither my interpretation nor my terminology derives from such theoretical or metatheoretical works. My intention has been to let my interpretations arise naturally from straightforward presentation and analysis of what I consider to be the most relevant data known to me. I may not have succeeded in this attempt, but in any case I have intentionally left the book free of overt and covert references to world-historical theories and metatheories, most of which I know little about.
With respect to the data and history writing in general, some comment on my own approach is perhaps necessary, especially in view of the recent application of the “Postmodernist” approach to history, the arts, and other fields. According to the Modernist imperative, the old must always, unceasingly, be replaced by the new, thus producing permanent revolution.’ The Postmodernist point of view, the logical development of Modernism, rejects what it calls the positivist, essentially non-Modern practice of evaluating and judging problems or objects according to specific agreed criteria. Instead, Postmodernists consider all judgments to be relative. “In our postmodern age, we can no longer take recourse to [sic] the myth of ‘objectivity, ” it is claimed.* “Suspicions are legitimately aroused due to the considerable differences in the opinions of the foremost authorities in this area.”°
History is only opinion. Therefore, no valid judgments can be made. We cannot know what happened or why, but can only guess at the modern motivations for the modern “construction of identity” of a nation, the nationalistic polemics of anti-intellectuals and nonscholars, and so on. All manuscripts are equally valuable, so it is a waste of time to edit them—or worse, they are said to be important mainly for the information they reveal about their scribes and their cultural milieux, so producing critical editions of them eliminates this valuable information. Besides, we cannot know what any author really intended to say anyway, so there is no point in even trying to find out what he or she actually wrote.® Art is whatever anyone claims to be art. No ranking of it is possible.
There is no good art or bad art; all is only opinion. Therefore it is impossible, formally, to improve art; one can only change it. Unfortunately, obligatory constant change, and the elimination of all criteria, necessarily equals or produces stasis: no real change. The same applies to politics, in which the Modern “democratic” system allows only superficial change and thus produces stasis. Because no valid judgments can be made by humans—all human judgments are opinions only—all data must be equal. (As a consequence, Postmodernists’ judgment about the invalidity of judgments must also be invalid, but the idea of criticizing Postmodernist dogma does not seem to be popular among them.) In accordance with the Postmodernist view, there is only a choice between religious belief in whatever one is told (i.e., suspension of disbelief) or total skepticism (suspension of both belief and disbelief). In both cases, the result, if followed resolutely to the logical extreme, is cessation of thought, or at least elimination of even the possibility of critical thought.’ If the vast majority of people, who are capable only of the former choice (total belief), are joined by intellectuals and artists, all agreeing to abandon reason, the result will be an age of credulity, repression, and terror that will put all earlier ones to shame. I do not think this is ‘good’. I think it is ‘bad’. I reject Modernism and its hyperModern mutation, Postmodernism. They are anti-intellectual movements that have wreaked great damage in practically all fields of human endeavor. I hope that a future generation of young people might be inspired to attack these movements and reject them so that one day a new age of fine arts (at least) will dawn.
Paleontology, a kind of history, is actually a hard science, so it has been largely immune to the anti-intellectualism of Postmodernist scholars.’ Al-though I am interested in dinosaurs, this book is not about their history but about human history; in my view, though, the same rules apply, and the Postmodern view is literally nonsense (literal nonsense being, in part, the goal of the view’s proponents). I do not think that my own experience of the world is a meaningless miasma of misperceptions simply because it has been experienced by me and is therefore subjective. It is certainly true that everything is to some degree uncertain—including science, as scientists know very well— and all scholars must, of course, take uncertainty and subjectivity into account. I do not think history is a science in the modern Anglo-American sense, but I do think it must be approached the same way as science, just as all other fields of scholarly endeavor should be. Because the Postmodern agenda demands the abandoning not only of science but of rationality, I cannot accept it as a valid approach for scholars or intellectuals in general.
I also believe it is important to recognize the forces behind human motivations, especially as concerns sociopolitical organization, war, and conceptualizations of these and other fields of human activity, such as the arts. Although this book is not a study of ethology or anthropology, whether concerning primates or humans, in writing a history on such a big scale I noticed that human behavior seems to be remarkably consistent. This is not to claim that history per se repeats itself, but rather that humans do tend to do the same things, repeatedly, while, on the other hand, true coincidences are extremely rare. People also tend to copy other people. For example, the wagon, with its wheels, seems to have been invented only once; it is a gradual, secondary development from prewheeled “vehicles,” and it took a long time to finally become the true wagon; but when it did so, it was very quickly copied by the neighbors of those who had developed it.
The consistency of human behavior over such great expanses of space and time can clearly be due only to our common genetic heritage. Viewed from the perspective of Eurasian history over the past four millennia, there does not seem to me to be any significant difference between the default underlying human sociopolitical structure during this time period—that is, down to the present day—and that of primates in general. The Alpha Male Hierarchy is our system too, regardless of whatever cosmetics have been applied to hide it. To put it another way, in my opinion the Modern political system is in fact simply a disguised primate-type hierarchy, and as such it is not essentially different from any other political system human primates have dreamed up. If recognition of a problem is the first step to a cure, it is long past time for this particular problem to be recognized and a cure for it be found, or at least a medicine for it to be developed, to keep it under control before it is too late for humans and the planet Earth.
From the preceding statements readers can draw their own conclusions about my approach in this book, but I hereby state it explicitly, as simply and clearly as I can: my aim has been to write a realistic, objective view of the history of Central Eurasia and Central Eurasians, not to repeat and annotate the received view or any of the Postmodern metahistorical or antihistorical views.°
The origins of this book ultimately go back almost exactly two decades, when I wrote a paper on the idea of the barbarian (on which see the epilogue) and considered writing an overarching history of all of Central Eurasia. My return to the topic is in part the result of a conversation I had some years ago with Anya King, who remarked about the widespread personal use of silken goods by Central Eurasian nomads. Following up on this observation, I did some calculation and concluded that the trade in luxury goods must have constituted a very significant part of the internal economy within Central Eurasia. Subsequently, while teaching my Central Eurasian History course, I noticed that the appearance, waxing and waning, and disappearance of Silk Road commerce paralleled that of the native Central Eurasian empires chronologically. I began to seriously rethink my views on the history of the Silk Road and the nomad empires, and in turn my ideas about Central Eurasian history as a whole. I gave the first public presentation of my new interpretation of Central Eurasian history as a paper, “The Silk Road and the Nomad Empires,” in the Silk Road Symposium organized by the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin on June 3, 2004.
My understanding of the topic continued to change significantly while I worked on the book. In fact, very little in the finished text has much to do with my original plan. Not only the particulars but the vision as a whole changed while I was writing it, in turn causing me to revise my presentation of the particulars. I could probably keep on revising and rewriting in this way indefinitely if I were so inclined, but I have other interests I would like to pursue, so the volume you hold in your hands represents essentially the state of my ideas when I finished the near-final draft early in 2007.
I have attempted to pay special attention to the underlying cultural elements that formed the Central Eurasian Culture Complex, which I believe to be important for understanding the narrative of what happened, why, and to what effect in the history of Central Eurasia and—to some extent—in the rest of Eurasia. In my coverage of the modern period, I have paid special attention to the phenomenon of Modernism, which is responsible for the cultural devastation of Central Eurasia in the twentieth century, both in political life and in the arts, which have yet to recover from its grip. I hope that some of the points I have noticed, and the arguments I have made, will lead to a better understanding of it and maybe even point the way to improving the human condition today.
As noted, this book is about Central Eurasia in general, over the entire historical period. Because of the scale involved, many topics are barely mentioned. Yet, even if I had been able to cover all fields of scholarship in Central Eurasian studies, I would not have been able to find much published research on many of them—including important topics in history, linguistics, anthropology, art, literature, music, and practically all other fields— despite the undoubted progress that has been made recently by young scholars of Central Eurasian studies. While other areas of the world—particularly Western Europe and North America—receive, if anything, too much attention, most major topics of Central Eurasian studies have been neglected, some almost completely. Some major sources—such as Hsiian Tsang’s Hsi yti chi ‘Account of the Western Regions’—still do not have a scholarly critical edition and modern annotated translation. Others have not even been touched.
Indeed, one cannot find a single book or major research article, good or bad, on many of those topics. Just to take poetry, how many new books are published every year on, say, Janghar (the Kalmyk national epic), Rudaki (the earliest great poet to write in New Persian), or Li Po (one of the two or three greatest poets who wrote in Chinese)? In English, the count has hoyered between zero (Janghar and Rudaki) and less than one (Li Po) for decades. How about the history of the Avar, Tiirk, or Junghar empires, or linguistic studies of Kalmyk, Bactrian, or Kirghiz (Kyrgyz)? It is rare that even an article is published on any of these major topics in Central Eurasian studies. To be sure, outstanding works, many of them listed in the bibliography, have been published on history topics in the past decade, and even some in linguistics, a model being Clark’s 1998 book on Turkmen. Nevertheless, the examples given here of topics that have not been treated well, or at all, are only a tiny fraction of the major topics of Central Eurasian studies— including art and architecture, history, language and linguistics, literature, music, philosophy, and many others—most of which remain little studied or almost completely ignored.
By contrast, every year many hundreds of books are published, and many thousands of conference papers given, on Chaucer, Shakespeare, and other early English writers, as well as countless thousands more on modern English-language writers, as well as on Anglo-American history, English linguistics, and Anglo-American anything else. We do not really need more of them for the time being.
In short, rather than writing yet another overconceptualized, overspecialized work on topics that have been, relatively speaking, studied into the ground, consider contributing just one article, or even a small book, on one of the countless neglected topics of Central Eurasian studies. Some of them are mentioned, all too briefly, in these pages.
In conclusion, much needs to be done, from every approach imaginable, on the subject of Central Eurasian history. I wish everyone well in their efforts to fill the many lacunae that remain.
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