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Download PDF | Christopher I. Beckwith - Empires of the Silk Road_ A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present-Princeton University Press (2009).

Download PDF | Christopher I. Beckwith - Empires of the Silk Road_ A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present-Princeton University Press (2009).

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 po liti cal 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.1 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 fl ow of history in Eurasia as anything other than the fantasy and mystery that fi ll 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. 









Th at is a misconception. An im mense body of source material exists on the history of Central Eurasia, especially in its connections with the peripheral civilizations.2 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 specifi c topics, individuals, po liti cal 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 par tic u lar 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 fi nd 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. Th e notes are therefore largely devoted to discussion of selected points I felt needed further comment or investigation. What ever 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. Th at 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 diffi cult 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 de cades, though they are discussed briefl y 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 pre sen ta tion 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 fi elds. According to the Modernist imperative, the old must always, unceasingly, be replaced by the new, thus producing permanent revolution.3 Th e 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 specifi c 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.4 “Suspicions are legitimately aroused due to the considerable diff erences in the opinions of the foremost authorities in this area.”5 History is only opinion. Th erefore, 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 fi nd out what he or she actually wrote.6 Art is what ever anyone claims to be art. 










No ranking of it is possible. There is no good art or bad art; all is only opinion. Th erefore 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. Th e same applies to politics, in which the Modern “demo cratic” system allows only superfi - cial 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 pop u lar 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.7 










 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. Th ey are anti- intellectual movements that have wreaked great damage in practically all fi elds 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 fi ne 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.8 Although 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 fi elds 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 sociopo liti cal or ga ni za tion, war, and conceptualizations of these and other fi elds 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. Th is 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 fi nally 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 ge ne tic heritage. Viewed from the perspective of Eurasian history over the past four millennia, there does not seem to me to be any signifi cant diff erence between the default underlying human sociopo liti cal structure during this time period—that is, down to the present day—and that of primates in general. Th e Alpha Male Hierarchy is our system too, regardless of what ever cosmetics have been applied to hide it. To put it another way, in my opinion the Modern po liti cal system is in fact simply a disguised primate- type hierarchy, and as such it is not essentially different from any other po liti cal system human primates have dreamed up. 











If recognition of a problem is the fi rst step to a cure, it is long past time for this par tic u lar 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.9 Th e origins of this book ultimately go back almost exactly two de cades, 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 signifi cant 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 fi rst public pre sen tation of my new interpretation of Central Eurasian history as a paper, “Th e Silk Road and the Nomad Empires,” in the Silk Road Symposium or ga nized by the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin on June 3, 2004. My understanding of the topic continued to change signifi cantly while I worked on the book. In fact, very little in the fi nished 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 pre sen ta tion of the particulars. I could probably keep on revising and rewriting in this way indefi nitely 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 fi nished the near- fi nal 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 eff ect 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 politi cal 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 fi elds of scholarship in Central Eurasian studies, I would not have been able to fi nd much published research on many of them—including important topics in history, linguistics, anthropology, art, literature, music, and practically all other fi elds— despite the undoubted progress that has been made recently by young scholars of Central Eurasian studies. While other areas of the world—particularly Western Eu rope 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 Hsüan Tsang’s Hsi yü 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 fi nd 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 En glish, the count has hovered between zero (Janghar and Rudaki) and less than one (Li Po) for decades. How about the history of the Avar, Türk, 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 de cade, 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 En glish writers, as well as countless thousands more on modern En glish- language writers, as well as on Anglo- American history, En glish 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 briefl y, 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 fi ll the many lacunae that remain.








INTRODUCTION 

 Central Eurasia1 is the vast, largely landlocked area in between Eu rope, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia,2 and the sub- Arctic and Arctic taïgatundra zone. It is one of the six major constituent world areas of the Eurasian continent. Because geo graph i cal boundaries change along with human cultural and po liti cal change, the regions included within Central Eurasia have changed over time. From High Antiquity to the Roman conquests by Julius Caesar and his successors, and again from the fall of the Roman Empire to the end of the Early Middle Ages, Central Eurasia generally included most of Europe north of the Mediterranean zone. Culturally speaking, Central Eurasia was thus a horizontal band from the Atlantic to the Pacifi c between the warmer peripheral regions to the south and the Arctic to the north.











 Its approximate limits aft er the Early Middle Ages (when Central Eurasia was actually at its height and reached its greatest extent) exclude Eu rope west of the Danube, the Near or Middle East (the Levant, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, western and southern Iran, and the Caucasus), South and Southeast Asia, East Asia (Japan, Korea, and China proper), and Arctic and sub- Arctic Northern Eurasia. Th ere are of course no fi xed boundaries between any of these regions or areas—all change gradually and imperceptibly into one other—but the central points of each of the peripheral regions are distinctive and clearly non–Central Eurasian. Th is traditional Central Eurasia has shrunk further with the Eu ro pe anization of the Slavs in the Western Steppe during the Middle Ages3 and the settlement of Manchuria and Inner Mongolia by Chinese in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.









What may be called “traditional Central Eurasia” aft er the Early Middle Ages thus included the temperate zone roughly between the lower Danube River region in the west and the Yalu River region in the east, and between the sub- Arctic taïga forest zone in the north4 and the Himalayas in the south. It included the Western (Pontic) Steppe and North Caucasus Steppe (now Ukraine and south Rus sia); the Central Steppe and Western Central Asia, also known together as West Turkistan (now Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kirghizstan); Southern Central Asia (now Af ghan i stan and northeastern Iran); Jungharia and Eastern Central Asia or the Tarim Basin, also known together as East Turkistan (now Xinjiang); Tibet; the Eastern Steppe (now Mongolia and Inner Mongolia); and Manchuria. 











Of these regions, most of the Western Steppe, Inner Mongolia, and Manchuria are no longer culturally part of Central Eurasia. Central Eurasian peoples made fundamental, crucial contributions to the formation of world civilization, to the extent that understanding Eurasian history is impossible without including the relationship between Central Eurasians and the peoples around them. A history of Central Eurasia therefore necessarily also treats to some degree the great peripheral civilizations of Eurasia—Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia— which were once deeply involved in Central Eurasian history. Traditional Central Eurasia was coterminous with the ancient continental internal economy and international trade system misleadingly conceptualized and labeled as the Silk Road. 












It has oft en been distinguished from the Littoral zone maritime trade network, which also existed in some sense from prehistoric times and steadily increased in importance throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages, but the sources make no such distinction. Th e continental and maritime trade routes were all integral parts of what must be considered to have been a single international trade system. Th at system was resoundingly, overwhelmingly, oriented to the Eurasian continental economy (and its local economies) based in the great po liti cal entities of Eurasia, all of which were focused not on the sea but on Central Eurasia. Th e Littoral System, as a distinctive economy of major signifi - cance, developed only aft er the Western Eu ro pe an establishment of regular open- sea trade between Eu rope and South, Southeast, and East Asia, as discussed in chapter 10; it became completely separate from the Silk Road only when the latter no longer existed. 











The cultural- geo graph i cal area of Central Eurasia must be distinguished from the Central Eurasian peoples and from Central Eurasian languages, all of which have been variously defi ned. While the topic of this book is the history of Central Eurasia, it is really about the Central Eurasian peoples. It therefore includes the history of Central Eurasians who left their homeland for one of the other regions, carry ing with them their Central Eurasian languages and the Central Eurasian Culture Complex (on which see the prologue). To some extent, the history of Eurasia as a whole from its beginnings to the present day can be viewed as the successive movements of Central Eurasians and Central Eurasian cultures into the periphery and of peripheral peoples and their cultures into Central Eurasia. 













Modern scholars have done much to correct some of the earlier misconceptions about Central Eurasia and Central Eurasians, and they have added signifi cantly to the store of data concerning the area and its peoples. Unfortunately, the corrections that have been made have not been adopted by most historians, and very many fundamental points have not been noticed, let alone corrected. In par tic u lar, the general view of Central Eurasians and their role in the history of Eurasia, even in studies by Central Eurasianists, contains a signifi cant number of unrecognized cultural misperceptions and biases. Some of them are recent, but others are inherited from the Re naissance, and still others—especially the idea of the barbarian—go back to Antiquity. Th e following is only a brief summary of some of the main points, which are discussed in detail in the epilogue. 













Most modern historians have implicitly accepted the largely negative views about Central Eurasians expressed in peripheral peoples’ historical and other literary sources without taking into serious consideration the positive views about Central Eurasians expressed in the very same peripheral culture sources, not to speak of the views held by Central Eurasians about the peripheral peoples. Although works by peripheral peoples provide more or less our only surviving record of many Central Eurasians until well into the Middle Ages, when sources in local Central Eurasian languages began to be written, most works by peripheral peoples are not by any means as one- sided as historians have generally made them out to be. Th e antipathy felt by CentralEurasians for the peripheral peoples is noted by historians and travelers from the periphery as well as by the Central Eurasians themselves in cases where sources in their languages are preserved—for example, by the Scythians for the Greeks and Persians, by the Hsiung- nu for the Chinese, and by the Turks for both the Chinese and the Greeks. 













The sensationalistic descriptions by Herodotus and other early historians should long ago have been corrected through the positive evaluations given by Greeks, Chinese, and others living among Central Eurasians as well as by the substantial amount of neutral, purely descriptive information provided by travelers and the same early writers themselves. Th e received view of premodern Central Eurasia is almost exclusively a ste reo type based on a misconstruing of only one segment of Central Eurasian society: the peoples of the steppe zone who have been widely believed to be “pure” nomads, distinct and isolated from settled Central Eurasians. Leaving aside the very serious problem that, ethnolinguistically speaking, the nomads cannot be clearly distinguished historically or archaeologically from urbanite and agriculturalist Central Eurasians,5 it is important to recognize and understand the ste reo types and misconceptions that fi ll the modern view of the Central Eurasian nomads:6 • Th e Central Eurasian nomads were warlike—fi erce and cruel natural warriors—due to their harsh environment and diffi cult way of life. Th is natural ability was much aided by their skills in horse back riding and hunting with bow and arrow, which were easily translated into military skills. • Th e Central Eurasian nomads’ life- style left them poor, because their production was insuffi cient for their needs. Th ey therefore robbed the rich peripheral agricultural peoples to get what they needed or wanted. Th is “needy nomad” theory is related to the “extortion and booty” model and “greedy barbarian” model of Central Eurasian relations with the peripheral states.










Because Central Eurasians were natural warriors—and, as nomads, constantly moving—they were hard to defeat. Th ey were a permanent military threat to the peripheral peoples, whom they regularly attacked and defeated. Central Eurasians thus dominated Eurasia militarily down to early modern times. Despite some comments found in historical sources that appear to support these ideas, careful reading of the same sources fl atly contradicts them. Th e falseness of these views is also demonstrated by simple examination of uncontested historical fact. Th ey are ultimately all direct descendants, little changed, of the constituent elements of the ancient Graeco- Roman idea, or fantasy, of the barbarian. Pastoral nomadic Central Eurasians were no more “natural warriors” than urban Central Eurasians were “natural merchants,” or agricultural Central Eurasians were “natural farmers.” Both nomad-founded states and those founded by sedentary peoples were complex societies. Although most people in the nomad sector of the former type of state were typically skilled at riding and hunting—a fact that never failed to impress non- nomadic peoples, who comment on it repeatedly—the far more populous and rich peripheral sedentary societies included very many people who were professional soldiers trained exclusively for war. 















This gave them the advantage over Central Eurasians in most confl icts. Th e nomads also were not poor. To be precise, some nomads were rich, some were poor, and most were somewhere in between, just as in any other culture zone, but the rank- and- fi le nomads were much better off in every way than their counterparts in the peripheral agricultural regions, who were slaves or treated little better than slaves. Th e nomads did want very much to trade with their neighbors, whoever they were, and generally reacted violently when they were met with violence or contempt, as one might expect most people anywhere to do. Th e biggest myth of all—that Central Eurasians were an unusually serious military threat to the peripheral states— is pure fi ction. In short, neither Central Eurasia nor Central Eurasian history has anything to do with the fantasy of the barbarian or the modern covert version of it discussed at length in the epilogue. Central Eurasian history concerns many diff erent peoples who practiced several diff erent ways of life. 












Each Central Eurasian culture consisted of countless individuals, each of whom had a distinct personality, just as in the rest of the world. Central Eurasians were strong and weak, enlightened and depraved, and everything in between, exactly like people of any other area or culture. Practically everything one can say about Central Eurasians, as people, can be said about every other people in Eurasia. It is necessary to at least attempt to be neutral in writing history. But what about the barbarians? If the historical record actually tells us Central Eurasians were not barbarians, what were they? Th ey were dynamic, creative people. Central Eurasia was the home of the Indo- Eu ro pe ans, who expanded across Eurasia from sea to sea and established the foundations of what has become world civilization. Central Asia in the Middle Ages was the economic, cultural, and intellectual center of the world, and Central Asians are responsible for essential elements of modern science, technology, and the arts. Th e historical record unambiguously shows that Central Eurasians were people who fought against overwhelming—indeed, hopeless— odds, defending their homelands, their families, and their way of life from relentless encroachment and ruthless invasion by the peripheral peoples of Eurasia. 














The Central Eurasians lost almost everything, eventually, but they fought the good fi ght. Th is book is thus ultimately about the continent- wide struggle between the Central Eurasians and the peripheral peoples,7 leading to the victory of the latter, the destruction of the Central Eurasian states, and the reduction of Central Eurasian peoples to extreme poverty and near extinction before their miraculous rebirth, in the nick of time, at the end of the twentieth century. One may still wish to ask, was not the history of Central Eurasia, dominated by states founded by nomadic or partly nomadic people, unique in its tendencies and outcomes? No. Th e struggle of the vastly outnumbered nations of Central Eurasia against the inexorable expansion of their peripheral neighbors was paralleled by that of the American Indian nations against the Eu ro pe ans and their ex- colonial clients, the Eu ro pe an- American states, who pursued a policy of overt or covert genocide in most countries of the Americas. In North America, the Indians fought to save their lands, their nations, and their families, but they lost. 













Their fi elds of corn were burned, their families were massacred, and the few survivors were transported by force to desert lands where they were left to die. Up until a few de cades ago, the Indians were condemned by the unjust, genocidal victors as “savages.” Finally, when they had almost disappeared, some among the victor peoples had a twinge of conscience and realized that the historical treatment of the Indians was exactly the reverse of the truth. Recognition of the struggles of the Central Eurasian peoples against the more than two- millennia- long mistreatment by their peripheral neighbors is long overdue. Th e warriors of Central Eurasia were not barbarians. Th ey were heroes, and the epics of their peoples sing their undying fame.








 













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