Download PDF | (Silk Road Studies, 4) CraigBenjamin (editor), David Chirstian - Realms of the Silk Roads_ Ancient and Modern-Brepols (2000).
360 Pages
INTRODUCTION
All but three of the papers in this volume were first presented at the Third Conference of the 'Australasian Society for Inner Asian Studies' (A.S.l.A.S.), held at Macquarie University in Sydney, from September 18-20 1998. (The exceptions are Chs. 1, 3 and 15.) Papers presented at the Second ASIAS conference (held from September 21-22 1996) have been published in David Christian & Craig Benjamin, (eds), Worlds of the Silk Roads: Ancient and Modern, Turnhout: Brepols, 1998. In both volumes, essays have been published with minimal editorial interference. This means, for example, that we have not tried to achieve uniformity in transliteration or spelling. As far as we know, these are the first volumes to bring together such a substantial body of work mainly by Australian scholars working on Inner Asia. And they show that Inner Asian studies are flourishing down under!
In the first volume, we offered a deliberately vague definition of 'Inner Asia' as the 'heartland' of Eurasia, 'those lands that have linked the major agrarian civilisations of Eurasia, from China to India to the Mediterranean and Europe, since the late Neolithic period'. The breadth of this definition suited a conference designed to bring together research of different kinds on many different eras, in the hope of generating a sort of intellectual synergy. Inner Asian studies have much to gain from such an approach. The technical difficulties faced by primary researchers in the field are formidable. Many Inner Asian societies were not literate until recently; and when literate, they often used languages known today by only a handful of specialists. So researchers often have to rely on the hostile or ignorant accounts of literate societies which despised or feared their Inner Asian neighbours. Inner Asian archaeology is equally demanding. Because so many Inner Asian societies lived from pastoralism, they left behind few remains, and these are difficult to interpret. (The first three essays in this volume illustrate weil the nature and extent of these difficulties.) The daunting technical problems of research in Inner Asia have encouraged a tradition of specialised, high precision scholarship.
Its primary aim is to tease precious information from recalcitrant source material. Large, synoptic studies of the region are much rarer. Y et a region as varied and extensive as Inner Asia offers exceptional opportunities for grand comparative studies. Are there not striking similarities between the regional politics of Tajikistan in the 1990s, and the Kushan empire 2,000 years earlier, with its five 'yabghus'? (See Chs. 7 and 8) Is there not something to be learned about the military methods of the Mongols when we find (Ch. 3) that largescale 'battue' hunts were common throughout much of Eurasia, and date to the Neolithic era? Is it not striking that the Uyghur writer, Zunun Kadir, describes desert journeys reminiscent of those described by Chinese Buddhist pilgrims who travelled through Sinkiang 1500 years before? Or what of the comparisons to be made between the accounts of travel writers-cum-spies such as the Han explorer, Chiang Ch'ien, and the British and Baltic German travellers described in Chs. 11 and 14? All were servants of agrarian empires seeking a foothold in the alien realms of Inner Asia. Contrasts can be as striking as similarities.
The Yuezhi ruled in Central Asia (Ch. 7) early in the Ist millennium, and the Uygurs ruled the lands north of Tang China several centuries later (Ch. 10). Yet both were, originally, pastoralist peoples who made successful military careers. How similar and how different were the conditions they faced? Finally, realising the extent and historical depth of exchanges along the Silk Roads (Chs. 4-6) reminds us that there is a deeper unity to the history of Inner Asia, and that Inner Asia played a critical role in linking all the great civilisations of Eurasia into a single, and very ancient 'world system'. Inner Asian history abounds in surprising and illuminating comparisons of this kind. So we hope readers will not just go to those sections of the book that are closest to their own interests, but will read more widely in order to maximise the chances that patterns evident in one area or period may cast light on unsolved problems in other areas of study.
To maximise this sort of synergy, we have deliberately not organised the essays according to chronology or geography. Instead, we have chosen a number of loose themes that allow us to group papers according to approach and subject matter. There is nothing rigid about this organisation, and some papers could easily have appeared in different sections. But this arrangement may help the reader pick up common themes across large areas of time and space, even if it does so serendipitously.
Each of the first three essays concentrates on a particular type or body of sources. Taken together, they illustrate well the intricacy and complexity of primary research in Inner Asian history, whether based on archaeology, inscriptions or texts. Betts and Y agodin are archaeologists, and their work reminds us of the fundamental role of Soviet and post-Soviet archaeology in the modern understanding of early Inner Asian history. They take us back to the first millennium BCE, when urbanisation first took off in the area around the Aral Sea known as Khorezmia. Here, pastoralists built huge animal traps, each adapted to the habits of particular prey species, from gazelle to wild sheep. The paper gives a vivid insight into methods of hunting that could be found throughout Eurasia, from Lappland to the Sinai desert. Sims-Williams has worked for several years on the translation of recently discovered Bactrian documents and inscriptions from Afghanistan.
In his paper, he shows that these materials, together with other modern evidence from Central Asia, confirm the impression that Zoroastrianism, though known mainly from Western lranian sources, had even deeper roots further East, in Sogdia and Bactria. As the Soviet archaeologist, Viktor Sarianidi has argued, in Margiana on the borders of modern Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, elements of Zoroastrianism ritual may date from as early as the second millennium BCE. I Gunner Mikkelsen describes the complex task of editing a Chinese manuscript based on a wellknown Chinese Manichaean sermon. His paper illustrates the extreme difficulties overcome in preparing the texts used with such insouciance by generalists (such as myself). The fact that Coptic texts can help us decipher a much later Chinese manuscript is a striking reminder of the contribution that comparative research can make to Inner Asian studies. Essays in the second section describe the extent and scale of exchanges and contacts through Inner Asia's 'Silk Roads'. Michael Underdown describes the often neglected branches of the Silk Roads that passed from Sinkiang through what is today Mongolia and towards Korea and Japan.
These north eastern routes were particularly important in the early history of the Korean state. Lieu concentrates on the 6th to the 8th centuries, when Islam first established itself in Inner Asia. He shows that in this particularly turbulent period, trade and travel along the Silk Roads was as vigorous as at any time before the 13th century. Christian argues that traditional accounts of the Silk Roads have neglected the crucial role played by pastoralists. A clearer understanding of that role suggests that in some form the Silk Roads have unified Eurasia from perhaps as early as the second millennium BCE. In this group of papers, Inner Asia emerges as the key to Eurasia's common history. The third group of papers focusses on politics. The dominant themes of Inner Asian political history reflect the interaction of pastoralists and agriculturalists, and the fragility of the state systems that emerged along the ecological divide between these two realms.
The exceptional mobility of pastoralist societies also helps explain the complex intertwining of languages, religions, and ethnicities that characterises Inner Asian political history. The essays by Mackerras and Benjamin concentrate, respectively, on the Uygur and Kushan empires. Both were created by dynasties whose roots lay in the pastoralist world; but like all pastoralist states, they grew strong by mobilising the wealth of agrarian regions. Benjamin's essay is an exhaustive survey of the literary evidence on the early history of the Kushan state, which emerged in the south of modern Central Asia. Mackerras summarises the complex economic, political, military and religious relationship between the Uygur empire and the Tang dynasty.
Both essays suggest some of the difficulties we face in trying to interpret pastoralist states through documentary sources that are often uncomprehending and sometimes hostile. Nourzhanov and Akbarzadeh discuss the Kushan homeland at the end of the twentieth century. Akbarzadeh shows how religion has been used as a threat and a bluff in the complex games played by states emerging from the debris of the Soviet Union. The 'Islamic threat', he concludes, is not what it is often made out to be; but most players in Central Asian politics have an interest in making use of it in one way or another; and the games they play with Islam may eventually turn religion into a much more significant political force than it is at present. Nourzhanov discusses the peace process in modern Tajikistan after the Civil War of the early 1990s. Here, the dominant factor is the role of regional power brokers who share an interest in avoiding civil war, but have little interest in giving up power in their regional fiefdoms to a central government. How different is the political world described in these two papers, from that of the Kushan and Uygur empires over 1,000 years before? The fourth group of essays focusses on different experiences of Inner Asia, or particular regions of Inner Asia.
Dilber Thwaites describes the view of an insider, the Uyghur Maxim Gorky, Zunun Kadir. Zunun Kadir had a harsh childhood, and wove from his childhood experiences striking realist accounts of his homeland in modern Sinkiang. Though he wrote within the constraints of censorship, his stories of Uyghur life convey a powerful and vivid sense of the 'imagined community' of modern Uyghur nationalism. The other essays in this section offer perspectives from the outside. Geoff Watson explores the role played by a semi-imaginary 'Central Asia' in the writings of British travellers to the region during the era of the 'Great Game', in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Though the British never ruled Central Asia, this did not prevent them from using their experiences in the region to demonstrate the superiority of British civilisation. The way to a British traveller's heart, as one canny Central Asian 'dervish' found, was to say that 'the English people are now Timur, for they are descendants of Genghis Khan, the Inglees will be conquerors of the world'.
If the British mission in the region led to little more than the filling of English trophy rooms, or the occasional attempt to impose strict rules on the indigenous sport of polo, the more the pity for Inner Asia it seems ! Here, Inner Asia's role is that of an exotic mirror. In their joint essay, Patrikeeff and Perkins describe the not dissimilar experiences of Baltic Germans whose careers took them to the far Eastern regions of the Russian Empire. Patrikeeff s first essay concentrates on the strange imperialist myths generated by the East Asian 'Great Game' that was played out early in the twentieth century between Russia/USSR, China, and Japan. Here, as traditional imperial structures broke down, the scale of Inner Asian landscapes and the mobility and reach of its many different communities generated new and sometimes terrifying fantasies about the recreation of great Inner Asian empires. The ghost of Chinggis Khan hovers over this essay as it does over so much of the history of Inner Asia in the last 800 years. The last two essays are somewhat different in that they are concerned, mainly, with aspects of teaching. Fletcher and Hetherington have been involved in a project designed to help students appreciate more effectively the long-term movements of state borders in East Asia.
The project illustrates the long-term fluctuations of the borders between China and the 'barbarian' lands to the north and north west. Margaret White's essay is not concerned specifically with Inner Asia, but raises an issue that occurs repeatedly in the study of Inner Asia: the difficulty faced by students brought up within any one religious tradition in understanding cultures shaped by other religious traditions. For those teaching and researching Inner Asian history, but living in 'Outer Eurasia', it sometimes seems that the most difficult task of all is to get beyond the sense oflnner Asia as 'other'. Margaret White's essay explores some ways of tackling the problem of religious parochialism in teaching environments.
The Appendix lists the papers presented at the third ASIAS conference. The editors of this volume have accumulated many debts in the course of its preparation, and it is a pleasure to take this opportunity to say thanks to the many people who have helped us. Di Yerbury, the Vice-Chancellor of Macquarie University, gave the conference her formal blessing, and held a reception for those who attended it. She has been a consistent supporter of Macquarie University's Inner Asian studies programme throughout the 1990s. Macquarie University Research Grants to Sam Lieu and David Christian helped pay for some of the editing and typing of this volume. Beth Lewis has once again done a superb job of turning our sometimes scruffy papers into printable manuscripts, working within the Macquarie University Ancient History Documentary Research Centre. In this, she has been helped greatly by Jonathan Markley. Gordon Benjamin proof-read the complete manuscript and did much detailed tidying up. Invaluable technical assistance was provided by Malcolm Choat, Lance Eccles, Trevor Evans, Stephen Llewelyn and Gunner Mikkelsen. Finally, we would like once again to thank our publisher, Brepols, for their continuing support of ASIAS.
David Christian, August 2000
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