Download PDF | Victor H. Mair (editor)_ Jane Hickman (editor)_ Colin Renfrew (editor) - Reconfiguring the Silk Road_ New Research on East-West Exchange in Antiquity-University of Pennsylvania Press (2014).
137 Pages
The routes and highways that linked East with West, the Silk Roads, carried with them an allure of romance, attractive both for the world of China and for those of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium, which these highways brought together. They have fascinated travelers, from Strabo and Zhang Qian to Marco Polo and on to Aurel Stein. For us today they are brought to vivid life again by the tangible material reality of the wonderfully preserved finds which the archaeologists of Xinjiang have brought to light in recent years. Many of these were seen in the exhibition Secrets of the Silk Road, which prompted the symposium leading to the present volume.
This gives an excellent idea of the increasing research activity which these important finds have stimulated. And it indicates also how many outstanding problems remain to be resolved. It is indeed time now to “reconceptualize” the Silk Roads, as Victor Mair sets out to do so effectively in his Introduction. By re-examining the material realities which are increasingly well documented through on-going excavation, we can perhaps now step aside from the potent mirages which have fascinated scholars and the general public for so long, as Peter Brown well evokes in his contribution. The wonderfully preserved textiles unearthed in recent decades are replacing those mirages with a splendor all of their own which is palpable: you can see them and admire them today. Yet when we see this rich material dating from the last two millennia BC onwards, we begin to realize how little we yet know about the very early days of this key region of Xinjiang and about the lands lying immediately to the west.
The remarkable finds from the Xiaohe burials, so successfully recovered and published by Idris Abdurssul and his colleagues of the Xinjiang Institute (Xinjiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology 2003, 2008), followed by their work at the so-called Northern Cemetery, reported here by Mair, have opened a new chapter in the prehistory of this crucial region. Yet it is scarcely conceivable that those buried at Xiaohe around 2000 BC were the first inhabitants of this region with all its rich variety of habitats. These people were farmers, already using both wheat and millet, crops that were originally domesticated in lands that lie far to the west (for wheat) and to the east (for millet) of Inner Asia.
These farmers must have had hunter-gatherer predecessors, benefiting from the rich waterways and lakes in the Taklamakan area, which is so difficult to imagine today in this now desiccated landscape. These new discoveries hint at how much we still have to learn. Comparable research is now being undertaken to the west, in Kazakhstan, as Michael Frachetti reports here. He presents good economic data which show that at the key site of Begash sheep and goat were abundant, with fewer cattle and with a relative lack of horses until the 1st millennium BC. Here too wheat and millet were known and used from around 2200 BC, partly for ceremonial purposes. And here too their use implies much earlier contact with the lands lying away to the east and far to the west where these crops were first cultivated. Frachetti’s work has the merit of examining the local ecological and environmental conditions with some care. He makes the important point that at Begash the use of these domesticated plant resources, particularly wheat—first domesticated far from Kazakhstan—was initially undertaken in a ritual or ceremonial context.
For him, in contrast to the chapter by Anthony and Brown, the domestication of the horse is not of prime concern, since the horse did not have a major role until the 1st millennium BC. At Begash, as in Xinjiang, the place of the horse is not a central one. The finds in Xinjiang grow progressively richer with the passing of the centuries, the clothing more elaborate, and the horse is first seen here in the 1st millennium BC, as documented so clearly by the excavations of Lü Enguo (2002) and his colleagues at the important cemetery of Subeishi. It is around this time that silk clothing is first seen in the burials, whose textiles are discussed with such expertise in this volume by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. By this time the Silk Roads constituted important commercial highways, as Brown and J.G. Manning bring out effectively. Manning sees the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms lying some way to the west as “the principal engine” of their development at this time.
He recalls the remark of the Greek scholar Apollodorus (reported by the Roman geographer Strabo) that “Bactriana is the ornament of Ariana as a whole”—so introducing into the discussion the term (“Ariana”) which the Aryans (Old Iranians) used for their mother country in what is today Afghanistan. The distances of which we are speaking are vast, yet they were covered by travelers in these early days. There were, of course, many Silk Roads, as several authors here emphasize, yet their main highways extended via Xinjiang through Inner Asia and on towards Syria on the Mediterranean coast and so to the Classical world. It is perhaps worth making the point here that the Silk Roads should not be too readily equated with the Eurasian steppe lands to the north, which form the principal focus of the contributions of J.P. Mallory and of David Anthony and Dorcas Brown. Their well-informed reviews of the problems of Indo-European origins lead us on to the realms north of the Black Sea, the proposed home of succeeding groups of nomad pastoralists, active already in the 1st millennium BC before the Scythians—the “barbarians” who resided there at the dawn of history, as first recorded by Herodotus.
The aforementioned two chapters lay emphasis upon the steppe lands as a major corridor for the dispersal of languages, and in particular on a possible steppe homeland for the Indo-European language family. But it is worth noting that recent phylogeographic approaches in historical linguistics (Bouckaert et al. 2012) discount such a view, seeing Anatolia rather than the steppes as a more appropriate area of origin for that great language family. That is an issue which will certainly be further debated in the future, but it is worth noting here that the paths of communication which later became the Silk Roads would already, on such a view, have been very much those trodden some millennia earlier by the early Indo-European speakers (in this case with their developing Proto-Indo-Iranian dialects) as they expanded east and south from Anatolia. Yet Anthony and Brown may well be right that the steppe lands did nonetheless play a role. For the easternmost land where any language of the Indo-European language family was spoken seems to have been precisely Xinjiang, towards the eastern end of the Silk Roads.
For it is there that the languages now termed Tocharian were spoken in the 1st millennium of the Common Era. Although Tocharian is indeed classified among the Indo-European family, it does not belong in the Indo-Iranian sub-family, and its speakers may have reached Xinjiang by a route along the steppes, far north of the main Silk Roads, taking a path from Anatolia through the Balkans, and from there running north of the Black Sea towards Xinjiang—just as Anthony and Brown describe. In this volume it is Mallory who is here primarily concerned with the problems of Indo-European origins. Anthony and Brown focus here particularly on the domestication of the horse and on the origins of horse riding, and downplay the wider significance of those processes, which is emphasized more prominently in the subtitle of Anthony’s recent book: How Bronze Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (2007). Both chapters, however, downplay the importance of the different positions within the Indo-European family classification of the Tocharian languages, on the one hand (spoken in Xinjiang in the 8th century of the Common Era), and of the Indo-Iranian languages, including Scythian and Sogdian, spoken in Central Asia including parts of Xinjiang in Classical times, as may be gathered from Classical writers and is documented in the texts found locally.
This is a distinction whose importance I myself have on an earlier occasion failed to emphasize (Renfrew 2005:209). But Tocharian and the Indo-Iranian language sub-family are so different that they cannot plausibly share a recent evolutionary history in their descent from some much earlier Proto-Indo-European ancestral language. Indeed recent phylogeographic studies (Bouckaert et al. 2012) open the way to the speculation (see Heggarty and Renfrew, 2014) that the Indo-Iranian sub-family had its origins not in the Eurasian steppe lands, but much further south, in what is now Afghanistan or Pakistan. On this model, Scythian and Sogdian would be relatively recent newcomers to the steppes, arriving from the south in the 1st millennium BC. The predecessor to the Tocharian languages may well have reached Xinjiang long before the 1st millennium of the Common Era, perhaps from north of the Black Sea, as Anthony and Brown suggest. But early Indo-European speech in that area is, in my view, more likely to be the result of the expansion from Anatolia of the early farmers in that area. The phylogeography of the early Indo-Iranian languages remains one of the most puzzling problems in early Indo-European historical linguistics.
Their development in Central and South Asia may have taken very different paths and histories, following the inception of wheatbased cereal farming in Central and South Asia, than those experienced by the ancestors of the Tocharians. Some of these controversial issues are well addressed by Philip Kohl in his concluding comments. He is rightly cautious about the possibility of equating the populations buried in Xinjiang in the last two millennia before the Common Era with the Indo-European-speaking Tocharians in the succeeding millennium. His remarks serve, in effect, to highlight the timeliness of this publication. Its lead editor, Victor Mair, who has done so much to rejuvenate this subject, speaks of “reconceptualising” the Silk Roads, and Philip Kohl talks of “reconfiguring.” Both are right. Both recognize that the pace of discovery has been rapid in recent years, and that further progress will come mainly from new discoveries of the kind discussed in this illuminating volume. It is appropriate perhaps to conclude by saluting our archaeological colleagues of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Republic of the People’s Republic of China, whose systematic researches have made possible the discussions here.
It is their future work which will one day resolve many of the problems which have been highlighted so effectively here. In publishing their work they generally follow the convention of collective responsibility practiced in the People’s Republic of China, where they are credited as authors not by individual names but jointly as the Xinjiang Wenwu Kaogu Yanjiusuo: the Xinjiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology. Many of them are indeed thanked by name in the notes following Victor Mair’s chapter on the Northern Cemetery. I have myself benefited from their kindness and their experience when visiting the museums in Urumqi and Turfan and exploring nearby sites in Xinjiang. It is their work that has brought to light the brilliant discoveries reviewed here (some of them well displayed in the exhibition that accompanied the original symposium). From this lively, stimulating, and sometimes controversial publication, they will, I hope, feel supported and encouraged by the vigorous interest which their work has generated. The task of reconfiguring the Silk Roads is indeed initiated very effectively in this stimulating volume. It promises to lead on to a much deeper understanding of early exchange between Eastern and Western Asia.
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