Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
History of Central Asia
Table of Contents
Introduction
Prehistory and antiquity
The Middle Ages
The modern period: the age of decadence
History of Central Asia, history of the area from prehistoric and ancient times to the present.
In its historical application the term Central Asia designates an area that is considerably larger than the heartland of the Asian continent. Were it not for the awkwardness of the term, it would be better to speak of Central Eurasia, comprising all those parts of the huge Eurasian landmass that did not develop a distinctive sedentary civilization of their own. But the real boundaries of Central Asia are determined at any given time in history by the relationship between the “civilized” and the “barbarian”—the two opposed but complementary. The equation so often propounded—of the civilized with the sedentary and the barbarian with the nomad—is misleading, however. The most significant distinction between the two groups in Eurasia lies probably in the successful attempt of the civilized to alter and command the physical environment, whereas the barbarian simply uses it, often in a masterly fashion, to gain an advantage. In its essence, the history of Central Asia is that of the barbarian, and its dominant feature is the sometimes latent, sometimes open conflict in which the barbarian clashes with the civilized. Two basic patterns of conquest are evident in the history of Central Asia: that of the barbarian, accomplished with arms and ephemeral in its results, and that of the civilized—slow, rather unspectacular, achieved through technological superiority and absorption.
The principal difficulty for the historian of Central Asia lies in the paucity and relative lateness of indigenous written sources. The first aboriginal sources—written in a Turkic language—date from the 8th century ce, and source material of similar value does not become available again until the 13th century. Most of the written sources dealing with Central Asia originate in the surrounding sedentary civilizations and are almost always strongly prejudiced against the barbarian; the most important among them are in Chinese, Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Persian.
Without a sufficient number of indigenous written sources, the language of a given Central Asian people is difficult to determine. It is, however, reasonable to suppose that many of them spoke a Uralic or an Altaic language, and it can be taken for certain that Paleo-Asiatic languages were in wider use in early times than they are now. While it seems likely that the principal languages of many great nomadic empires were Turkic or Mongolian, the attribution of such languages to peoples about whose speech insufficient linguistic evidence exists—as in the case of the Xiongnu or the Avars—is unwarranted; it is wiser to confess ignorance.
Two of the natural vegetation zones of Central Asia have played a prominent part in history: the forest belt, 500 to 1,000 miles (800 to 1,600 km) wide, and, south of it, the steppe, a vast grassland extending eastward from Hungary to Mongolia, facilitating communications and providing grass, the only raw material absolutely essential to the creation of the great nomad empires. The northern frozen marshes and the southern deserts played a minor role in Central Asian history.
Within the broad concept of Central Asia as defined above, there is in terms of historical geography a more precisely delineated Central Asian heartland consisting of three adjacent regions, collectively referred to by 19th-century explorers and geographers as Russian and Chinese Turkistan.
The first of these regions, known to the ancient Greeks as Transoxania and to the Arabs as Māwarāʿ al-Nahr (“That Which Lies Beyond the River”), consists of the area between the Amu Darya (the Oxus River of the Greeks and the Jāyḥun of the Arabs) and Syr Darya (the Jaxartes River of the Greeks and the Sāyḥun of the Arabs). It is an arid, semidesert country where, before the development of large-scale irrigation projects in the 20th century, the sedentary population maintained itself by intensive cultivation of the fertile tracts bordering the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya or by cultivation of the oases, in which were situated the major urban centres such as Bukhara and Samarkand.
The second, predominantly steppe, region extends northward from the upper reaches of the Syr Darya to the valley of the Ili River and to the foothills of the ranges lying between the Altai Mountains and the Tien Shan. Bounded on the south by the line of the Tien Shan and to the north by Lake Balkhash, this area was known to the Turks as the Yeti Su, the “Land of the Seven Rivers,” hence its Russian name of Semirechye.
The third region, centring on the Takla Makan Desert, is bounded on the north by the Tien Shan, on the west by the Pamirs, on the south by the Kunlun Mountains, and on the northeast by the Junggar Basin. Often referred to as Kashgaria, from its principal urban centre, Kashgar (Kashi), the region is characterized by small oasis settlements lying between the desert and the surrounding ranges, such as Hotan, Yarkand, Kashgar itself, and Aksu (Akosu), which served as way stations on the so-called Silk Road between China and the West.
Prehistory and antiquity
The beginnings of human history in Central Asia date back to the late Pleistocene Epoch, some 25,000 to 35,000 years ago, which includes the last full interglacial period and the last glaciation, the latter being followed by the interglacial period that still persists today. The Aurignacian culture of the Upper Paleolithic coincided with the last glaciation, which was much less severe in northern Asia than in Europe. In a period when ice covered northern France, Siberia below latitude 60° N was ice-free. The Paleolithic Malta site, 28 miles northwest of Irkutsk, is clearly Aurignacian, and it is safe to assume that in this period Siberia and the subarctic areas of Europe belonged to the same civilization. The differentiation between Central Asia and the surrounding civilization did not begin until Neolithic times, marked by tremendous technical progress and a wide diversification of cultures. This article does not discuss the development of these cultures or their contacts with eastern, southern, and western cultures; most of the archaeological results, however important, are controversial and are subject to different interpretations in the light of new finds. Early western peoples
The first human groups to emerge at the dawn of history that are identifiable by name rather than by their artifacts are the Cimmerians and the Scythians, both located in the western half of Central Asia as reported by the Greeks.
The Cimmerians, whose name appears in the Odyssey of Homer, occupied the southern Russian steppe from about 1200 bce. Their civilization, which belongs to the Late Bronze Age, is barely distinguishable from that of other peoples with whom they mingled. From the second half of the 8th century bce, the Cimmerians were replaced by the Scythians, who used iron implements. The Scythians created the first known typical Central Asian empire. The chief thrust of their expansion was directed against the south rather than the west, where no major power existed and which thus offered little chance for valuable booty. In the late 8th century bce, Cimmerian and Scythian troops fought against the Assyrian king Sargon II, and, at the end of the 6th century bce, conflict arose between the Scythians and the Achaemenian king Darius I.
Darius’s expedition (516?–513? bce) against the Scythians in southern Russia was described in great detail by the Greek historian Herodotus, who provided the first and perhaps the most penetrating description of a great nomad empire. In more than one respect, the Scythians appear as the historical prototype of the mounted warrior of the steppe. Yet, in their case, as in others, it would be mistaken to see in them aimlessly roaming tribes. The Scythians, like most nomad empires, had permanent settlements of various sizes, representing various degrees of civilization. The vast fortified settlement of Kamenka on the Dnieper River, settled since the end of the 5th century bce, became the centre of the Scythian kingdom ruled by Ateas, who lost his life in a battle against Philip II of Macedon in 339 bce.