From the chapter title â âCentral Asia before Russian Dominionâ â one may guess which portions of Central Asia are under review; namely, those that fell to the military conquest of the Russian Empire, the territory of the modern republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Sometimes called Western Turkestan or until 1991 Soviet Central Asia, these vast territories roughly equal the size of continental Europe. We may broadly divide the history of the region across three eras: the present back to the arrival of permanent Russian military settlement (ca. 1865âpresent), the Islamic period (beginning with the occupation of Merv and Herat in 651 CE) and the pre-Islamic period (stretching back to the Achaemenid Persian Empire in the sixth century BCE). This historical survey will summarise the history of the territory relevant to contemporary Central Asia from the earlier two eras.
Pre-Islamic period
Central Asia was home to both sedentary and nomadic societies long before the historical period. Following Richard N. Frye, the primary difference between the different groups of people indigenous to Central Asia was language or tribal affiliation, markers that leave no remains in the archaeological record (Frye 1996: 31). Reading potsherds allows archaeologists to track changing practices, but linking pottery decoration to a tribe, language or culture is speculative at best. In other words, unknowable languages were spoken by unknowable cultures, living in small and scattered populations.
The region is home to thousands of archaeological sites and some modern cities were first settled as encampments and villages in the prehistoric era. Agriculture arrived in the region around 7000 BCE, though restricted to oases, river valleys and arid zones watered using irrigation. By 6000 BCE, large mammal domestication included sheep, goats and cattle, though it was the domestication of horses after 4000 BCE that cemented the importance of the region in world history (Findley 2005: 23). No evidence has yet emerged of large towns prior to the first millennium BCE and around the time of the arrival of the Indo-European speakers.
The term âIndo-Europeanâ refers to the language and not the ethnic or genetic markers of these people. This survey of the history of Central Asia includes a focus on the linguistic evidence, which should not be conflated with modern ethnic or national identity. This refers both to prehistorical languages like Proto-Indo-European and more recent languages preserved in the historical record.
While Caucasoid and Mongoloid anatomical features in skeletal remains have extended east and west across Eurasia since ancient times, their skeletons do not record their languages. Linguistic evidence suggests that the wide-ranging Indo-European speakers were acquainted with both agriculture and herding. These Indo-European speakers figure prominently in recent scholarship on the rise of the wheel, pastoral nomadism and mounted archery (Anthony 2007). Speaking of long-term cultural continuities in the region (not exclusive to Western Turkestan, of course), characteristics and practices âmisleadingly grouped together as shamanismâ (Findley 2005: 25), including water taboos, animal art and cults of ancestral spirits, link the Saka, Scythians, Turks, Mongols and Tokharians, connecting Indo-European and Altaic cultures across the inland grassy sea. While the Indo-Europeans dominated Central Asia until the first century CE, archaeological evidence suggests that âalready by the second millennium BCE ⊠Mongoloid types had begun to expand westwardâ (Frye 1996: 35), with the population-multiplying consequences of the successful acquisition of animal husbandry and agriculture.
In the earliest historical era, interactions between pastoral nomads and their sedentary neighbours already marked Central Asia, as portrayed in the religious texts of Zarathustra (Zoroaster). A priest of the old Aryan religion, Zarathustra probably lived in Bactria, the most prosperous and populous part of the region, around the year 1000 BCE. He advocated reform by rejecting the glorification of violence and the worship of the vast pantheon of deavas. Zarathustra instead proclaimed the existence of one deity, Ahura Mazda, âwise lord.â William McNeill suggested the possibility of the religion of Zarathustra maturing alongside the spread of sedentary populations in Persia and Central Asia, outlawing âbloody sacrificesâ in favour of ritual prayers and celebrations that later emerged as central to the religion itself, offering an intriguing parallel to the adaptations of Judaism and Christianity during the Roman era (McNeill 1963: 154). Many other religions later passed through Central Asia in the historical period, including the earlier expressions of Buddhism emerging from Afghanistan, as well as Judaism and Christianity. However, for longevity and impact, Islam remains the central religion of historical and contemporary importance. Its longevity of religious and political control began in the early eighth century, continuing with Islamâs replacement of a rich tapestry of confessional diversity with a superficial, if vocal, majority. Even so, much evidence from the Islamic era suggests that older, indigenous religious practices and beliefs continued.
The first historical political power in the region that can be identified without speculation was the Medes, under whom the religion of Zarathustra spread from Mesopotamia to Anatolia, Persia and Central Asia. The Medes came to rule over the Persians in Fars and, together with the Babylonians, brought down the Assyrians by conquering Nineveh. The agriculturally settled Medes and Hittites of Anatolia spoke languages related to those of the nomadic Saka and Scythians of the Eurasian plains. However, arguing that these populations shared ethnic, cultural, religious or economic connections is more fraught.
One may usefully divide Central Asia roughly north from south. This creates two large geographic expanses: one dominated by pastoral nomadism (the north) and the other intensely cultivated amid nomadic herders (the south). In the time of the Medes, who ruled the southern agriculturalists, the northern inhabitants were recognised in Persian and Egyptian sources as the nomadic Saka. They divided the Saka into vague groups under evocative labels like the Hauma-brewing Saka, the Saka beyond the river, the Saka beyond Sogdiana, the Saka beyond the plains and the Saka beyond the marshes. None of these groups have been meaningfully connected to known archaeological sites, similar to the Massagetae of the Greek sources who lived east of the Caspian Sea, but unlike the Scythians of the Pontic steppe personally visited by Herodotus.
Persia and Alexander
The ancient armies of the Medes and Persians forged both alliances and deadly wars with their nomadic neighbours. Nomads and townsfolk have long worked and lived side-by-side, such that the attempts of anthropologists to meaningfully separate the two categories have often failed in practice, devolving into discussions of âsemi-nomadsâ and the like. The arrival from outside the region of powerful agriculturalists or pastoral nomads had echoing influences in the region; as the arrival of the Persians coincided with the growth of cities, so did the movements of the Turks and Mongols see the rise of gigantic pastoral societies. Speaking of the Persians, the two largest and important cities of the region at the time were Samarkand and Balkh (Marakanda and Bactra, respectively, to the Greeks), with the tertiary centre of Merv (Margiana) linking them to the Achaemenids and Medes in greater Iran. The Aramaic language used to run the Achaemenid Persian Empire became the basis for the earliest indigenous written languages of Bactrian, Sogdian and Khwarazmian â but they came later, after Alexanderâs conquest and the establishment of the Greco-Bactrian and other successor states. When Alexander died in Babylon in 323 BCE, the Greco-Persian Empire he had conquered dissolved and Central Asia passed to Seleucus I Nikator. The dynasty that survived Seleucus through his son Antiochus (by his wife Apama, daughter of the Sogdian Spitamenes) has not attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, but historians know it as Greco-Bactria. In the 1960s, archaeologists investigated a set of ruins known by its Turkic name Ay Khanum and found a recognisable Greek polis in northern Afghanistan. The inscriptions and materials attest to the spread of uncontaminated Greek language within the bounds of Central Asia. Moreover, the two de facto state languages of Aramaic (from the Achaemenids) and Greek appeared south of the Hindukush on the didactic Buddhist inscriptions of Ashoka (c. 304â232 BCE).
Parthia and the silk routes
The Seleucid dynasty maintained independence in southern Central Asia until the mid-second century BCE, despite increasing threats in the north and west. After Hannibalâs decade-long occupation of the Italian peninsula in the Second Punic War, the Carthaginian Empire suffered a fatal reversal of fortune. Hannibal escaped east to the Phoenician heartland and Roman eastern expansion pushed him further east in the Parthian and Greco-Bactrian wars on the western fringes of Central Asia. Rule of the region passed entirely to the Parthians under Mithridates I (c. 171â138 BCE). Despite the advent of political unity, the Parthian rulers oversaw a period of increasing chaos following waves of nomadic incursions from the north.
A movement of nomadic people not unlike the massive migration of Germanic tribes into the Roman Empire thoroughly remixed the demographic makeup of Central Asia, beginning already in the second century BCE. The linguistic and cultural makeup of the northern steppe began to shift as the Finno-Ugric- and Indo-European-speaking populations gave way before the proto-Turkic-speaking. Where the influx of nomads among the sedentary inhabitants falls on the continuum between assimilation and extermination remains unknown. During this period (c. 200 BCEâ200 CE), Central Asia existed on the periphery of larger states: Parthia to the north and west and the long-forgotten Kushan to the south and Han China to the East. In terms of cultural history, Mahayana Buddhism spread along the trade routes that blossomed in Central Asia connecting Rome, Parthia, Sogdia, India and China. This network was first labelled the Great Silk Route by the German Orientalist Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877 in recognition of its most prominent luxury item, silk, being of profound commercial and diplomatic importance as a trade good.
The dynamic period of political shake-ups reflected an underlying demographic change, though understanding the change in terms of ethnicity, culture and language remains beyond the grasp of the surviving evidence. The Zoroastrian Sasanid state in Iran replaced that of the Arsacid Parthians in the 220s, while the Kushan fell to a nomadic invasion from the north in the mid-fourth century CE, the so-called Kidarite Huns, in turn, replaced by a more powerful nomadic confederation, the similarly Altaic Hephthalites, who passed through Central Asia into what is now Afghanistan before conquering large sections of northern India. The Turkicisation of the steppes continued, most famously as other relatives of the Xiong-nu of the Chinese sources invaded Anatolia and Eastern Europe, the Huns of the late Classical period. The Silk Roads flourished throughout this politically turbulent time, even into the sixth century CE. The Sogdian merchants that dominated trade began to establish colonies ever eastward, communities of Buddhists and eastern Christians.
Manichaeism, an extinct world religion, first thrived and then slowly dissolved in the period between the third and fifteenth centuries CE. The artist-healer-prophet Mani (216â277) was distantly related to the Arsacid royal family of the Parthian Empire and had his first religious revelation at the age of 12. Raised in an environment bestride Zoroastrian, Christian and Buddhist teachings, Mani utilised these thinkers of the (not-so-distant) past in describing a dualistic religion of good and evil, sinful and pure, the elect and the auditors (Tardieu 2009). Mani suffered a martyrâs death, ensuring his philosophy would outlive him. Though there is no way to document the historic connection between the two, many have supposed that Manichaeism survived in Europe in the form of Catharism, so viciously exterminated in the thirteenth century during the Albigensian Crusade.
Another people emerged from northeastern Asia in the sixth century CE, the GöktĂŒrks (Celestial Turks) under their Qaghan, the title an etymological cousin of Khan. Thanks to the wide dispersion of their pastoral nomadic subjects, the TĂŒrk Qaghanates occupied truly massive territories throughout the Eurasian steppe belt. The memory of the Qaghanate survives in part thanks to their inscribing their political origins in violent rebellion from the Tang Dynasty in China on stone monuments found in Mongolia by the Russian Turkologist Nikolai Yadrintsev in 1889. By the end of the seventh century, the first Turkic state had splintered and fertilised numerous successors throughout and without the region, from the Khazars west of the Volga to the newly emerged Qarluqs of Central Asia proper.
