Caravanserai

4 Key excerpts on "Caravanserai"

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  eBook - ePub

  A History of Architecture and Trade

  • Patrick Haughey(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  By observing any map illustrating the caravan routes throughout the Islamic world, one can understand how commerce has a prominent role in the structure and in the construction of the in-between cities territory. The urban settlements are, in fact, all connected to one another through precise caravan routes formalizing a polarized network of paths and nodes. Within this network many people travel. They are not only merchants, but also students and scholars visiting schools and universities, as well as pilgrims on their journey to Mecca (hajj). For each of these travelers, for each of the caravan routes, the market is the final stop-over of this worldwide vast territorial system connecting Europe to North Africa, Near East and Middle East, up to India and China, often crossing arid lands and open water. The caravan trade was fundamental for the survival of the urbanized life of the entire Islamic world and, for this reason, it was soon organized to support travelers in their journeys. Authorities and wealthy individuals were, in fact, occupied in the construction of roads, water cisterns and shelters, while the nomads of the deserts and the steppes were in charge of the security and the sustenance of the travelers. 16 After a long journey through the dusty roads, the merchants (and all the other travelers) need shelter to rest with their camels and their goods could be protected from robberies. This is possible in the Caravanserais located all along the commercial routes, often spaced a one-day journey from one another. The Caravanserai is a small, fortified city, and therefore presents most of the elements characterizing the urban Islamic environment. In fact, inside this building, one can find most of the typical functions hosted and offered by the city. There is a thick wall to protect its inhabitants and define a limit between an inside and an outside. Within the Caravanserai there are a number of services to sustain the life of the users during their stay

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  eBook - ePub

  Caravans in Global Perspective

  Contexts and Boundaries

  • Persis B. Clarkson, Calogero M. Santoro, Persis B. Clarkson, Calogero M. Santoro(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  More than just spaces of hospitality and protection, however, the Caravanserais were critical to the early modern political economy as spaces where travelers encountered governmentality and which mediated difference across borders. Travelers note that the Caravanserai at the place now called Kishkinakhud, in Kandahar, Afghanistan, was “the last outpost of the grand Mogul” (Manrique 1927:266), or “a small castle in which the Mogul has a garrison, being the utmost boundary of his dominions westwards” (Steel and Crowther 1905 [1625], cited in Kerr 1813:213). Travelers experienced changes in control and the frontier nature of the land that now makes up modern Afghanistan through the changing tolls and taxes, varying from ½ to 2 abacees (charged per camel) along the Safavid/Mughal frontier (Steel and Crowther 1905 [1625], cited in Kerr 1813:152). As travelers moved west, leaving Mughal control, they came upon the Caravanserai at “Greece” or modern Gereshk, the “first belonging to the king of Persia” (Steel and Crowther 1905 [1625], cited in Kerr 1813:153), and farther west, reached the town of Farah, where in order to continue into Persia, they would wait for seven to ten days while the “king’s treasurer [saw] all their packs weighed”, in order to estimate the duties owed (Steel and Crowther 1905 [1625], cited in Kerr 1813:155).

  The experience of routing inactivity was part of the culture of travel across the Safavid and Mughal empires; when a caravan reached its terminus, there was a period of waiting, filled with trade and gathering of new supplies in the town, before a new caravan was formed for the next leg of the journey, and caravans were timed with the seasons so as to safely travel through mountain passes (Goës, cited in Yule and Cordier 1916:230). The Caravanserai networks were infrastructural in that they enabled the transport of people and goods, but also because they constituted an organizational structure that situated travelers in relation to states. Further, the Caravanserais created an infrastructure for information exchange. Of the Caravanserais of Persia, Chardin notes that each Caravanserai is specially designated for caravans from a certain country or the merchants of certain goods, and thus forms a space where one can seek news as well as particular goods (Chardin 1811(II):147, 394).

  More than just a system of overland trade, the Caravanserai networks through Persia and Afghanistan constituted a society of the road and an early modern form of globality. The infrastructural networks of the Caravanserai systems represent a conscious investment in the creation of a culture of caravan travel, wherein travelers were protected from the dangers of the road, provided with hospitality, given a space to exchange goods and ideas. We glimpse this society of the road through early modern accounts of travel through Afghanistan in the Safavid period, which constitute the framework and primary evidence for historical knowledge of the period.

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  Landscapes of the Islamic World

  Archaeology, History, and Ethnography

  • Stephen McPhillips, Paul D. Wordsworth, Stephen McPhillips, Paul D. Wordsworth(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press

    (Publisher)

  The somewhat awkward terminology, “stopping places,” arises from an attempt to move away from other wise loaded nomencla-ture. Caravanserais, for example, feature frequently in research on the architec-ture of Central Asia and Iran, yet refer to only one particular phenomenon. Semantic nuances between the di ff erent terms for these desert outposts will be-come apparent in the following discussion, but they all share a common de fi nition as nodal points in the landscape that show evidence of human movement over a sustained period. Figure 12.1 Map of the Karakum Routes Survey Project area showing the locations of the twenty-six sites recorded in detail (inset—general location map) (prepared by author). Sustaining Travel 221 The data have been gathered as part of wider research into medieval routes across the Karakum, collected through archaeological landscape survey (the Kar-akum Routes Survey Project, henceforth KRS) since 2009. One of the primary motivations in analyzing this landscape was to understand the complexity of re-gional and interregional travel beyond the traditional concept of the “Silk Routes” and the “Great Khurasan Road”—the major historical trade arteries that have come to characterize this region. Three broad themes highlight the economic processes underpinning the es-tablishment, the function, and ultimately the abandonment of the desert stop-ping places: construction, hydroeconomies, and food and pastoralism. Presented below is a brief discussion of the evidence for these activities, followed by some re fl ections on the related aspects of the interdependence or independence of these outposts. Finally, this paper o ff ers some preliminary conclusions on the charac-terization of these economies of movement, and some ideas as to how this concept can be a useful paradigm for exploring this and other desert landscapes.

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  Caravans in Socio-Cultural Perspective

  Past and Present

  • Persis B. Clarkson, Calogero M. Santoro, Persis B. Clarkson, Calogero M. Santoro(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Ethnoarchaeological notes from the southern Andes Axel E. Nielsen

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003179276-3

  Caravan traffic, narrowly defined as the circulation of goods using pack animal trains, presents some common logistical and territorial problems worldwide. First, people and animals have to obtain water and food along the journey. Second, caravans need to secure permission to traverse alien territories and defend themselves from potentially hostile groups encountered along the route. Third, they have to negotiate the collaboration of non-human agencies that are important for the success of the trip (deities, place-spirits, animals, etc.) through proper ritual protocols. The ways in which these broad issues have been handled in different caravan traditions vary significantly according to natural factors, such as the biological characteristics of the animals or the distribution of resources along the routes, but they also depend on political conditions and worldview, among other socio-historical variables. A consideration of these broad topics, then, could serve as a starting point for cross-cultural research on caravans and their relationship with social processes.

  In the following pages, I argue that rest areas offer good opportunities for exploring how ancient caravans handled these issues under different historical circumstances, besides providing valuable information about herders’ society and cosmology. Caravan rest areas (hereafter CRA) are places where long-distance caravans stop for one or more days to rest, repair travel gear, and re-organize the cargo. The importance of these places was first recognized through ethnoarchaeological research among llama pastoralists of the southern Andean altiplano of Potosí, Bolivia (Nielsen 1997). Since llamas only walk and forage during the day, when traveling, they have few hours of light left to graze. This means that after three to five days of marching (60–100 km), caravans have to stop for one or more complete days to feed the animals properly and replenish their strength. Usually, these places offer good forage and therefore are also valued by local communities with whom traveling herders must negotiate in order to stay with their flocks. This makes access to them highly dependent on territorial rules and socio-political circumstances that affect them. Finally, these places tend to concentrate ritual practices as well. In the Andes, then, resting areas hold great potential for archaeological research on the logistical, socio-political, and ritual dimensions of caravan journeys.

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