The revise the paper of the Eurasian nomad history

c h a p t e r t w o

The Early Nomads: “Warfare is Their Business”

T he breakup of the Indo-European linguistic community around 3000 to 2500 BCE produced an outpouring of peoples across Eurasia and adjoining lands. One grouping, the ancestors of the

Tokharians, arrived in Xinjiang by the late third- or early second-mil- lennium BCE, 1 making it one of the most ancient and enduring points of Chinese contact with Western peoples. Another grouping, the Indo- Iranians or Indo-Aryans, also went eastward to Siberia, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and northern Pakistan. The tribal name Ârya / Âriya (Aryan) derives from an Indo-European term meaning “lord, free person” and, ultimately, “a master of a house who shows hospitality to a stranger.” 2 It did not have any of the racial connotations it acquired in the 20 th century. By 2000 BCE, at the latest, the Indo-Iranians, who were agri- culturalists and livestock breeders, had split into the linguistic ancestors of the Indic-speaking populations of South Asia and the Iranian-speaking populations of Iran and Central Asia today.

Indo-Aryans, probably coming through Afghanistan, entered South Asia around 1500 BCE, encountering the older Harappan civilization and Dravidian peoples. It was earlier thought that this was a sudden, mass invasion that dislocated, destroyed, or enslaved the earlier inhabi- tants. More recent scholarship suggests that this interaction was more gradual and peaceful, as the newcomers took over regions that had long been in decline. 3 Iranian-speaking tribes entered the land that now bears their name sometime between 1500 BCE and 1000 BCE, imposing them- selves on a diverse population. In Ancient Persian, they may have called their new homeland âryânâm khshathram (the kingdom of the Aryans). In early medieval Persian this became Êrânshahr and later simply Irân . 4

Other Indo-Iranians en route to Siberia made contacts with the Uralic northern forest peoples (linguistic ancestors of the Finns and Hungarians, among others) leaving traces of their interaction in words such as Hungarian tehen (cow) from Indo-Iranian dhainu , Finnish parsas (pig) from Indo-Iranian parsa , Finnish mete and Hungarian méz (honey) from Indo-Iranian madhu .” 5 Subsequently, Iranian nomads made contact with

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22 C e n t r a l A s i a i n Wo r l d H i s t o r y

Turkic and other Altaic peoples in Mongolia and Siberia. Whether they introduced nomadism to them remains unclear. It is with the movements of these peoples that we move from pre-history to history, relying now not only on the surviving fragments of daily life unearthed by archaeolo- gists, but also on the recorded observations of their neighbors.

In Central Asia, the Iranian nomads, whom the Persians called Saka and the Greeks Scythians , became an essential link between the growing civilizations of the Middle East and China. Nonetheless, crucial tools such as writing, central to the development of settled societies, do not appear to have come to the steppe until well into the fi rst millennium CE. The agricultural revolution that spurred population growth else- where found only spotty refl ection here. The nomads were best known for their martial prowess exhibited in their archery from horseback or a war chariot. In Old Iranian, the term rathaeshtar (aristocrat/warrior) literally meant “he who stands in a chariot.”

The ancient Iranians believed that all things, even abstract ideas, possessed a living spirit. They made offerings to gods of water, fi re, and other elements. Believers also imbibed an intoxicant, haoma (Sanskrit: soma ) made from ephedra. Warriors seeking to achieve a state of ecstatic frenzy for combat partook of this stimulant. A special class of priests performed purifi cation rites daily. The maintenance of ritual purity was essential to preserving asha , the natural order of the world and cosmos. Asha governed sunrise, sunset, the seasons, and justice. Humans were created to contribute to this by struggling for truth and justice and against the Lie ( drug ) and Evil.

Zoroaster ( Zarathushtra in Old Iranian, which means “camel- driver”), the religious reformer after whom the Zoroastrian religion is named, most probably lived in Central Asia in the upper Amu Darya region, perhaps about 1200–1000 BCE (some scholars date him as early as 1500 BCE or as late 600 BCE; others place him in northwest Iran). In this “expanse of the Aryans” ( âryânâm vaêjô ), Zoroaster emphasized the ethical base of ancient Iranian beliefs, exalting Ahura Mazda (Lord Wisdom) as the Supreme Being and ruler of the forces of the Good. He heads the struggle against Ahriman, the leader of the demonic forces, a fi gure akin to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic concept of the Devil. Zoroaster underscored human responsibility to fi ght Evil. He believed that he received his prophetic revelations at the beginning of the last of four 3000-year cycles. After him, a savior-like fi gure will appear every 1000 years. The last of them, born of Zoroaster’s miraculously preserved seed, will usher in the fi nal struggle with Ahriman, the Day of Judgment, the end of days, and the attainment of paradise for the good. These

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T h e E a r l y N o m a d s : “ Wa r f a r e i s T h e i r B u s i n e s s ” 23

ideas did not immediately win over his compatriots, but would have a profound impact on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Subsequently, the Sasanid rulers of Persia made Zoroastrianism the offi cial religion of their empire, but it never acquired this status in a Central Asian state. In Iran, there was also a hereditary priestly class closely associated with the monarchy, the magu in Old Persian, descended from the priest-tribe of the Medes, a kindred Iranian-speaking people, who dominated Iran and adjoining areas from 728 BCE until the Persians under Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, conquered them in 550 BCE. Zoroastrianism is sometimes called the “Religion of the Magi.” In Central Asia, Zoroastrianism, also termed Mazdaism or Mazdayasnaism (Mazda worship), incorporated elements from local beliefs and other religious traditions.

The Scythians, expert equestrians, employed their horses in war and in sport. Hare hunting, conducted on horseback at breakneck speed with short lances, was particularly popular and is often depicted in Scythian art. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York

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24 C e n t r a l A s i a i n Wo r l d H i s t o r y

These ideas do not appear to have affected the Iranian Scythians (late eighth- to fourth-century BCE), the Sarmatians who supplanted them, or later Iranian nomadic tribes, which formed a series of confed- erations stretching from Ukraine to Mongolia. Herodotus considered the Scythians militarily invincible. According to him, they drank the blood of their slain foes, whose heads they brought to their king. The warriors fashioned napkins and clothing from the scalps of those they had killed and made drinking goblets from their skulls. Scythians swore oaths by consuming a mixture of blood (contributed by the oath-takers) and wine into which they fi rst dipped their arrows or other weapons. In annual tribal or clan gatherings, those who had killed their enemies were permitted to join the chief in drinking a specially brewed wine. Those that had not were barred from participation in this ceremony, a signal dishonor.

Herodotus reports that the kindred Issedones consumed the fl esh of their deceased fathers, mixing it with chopped sheep and goat meat. The deceased’s head was then cleaned and gilded, serving afterwards “as a sacred image” to which they made sacrifi ces annually. Alien cus- toms aside, Herodotus notes that they “observe rules of justice strictly” and women enjoy “equal power” with men. 6 Strabo, a Greek geographer in the fi rst century BCE, says much the same of the kindred “uncouth, wild, and warlike” Massagetae, who are “in their business dealings, straightforward and not given to deceit.” 7 The “animal style” art of the later Scythians, with its realistic and dramatic depictions of animals, expressed their love of the hunt and the natural world. The Scythians believed that animals possessed magical powers and they decorated their clothing, everyday objects, and weapons with animal images.

Meanwhile, other Iranians settled in some of the oases and fertile river valleys, forming the Sogdian and Khwarazmian peoples in what is today Uzbekistan and the Bactrians in Afghanistan. Yet others, such as the Khotanese Saka, went further east and established themselves in a number of oasis city-states in Xinjiang. Although dispersed across Central Asia, the various Iranian peoples retained much in common. Sima Qian, the “grand historian” of China, reports that the Iranians from Ferghana (eastern Uzbekistan and adjoining parts of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan) to Iran share “generally similar” customs and speak “mutually intelligible” languages. “They are skillful at commerce and will haggle over a fraction of a cent. Women are held in great respect, and the men make decisions on the advice of their women.” 8 Overall, information about them is sparse. There may have been some loose political structures centering on Khwarazm (western Uzbekistan) and

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T h e E a r l y N o m a d s : “ Wa r f a r e i s T h e i r B u s i n e s s ” 25

Bactria (Afghanistan). Living on the borders of the steppe world and familiar with the nomads, Bactrians, Khwarazmians, and especially Sogdians were in an excellent position to serve as middlemen in trade.

Cyrus, the Persian who founded the fi rst great land empire, extend- ing from the Near East to northern India, invaded Central Asia. He subjugated Bactria, Sogdia, and Khwarazm, but subsequently perished in 530 BCE while leading a campaign against the Scythians. The Scythian queen, Tomyris, seeking revenge for her son’s death, placed Cyrus’s head in “a skin with human blood” 9 and declared that now the blood- thirsty conqueror could quench his thirst. Darius I, who came to power eight years after Cyrus’s ghastly demise, was unable to conquer Greece but succeeded in Central Asia, subjugating some of the steppefolk. Margiana (modern Turkmenistan), Sogdia, Khwarazm, and Bactria, reached accommodations with the Achaemenids becoming satrapies (provinces) of the Persian Empire until Alexander the Great conquered the region in 330–329 BCE. The Scythians and later Iranian nomads, however, remained independent. Under Achaemenid rule, Iranian Central Asia became involved in long-distance trade networks connecting western and southern Asia. Trade furthered urban development and the expansion of agriculture, irrigated by large-scale canal systems. A system of underground irrigation canals called kârîz (a Persian term), even today an important feature of agriculture in Xinjiang, may have begun during the era of Achaemenid infl uence in Central Asia. 10 Ancient Persia pioneered this kind of canal, today called in Iran by its Arabic name, qanât .

Alexander’s conquest of Iran (331–330 BCE) and his campaigns in Central Asia brought Khwarazm, Sogdia, and Bactria under Graeco- Macedonian rule. As elsewhere, Alexander founded or renamed a number of cities in his honor, such as Alexandria Eschate (“Outermost Alexandria,” near modern Khojent in Tajikistan). He married Roxane, the daughter of a local Bactrian chieftain, 11 in the hope of creating closer bonds with the Iranian East. Alexander IV, his son with Roxane, never achieved full power. The squabbling Graeco-Macedonian generals killed them both in 309 and then divided the empire. By the mid-third century BCE, the Graeco-Macedonian colonists in Bactria broke away, creating their own state in the more northerly parts of Afghanistan.

The cultural history of Graeco-Bactria, with its rich blend of Hellenistic, Iranian, and Indian artistic traditions is partially known through fragmentary archaeological fi nds. Buddhism brought by mis- sionaries from India had some success here. Politically, Graeco-Bactria expanded into northern India, Ferghana, and perhaps parts of Xinjiang.

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26 C e n t r a l A s i a i n Wo r l d H i s t o r y

Weakened by Saka raiders and domestic strife, it declined by the mid- second century BCE. In 128 BCE, if not earlier, nomadic tribes coming from the Iranian and Tokharian borderlands of northern China overran it. The cause of these movements across the steppe was the rise and expansion of a new power in Mongolia: the Xiongnu.

The Xiongnu, whose origins are obscure, emerged in the third century BCE as China was recovering from a long period of internal strife that ended when the Qin (221–206 BCE) unifi ed the various Chinese states. The Qin and their successors, the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE) pur- sued an aggressive northern policy. They built fortifi cation walls that would later become the Great Wall, a means to secure newly subjugated territories and a platform for further expansion. The Xiongnu saw this as a threat and prepared for war. 12 Sima Qian claimed that “plundering and marauding” was their response to crises. “Warfare,” he concluded, “is their business.” 13 They organized their army in units of 10, 100, 1000, and 10,000, divided into right and left wings with the commander at the

Hand-dug canals in Xinjiang require constant attention. Typically, villagers dig a series of narrow but deep wells, sometimes to depths of 275 feet or more. The wells are linked by channels forming a kind of grand canal from which they build branches across the areas to be irrigated. Courtesy of Justin J. Rudelson

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146 N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 4 – 2 5

2004), 1–2, 65–98 , on the military revolution in the Eurasian steppes and the Near East.

3. Adrienne Edgar, “Everyday Life among the Turkmen Nomads,” in Jeff Sahadeo and Russell Zanca, eds., Everyday Life in Central Asia Past and Present (Bloomington; Indiana University Press, 2007), 38–44 .

4. Owen Lattimore, The Inner Asian Frontiers of China (The American Geographical Society, 1940 ; repr., Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1988) , 522.

5. Anthony, The Horse , 460.

6. Lien-Sheng Yang, “Historical Notes on the Chinese World Order” in John K. Fairbank (ed.), The Chinese World Order (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 33 . On Byzantine strategy, see Edward N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire (Cambridge, MA.-London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2009), 415–418 .

7. See the remarkable quantity of goods studied by E. H. Schaefer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’ang Exotics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963; repr. 1985) .

8. Hugh Pope, Sons of the Conquerors. The Rise of the Turkic World (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2005), 316 .

9. Mah mûd al-Kâš arî, The Compendium of Turkic Dialects: Dîwân Lu at at-Turk , vol. 1, trans. and ed. Robert Dankoff in collaboration with James Kelly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982–1985), 273 . “Tatsïz türk bolmas, bashsïz börk bolmas.”

10. Denis Sinor, “Samoyed and Ugric Elements in Old Turkic,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 3–4 (1979–1980), 768–773 , and “The Origin of Turkic Balïq ‘Town’,” Central Asiatic Journal 25 (1981), 95–102 . Sinor has suggested that this word comes from the Ugric languages. There are a number of Ugric loan words in Turkic, although why the Turks would have borrowed this term from the hunting-gathering Ugric peoples is unclear.

C H A P T E R 2

1. Elena E. Kuzmina, The Prehistory of the Silk Road , ed. Victor Mair (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 88–98 .

2. Vera S. Rastorgueva and Dzhoi I. Edel’man, Etimologicheskii slovar’ iranskikh iazykov, (Moscow: Vostochnaia Literatura, 2000-ongoing), 1: 222 .

3. The subject remains hotly debated. See Edwin F. Bryant and Laurie L. Patton, eds., The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History (New York: Routledge, 2005) and Thomas R. Trautmann, ed., The Aryan Debate (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005) .

4. See A. Shapur Shahbazi, “The History of the Idea of Iran” in Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis and Sarah Stewart, eds., Birth of the Persian Empire: The Idea of Iran , vol. 1 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 100–111 .

5. Michael Witzel, Linguistic Evidence for Cultural Exchange in Prehistoric Western Central Asia in Sino-Platonic Papers 129 (December 2003): 13 .

6. Herodotus, The History , trans. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 289 .

7. Strabo, The Geography of Strabo , vol. 5, trans. H. L. Jones (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 1944), 264–269 .

8. Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian : Han Dynasty , vol. 2, trans. Burton Watson, 2 nd rev. ed. (Hong Kong: Columbia University Press, 1993), 245 .

9. Herodotus, The History , trans. Grene, 129–130.

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N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 5 – 3 7 147

10. See Justin J. Rudelson, Oasis Identities (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997 ), 66–68 .

11. Frank L. Holt, Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 86 .

12. Nicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 ), 186–188 .

13. Sima Qian, trans. Watson, 129, 143.

14. Sima Qian, trans. Watson, 130, 134.

15. Sima Qian, trans. Watson, 143–144, notes the fondness of the Xiongnu for Chinese silk and foodstuffs, particularly grains, and their insistence that they be given “the right measure and quality.”

16. Sima Qian, trans. Watson, 140–141.

17. Sima Qian, trans. Watson, 143.

18. Sima Qian, trans. Watson, 146.

19. Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History , trans. James Ward (Leiden: Brill, 2005 ), 28–32 .

20. David Christian, “Silk Roads or Steppe Roads? The Silk Roads in World History,” Journal of World History 11, no. 1 (2000): 1–26 .

21. Thomas J. Barfi eld, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 36 .

22. Juha Janhunen, Manchuria: An Ethnic History (Helsinki: The Finno-Ugrian Society, 1996), 187 .

23. For the most recent arguments in favor of this connection, see M Érdy, “Hun and Xiong-nu Type Cauldron Finds Throughout Eurasia” Eurasian Studies Yearbook 67 (1995), 5–94 ; D.C. Wright, “The Hsiung-nu–Hun Equation revisited” Eurasian Studies Yearbook 69 (1997), 77–112 ; E. Pulleyblank, “Tribal Confederations of Uncertain Identity. Hsiung-nu” in H.R. Roemer (ed.), History of the Turkic Peoples in the Pre-Islamic Period . Philologiae et Historiae Turcicae Fundmenta , I (= Philologiae Turcicae Fundmenta , III) (Berlion: Klaus Schwarz, 2000), 60 ; Étienne de la Vaissière, “Huns et Xiongnu,” Central Asiatic Journal 49, no. 1 (2005): 3–26 .

C H A P T E R 3

1. They appear to have spoken a Mongolic language, see Alexander Vovin, “Once Again on the Tabga Language” Mongolia Studies 29 (2007): 191–206 .

2. Károly Czeglédy, “From East to West: The Age of Nomadic Migrations in Eurasia,” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 3 (1983), pp. 67–106 ; Étienne de la Vaissière, “Is There Any Nationality of the Hephthalites?” Bulletin of the Asia Institute 17 (2003): 119–132 .

3. R. C. Blockley, ed. and trans., The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the Later Roman Empire: Eunapius, Olympiodorus, Priscus and Malchus , vol. 2 (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1981, 1983), 344–345 .

4. Türk is used to denote the specifi c Turkic people bearing this name. Turk and Turkic are generic terms encompassing all the peoples speaking a Turkic language.

5. S. G. Klyashtornyi, “The Royal Clan of the Türks and the Problem of Early Turkic-Iranian Contacts,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 47 no. 3 (1994): 445–448 .

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