Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present

PREFACE

This book presents a new view of the history of Central Eurasia and the other parts of the Eurasian continent directly involved in Central Eurasian history. Originally I planned to write a sketch of the essential topical elements of a history of Central Eurasia, without much of a chronological narrative. Having in mind the French tradition of writing professionally informed but readable essays for an educated general audience, with minimal annotation, I imagined it with the title
Esquisse d’une histoire de l’Eurasie centrale.
In the actual writing, the people and events insisted on following their proper order and I found myself giving a basic outline of the political and cultural history of Central Eurasia within the context of a history of Eurasia as a whole, sometimes with extensive annotation, only occasionally involving reexamination of primary sources.
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Nevertheless, I have kept my original main goal foremost in my mind: to clarify fundamental issues of Central Eurasian history that to my knowledge have never been explained correctly or, in some cases, even mentioned. Without such explanation, it would continue to be impossible to understand the ebb and flow of history in Eurasia as anything other than the fantasy and mystery that fill most accounts. Mysteries are intriguing, and sometimes they must remain unsolved, but enough source material is available to explain much of what has been mysterious in Central Eurasian history without resorting to the “usual suspects."

In this connection there is a widespread opinion that few sources exist for Central Eurasian history and consequently little can be said about it. That is a misconception. An immense body of source material exists on the history of Central Eurasia, especially in its connections with the peripheral civilizations.
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Because that history covers a span of four millennia, and as there is a correspondingly large secondary literature on some of the topics within that area and period, to do it any sort of justice would require a series of massive tomes that could be produced only by a team of scholars, not by one writer working alone with attendant limitations on knowledge, skills, energy, and time. The only way a single individual could manage to produce a book on such a huge topic would be by pulling back and taking a big-picture approach—a very broad perspective—which, as it happens, is what interests me.

In general, therefore, this book is not a highly focused treatment of any specific topics, individuals, political units, periods, or cultures (not even of the Central Eurasian Culture Complex, which deserves a book of its own), with the partial exception of those that are of particular interest to me. It is also not an exhaustive account of events, names, and dates, though the observant reader will note that I have tried to provide that information for all important events and people, even though I sometimes have had to go to surprisingly great lengths to find it. Finally, it is not a source study or a comprehensive annotated bibliography. In recent years a number of excellent studies have been published on some of the most notable people, places, periods, and other topics, with full annotation and references, and I recommend them to interested readers.

What I have done is to reexamine the more or less unitary received view of Central Eurasians and Central Eurasian history and attempt to revise it. The notes are therefore largely devoted to discussion of selected points I felt needed further comment or investigation. Whatever detail I have been able to squeeze into the narrative or the topical sections is there mostly because it seemed important to me at the time and I did not want to leave it out. That means I have left out many things that are undoubtedly important but did not seem crucial to me at the time, or that I simply overlooked. I originally did not intend to include more than absolutely minimal annotation, to keep my focus on the argument. As one can see, it did not end up quite that minimal. Habits are difficult to repress, and apparently I
like
notes that go into detail on interesting topics. (Some long notes, which are mainly of interest to specialist scholars, would cause congestion in the main text, so I have placed them in a separate notes section at the end.)

However, this book does not go to the other logical extreme either. It is not a general theory of history, and I do not intend to imply any such theory in it. There are many recent works of this type, but my book is not one of them. I also do not examine in any detail the many theories—or, rather, variantsof the one current theory—of Central Eurasian state formation that have been published in the past few decades, though they are discussed briefly in the epilogue. Neither my interpretation nor my terminology derives from such theoretical or metatheoretical works. My intention has been to let my interpretations arise naturally from straightforward presentation and analysis of what I consider to be the most relevant data known to me. I may not have succeeded in this attempt, but in any case I have intentionally left the book free of overt and covert references to world-historical theories and metatheories, most of which I know little about.

With respect to the data and history writing in general, some comment on my own approach is perhaps necessary, especially in view of the recent application of the “Postmodernist” approach to history, the arts, and other fields. According to the Modernist imperative, the old must always, unceasingly, be replaced by the new, thus producing permanent revolution.
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The Postmodernist point of view, the logical development of Modernism, rejects what it calls the positivist, essentially non-Modern practice of evaluating and judging problems or objects according to specific agreed criteria. Instead, Postmodernists consider all judgments to be relative. “In our postmodern age, we can no longer take recourse to
[sic]
the myth of ‘objectivity,’ “ it is claimed.
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“Suspicions are legitimately aroused due to the considerable differences in the opinions of the foremost authorities in this area.”
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History is only opinion. Therefore, no valid judgments can be made. We cannot know what happened or why, but can only guess at the modern motivations for the modern “construction of identity” of a nation, the nationalistic polemics of anti-intellectuals and nonscholars, and so on. All manuscripts are equally valuable, so it is a waste of time to edit them—or worse, they are said to be important mainly for the information they reveal about their scribes and their cultural milieux, so producing critical editions of them eliminates this valuable information. Besides, we cannot know what any author really intended to say anyway, so there is no point in even trying to find out what he or she actually wrote.
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Art is whatever anyone claims to be art. No ranking of it is possible. There is no good art or bad art; all is only opinion. Therefore it is impossible, formally, to improve art; one can only change it. Unfortunately, obligatory constant change, and the elimination of all criteria, necessarily equals or produces stasis: no real change. The same applies to politics, in which the Modern “democratic” system allows only superficial change and thus produces stasis. Because no valid judgments can be made by humans—all human judgments are opinions only—all data must be equal. (As a consequence, Postmodernists’ judgment about the invalidity of judgments must also be invalid, but the idea of criticizing Postmodernist dogma does not seem to be popular among them.) In accordance with the Postmodernist view, there is only a choice between religious belief in whatever one is told (i.e., suspension of disbelief) or total skepticism (suspension of both belief and disbelief). In both cases, the result, if followed resolutely to the logical extreme, is cessation of thought, or at least elimination of even the possibility of critical thought.
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If the vast majority of people, who are capable only of the former choice (total belief), are joined by intellectuals and artists, all agreeing to abandon reason, the result will be an age of credulity, repression, and terror that will put all earlier ones to shame. I do not think this is ‘good’. I think it is ‘bad’. I reject Modernism and its hyper-Modern mutation, Postmodernism. They are anti-intellectual movements that have wreaked great damage in practically all fields of human endeavor. I hope that a future generation of young people might be inspired to attack these movements and reject them so that one day a new age of fine arts (at least) will dawn.

Paleontology, a kind of history, is actually a hard science, so it has been largely immune to the anti-intellectualism of Postmodernist scholars.
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Although I am interested in dinosaurs, this book is not about their history but about human history; in my view, though, the same rules apply, and the Postmodern view is literally nonsense (literal nonsense being, in part, the goal of the view’s proponents). I do not think that my own experience of the world is a meaningless miasma of misperceptions simply because it has been experienced by me and is therefore subjective. It is certainly true that everything is to some degree uncertain—including science, as scientists know very well—and all scholars must, of course, take uncertainty and subjectivity into account. I do not think history is a science in the modern Anglo-American sense, but I do think it must be approached the same way as science, just as all other fields of scholarly endeavor should be. Because the Postmodern agenda demands the abandoning not only of science but of rationality, I cannot accept it as a valid approach for scholars or intellectuals in general.