Authors: Christopher I. Beckwith
Tags: #History, #General, #Asia, #Europe, #Eastern, #Central Asia
Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (2 page)
I also believe it is important to recognize the forces behind human motivations, especially as concerns sociopolitical organization, war, and conceptualizations of these and other fields of human activity, such as the arts. Although this book is not a study of ethology or anthropology, whether concerning primates or humans, in writing a history on such a big scale I noticed that human behavior seems to be remarkably consistent. This is not to claim that history per se repeats itself, but rather that humans do tend to do the same things, repeatedly, while, on the other hand, true coincidences are extremely rare. People also tend to copy other people. For example, the wagon, with its wheels, seems to have been invented only once; it is a gradual, secondary development from prewheeled “vehicles,” and it took a long time to finally become the true wagon; but when it did so, it was very quickly copied by the neighbors of those who had developed it. The consistency of human behavior over such great expanses of space and time can clearly be due only to our common genetic heritage. Viewed from the perspective of Eurasian history over the past four millennia, there does not seem to me to be any significant difference between the default underlying human socio-political structure during this time period—that is, down to the present day—and that of primates in general. The Alpha Male Hierarchy is our system too, regardless of whatever cosmetics have been applied to hide it. To put it another way, in my opinion the Modern political system is in fact simply a disguised primate-type hierarchy, and as such it is not essentially different from any other political system human primates have dreamed up. If recognition of a problem is the first step to a cure, it is long past time for this particular problem to be recognized and a cure for it be found, or at least a medicine for it to be developed, to keep it under control before it is too late for humans and the planet Earth.
From the preceding statements readers can draw their own conclusions about my approach in this book, but I hereby state it explicitly, as simply and clearly as I can: my aim has been to write a realistic, objective view of the history of Central Eurasia and Central Eurasians, not to repeat and annotate the received view or any of the Postmodern metahistorical or antihistorical views.
9
The origins of this book ultimately go back almost exactly two decades, when I wrote a paper on the idea of the
barbarian
(on which see the epilogue) and considered writing an overarching history of all of Central Eurasia. My return to the topic is in part the result of a conversation I had some years ago with Anya King, who remarked about the widespread personal use of silken goods by Central Eurasian nomads. Following up on this observation, I did some calculation and concluded that the trade in luxury goods must have constituted a very significant part of the internal economy within Central Eurasia. Subsequently, while teaching my Central Eurasian History course, I noticed that the appearance, waxing and waning, and disappearance of Silk Road commerce paralleled that of the native Central Eurasian empires chronologically. I began to seriously rethink my views on the history of the Silk Road and the nomad empires, and in turn my ideas about Central Eurasian history as a whole. I gave the first public presentation of my new interpretation of Central Eurasian history as a paper, “The Silk Road and the Nomad Empires,” in the Silk Road Symposium organized by the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin on June 3, 2004.
My understanding of the topic continued to change significantly while I worked on the book. In fact, very little in the finished text has much to do with my original plan. Not only the particulars but the vision as a whole changed while I was writing it, in turn causing me to revise my presentation of the particulars. I could probably keep on revising and rewriting in this way indefinitely if I were so inclined, but I have other interests I would like to pursue, so the volume you hold in your hands represents essentially the state of my ideas when I finished the near-final draft early in 2007.
I have attempted to pay special attention to the underlying cultural elements that formed the Central Eurasian Culture Complex, which I believe to be important for understanding the narrative of what happened, why, and to what effect in the history of Central Eurasia and—to some extent—in the rest of Eurasia. In my coverage of the modern period, I have paid special attention to the phenomenon of Modernism, which is responsible for the cultural devastation of Central Eurasia in the twentieth century, both in political life and in the arts, which have yet to recover from its grip. I hope that some of the points I have noticed, and the arguments I have made, will lead to a better understanding of it and maybe even point the way to improving the human condition today.
As noted, this book is about Central Eurasia in general, over the entire historical period. Because of the scale involved, many topics are barely mentioned. Yet, even if I had been able to cover all fields of scholarship in Central Eurasian studies, I would not have been able to find much published research on many of them—including important topics in history, linguistics, anthropology, art, literature, music, and practically all other fields—despite the undoubted progress that has been made recently by young scholars of Central Eurasian studies. While other areas of the world—particularly Western Europe and North America—receive, if anything, too much attention, most major topics of Central Eurasian studies have been neglected, some almost completely. Some major sources—such as Hsüan Tsang’s
Hsi yü chi
‘Account of the Western Regions’—still do not have a scholarly critical edition and modern annotated translation. Others have not even been touched.
Indeed, one cannot find a single book or major research article, good or bad, on many of those topics. Just to take poetry, how many new books are published every year on, say,
Janghar
(the Kalmyk national epic), Rudaki (the earliest great poet to write in New Persian), or Li Po (one of the two or three greatest poets who wrote in Chinese)? In English, the count has hovered between zero
(Janghar
and Rudaki) and less than one (Li Po) for decades. How about the history of the Avar, Türk, or Junghar empires, or linguistic studies of Kalmyk, Bactrian, or Kirghiz (Kyrgyz)? It is rare that even an article is published on any of these major topics in Central Eurasian studies. To be sure, outstanding works, many of them listed in the bibliography, have been published on history topics in the past decade, and even some in linguistics, a model being Clark’s 1998 book on Turkmen. Nevertheless, the examples given here of topics that have
not
been treated well, or at all, are only a tiny fraction of the major topics of Central Eurasian studies—including art and architecture, history, language and linguistics, literature, music, philosophy, and many others—most of which remain little studied or almost completely ignored.
By contrast, every year many hundreds of books are published, and many thousands of conference papers given, on Chaucer, Shakespeare, and other early English writers, as well as countless thousands more on modern English-language writers, as well as on Anglo-American history, English linguistics, and Anglo-American anything else. We do not really need more of them for the time being.
In short, rather than writing yet another overconceptualized, overspecialized work on topics that have been, relatively speaking, studied into the ground, consider contributing just one article, or even a small book, on one of the countless neglected topics of Central Eurasian studies. Some of them are mentioned, all too briefly, in these pages.
In conclusion, much needs to be done, from every approach imaginable, on the subject of Central Eurasian history. I wish everyone well in their efforts to fill the many lacunae that remain.
Note to the Paperback Edition
I am pleased that this book has been well enough received to merit a paperback edition, and have taken the opportunity to correct a number of errors of different kinds in the text. I would like to thank Nicola Di Cosmo, Gisaburo N. Kiyose, Andrew Shimunek, and Endymion Wilkinson for kindly sending me their comments and corrections. Unfortunately, all of the changes could not be made in this paperback edition, but they will most definitely be incorporated into a future edition of this book. I am of course responsible for any errors, old or new, that remain.
C. I. Beckwith
Tokyo, 2010
1
On the meaning of “primary sources” in the history of premodern periods, see endnote
1
.
2
The history of Central Eurasian interaction with the Indian subcontinent (and, to a slightly lesser extent, the pre-Islamic history of Persia and southern Central Asia) is very poorly documented until fairly recent times. Due partly to this fact, and partly to my own failings (including lack of interest in South Asia), I have paid less attention to the topic. However, much important and interesting work is currently being done on the history of the region from Mughal times to the nineteenth century, and it is to be hoped that more will soon be learned about the earlier periods as well.
3
See the discussion of Modernism and related topics in
chapters 11
and
12
.
4
Bryant (2001). The same kinds of claims are made in other fields, including archaeology: “Postmodernism has impacted archaeology under the rubric of post-processualism, which holds that every reading or decoding of a text, including an archaeological text, is another encoding, since all truth is subjective” (Bryant 2001: 236). Having weighed different claims, some made by professional scholars of high reputation, some made by nationalistic politicians, Bryant (2001: 298–310) finally concludes that one cannot clearly decide between solid scholarship and the alternative. On the topic dealt with by his book, see appendix A.
5
Bryant (1999: 79); see
appendix A
.
6
Of course, anyone who wishes to examine the original manuscripts is free to do so. The point of producing a critical edition is to establish the archetype, the closest possible approximation to the original text, so as to eliminate corruptions that do not belong to the original, and to reveal the intended meaning of the author or authors to the extent possible. Critical edition is criticized as “positivist” because it is to some extent a scientific method and postmodernists reject science as “positivism.”
7
This result was well understood by the Skeptics, philosophers of Antiquity who overtly aimed at this cessation. Their goal was to achieve happiness by eliminating the discontent arising from too much critical thought.
8
The followers of fundamentalism (an extreme type of Modernism) object even to the results of paleontology.
9
On the need for a scholarly encyclopedic work on Central Eurasian history, see endnote
2
.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In support of the research and writing of this book I was awarded an Indiana University Summer Faculty Fellowship (2004); a Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship (2004–2005), tenure taken in Tokyo, Japan; and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2004–2005), tenure taken in 2005–2006 in Bloomington and in Dénia, Spain. In Dénia I completed the first full draft and then totally rewrote it, producing the essence of the final book minus much checking and correction of details, editing, and bibliographical additions. I am grateful to the granting institutions for their generous support.
I would also like to thank all those who advised me on my applications, wrote letters of recommendation for me, or helped me in other ways. In particular, I am indebted to E. Bruce Brooks of the Warring States Working Group at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Nicola Di Cosmo of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; Denis Sinor of Indiana University; Tatsuo Nakami of the Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies; and Roxana Ma Newman, Toivo Raun, and Rose Vondrasek of Indiana University. Without their support I would not have had the time to write this book. I also would like to thank the staff at Princeton University Press, including Rob Tempio, senior editor; Sara Lerner, production editor; Chris Brest, cartographer; Dimitri Karetnikov, illustration specialist; Tracy Baldwin, cover designer; Brian MacDonald, copyeditor; and all others who worked on the book, for their efforts to make it turn out well.