“Asie centrale 300-850: Des routes et des royaumes” by Étienne de la Vaissière

Gold buckle, Saksanokur, Tajikistan. 2nd-1st century BCE via Wikimedia Commons)

Our journey toward having a true understanding of world history passes through Central Asia, the lands in-between the great civilizations of India, China and Iran. William H McNeil’s classic Rise of the West (1963) vividly illustrated the role of Central Asia as a gearbox whose spinning connected these civilizations and propelled history forward. One had to imagine these gears as some kind of Buddhist chakras. But history cannot be based only through metaphors. Someone has to do the spade work to ground the chakras in hard facts: the shards, fragments, bones and rags that archaeologists uncover.

This is what Étienne de la Vaissière does in Asie centrale. His starting point is not the familiar narratives about the Silk Road, the spread of Buddhism, or of Islam. Over this territory stretching 3,000 kilometers between India, China and Iran, and in a time period lasting five centuries, Vaissière interprets for us the evidence of ruins, paintings, sculptures and manuscripts—many of which are included in the lavish, color illustrations in this superbly-produced book. His conclusions diverge in many points from what we mostly assumed about this era.

He starts by showing us the fundamental impact of climatic changes on this arid and fragile region, but not as a linear story of desertification or rainy periods. Rather he shows that man’s struggle for water led to the creation of flourishing oases cities like Khwarazm, Merv and Turfan, and in turn impelled the development of sophisticated and highly-organized societies. In most of these oases, the population spoke Soghdian, an ancient Iranic language of which one dialect survives as Yaghnobi, in the Pamir mountains.

Surprisingly, it was not the settled Soghdians but the nomadic pastoralists, Turks and Mongols, who suffered the most from severe climate, with more than one empire of the steppes collapsing due to bad weather. This is because, despite the equal sophistication and technicity of their live-stock herding economy, they could not improve on their productivity: farmers learned to improve crop yield many-fold, but pastoralism, once optimized, never gained in output.

 

Asie centrale 300-850: Des routes et des royaumes, Étienne de la Vaissière (Les Belles Lettres, April 2024)
Asie centrale 300-850: Des routes et des royaumes, Étienne de la Vaissière (Les Belles Lettres, April 2024)

The typology of Central Asia, with its islands of oases in a sea of steppe, ensured that the Soghdians and the Turko-Mongols learned to live together. The two societies overlapped and intersected, in wars, politics, and above all in commerce. The vast distances between the oases, on the frontiers with the great empires, provided a stimulus to trade on a continental scale. The Soghdians formed trading colonies in China, and provided the nodes in the network that tied in Iran and India. The Turks and Mongols provided protection, transportation, and even capital, in a system known as the ortak. Here the supreme khan invested his treasure with the merchants and received his share of the profits.

We call this trade network the Silk Road. Vassiere makes it clear that the Silk Road cleared a lot of goods, besides silk. Musk, furs, and slaves formed an important part of the flow, but horses represented one of the biggest commodities by value. The Turks raised and sold horses in China and in India. Fine horses from Soghdiana went to China as diplomatic presents. Chinese monks bought horses to make the long trip into India. An important role for silk was that of money, to pay for the horses, as well as the soldiers and civil servants on China’s western frontier.

The fruitful collaboration between steppe and sown gave rise to the wealthy and cosmopolitan culture of Central Asia in the early Middle Ages. In Panjikent, Samarkand and Khotan rich mural decorations reveal a sophisticated society where people enjoyed wine and poetry, and where they entertained ambassadors from as far away as Korea with dancing girls and equestrian games. The Central Asians indeed acted as a global gearbox for art, music, science and the emerging world religions, and with the intellectual freedom that the distances separating them from the great empires provided. Vassiere cites Renaissance Italy as a striking analogy.

He does not see the Silk Road of the 6th-8th centuries as the first stage of globalization. The Silk Road addressed primarily the economic needs of the Central Asians, and only to a limited extent that of the Indians, Chinese, Iranians or Romans. It did not leave any durable economic institutions, but it created an idea of a world market, one that later travelers and merchants would realize. As global trade grew in the Middle Ages, it increasingly traveled in boats.

 

The book closes with the triumph of Islam in Central Asia and the fall of the Tang dynasty. The two events are related. Had it not been for the An Lushan rebellion against the Xuanzong emperor, Tang China might have kept the armies of Islam out of Transoxiana, or even restored the Zoroastrian Shah of Iran to his throne. As it was, the region saw fluctuating fortunes for a century, with the Soghdian and Turkish princes frequently rebelling against the Arabs and reviving their native cults. Only during the Abbasid Revolution of the 8th century did the Central Asians make a common cause with the family of the Prophet, in return for a free hand in ruling the region. Central Asia became completely and simultaneously Persianized and Islamicized and turned away from the allure of China for centuries.

Asie centrale covers a lot of history, but is notably concise about historical actors. Just as readers of Fernand Braudel’s book The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II wondered why the Spanish king never appeared in the book, so Vaissière’s readers may miss the Xuanzong Emperor, the great Khagans of the Turks, and Abu Muslim if they read too fast. This is not a criticism. This book focuses on the lived life over “la longue durée.” It’s about the omnipresent Soghdian merchant, his letters to his wife, his bills of lading, his lonely grave, scattered between Samarkand and Dunyang. Given the enormous erudition behind this work, readers may be surprised by the succinctness of the footnotes. Through Vaissiere’s dense, thorough examination of these artifacts, we reach a deeper understanding of the merchants of the Silk Road, their lifestyle, their beliefs and their destiny.


David Chaffetz is the author of Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture in Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou (Abbreviated Press, November 2019) and Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empire (WW Norton, July 2024).