Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (36 page)

The ritual suicide or execution of the comitatus was inseparable from the ideas about the afterlife held by those who swore the oath of the core comitatus. They believed that death in battle fighting for their lord was “like returning home,”
³⁵
and apparently that after death everything would be much as it was in life, at least with respect to the comitatus members’ duty to fight for their lord, and the lord’s duty to reward his men with riches. The lord had to be buried with great wealth in order to be rich in the afterlife, and the warriors needed their horses and weapons, which were buried with them.

When the dominant Central Eurasian peoples, all of whom practiced the comitatus at the beginning of the Early Middle Ages, adopted world religions in the eighth century, their ideas about the afterlife began to change. Suicide and murder are sins in the major world religions. In order to retain the comitatus, the usefulness of which was obvious to everyone, it was necessary eventually to eliminate the members’ suicide or ritual execution.
³⁶

The main practical purpose of the comitatus was to serve as a lord’s personal guard corps—one loyal to him personally, not to the state. The institution was too valuable to be abandoned, despite its cost, so it was retained in one form or another down to the end of Central Eurasian independence in early modern times. But the changes it did undergo are significant.

In the case of the Sogdians and other Western Central Asians, whose comitatus was most highly developed and tended to contain many members, little did actually change. The adoption of Islam resulted in conversion of the Central Asian comitatus to the
ghulâm
system, which was, in essence, simply a traditional comitatus without the members’ ritual suicide or execution.
³⁷

In the Tibetan Empire, due to the paucity of source material it is difficult to say how long the comitatus was maintained as such after the adoption of Buddhism, but it seems clear that at least to a certain extent it was transmuted into a monastic form. The Tibetans’ chosen form of Buddhism emphasized devotion to a spiritual teacher. This devotion was little different from that of the comitatus members to their lord.
³⁸
When the Tibetan emperor was proclaimed to be a Buddhist ruler—a
dharmarâja
‘religious king’ or
cakravartin
‘one who turns the wheel (of the Buddhist law)’—the monks were ultimately in his service. It is not surprising then to find that monks fought in the army in the late imperial period.
³⁹
By the end of the Early Middle Ages there was a large monastic establishment in the Tibetan Empire.

In the case of the Uighurs, who adopted Manichaeism, and the Khazars, who adopted Judaism, the outcome with respect to the comitatus is unknown, though it was certainly long maintained in one form or another after their adoption of world religions.
⁴⁰
It continued unchanged to the north of the Khazars, principally among the Norse and Slavs who eventually destroyed them, and it also continued to the north and east of the Uighurs, particularly among the Khitan and Mongols who succeeded the Uighurs as rulers of the Eastern Steppe. These peoples are all known to have had a form of the comitatus centuries later. Because the Slavs were theoretically Christian by the time their comitatus, the
dru
ž
ina,
is mentioned in historical records and other literature, it is probable that it was becoming, or had already become, a guard corps without ritual death and burial together with the comitatus warriors’ lord.

Central Asian Buddhist and Early Islamic Culture

The Arab capital had moved frequently throughout the first century of Islam. In the middle of the eighth century, the Abbasid Revolution brought a huge army of Central Asianized Arabs and Arabicized Central Asians, the
Khurâsâniyya
‘Khurasanis’ or ‘Easterners’ into the heart of the Arab Empire, where they were finally settled by al-Mansûr around Baghdad when he built his new capital there, the City of Peace. The capital stayed in Baghdad with the exception of the reign of the son of Hârûn al-Rashîd, al-Ma’mûn (r. 808/813–833), whose capital was in Central Asia itself, in Marw, for a decade until he left in 818 to move, slowly, back to Baghdad.
⁴¹
The Arab conquest of Tokhâristân and neighboring parts of Central Asia, which until then had been solidly Buddhist, had a powerful, formative influence on Islamic culture. Central Asian thinkers, many of whom at that time were non-Muslim by training, found themselves inside the increasingly cosmopolitan Arab Empire, where their knowledge and practical skills must have been highly valued.

Under the first Abbasid caliphs, the position of vizier was often held by one or another member of the Barmakid (Barmecide) family, beginning with Khâlid ibn Barmak (d. 781/782). The Barmakids cultivated Indian science and sent several expeditions to India to bring books and scholars to Baghdad. Some of the learning so acquired was translated into Arabic.
⁴²
Islamic theology and metaphysics developed the theory of atomism, which “had become firmly established in theological circles by the middle of the ninth century” and owes its fundamental view not to Greek atomism but to “Indian influence” that has not yet been precisely identified but was undoubtedly transmitted directly to the Arabs via Central Asian Buddhism, in which atomic theories were prominent features.
⁴³
The great Indian treatise on astronomy, the
Brāhmasphuṭa-Siddhānta
by the seventh-century author Brahmagupta was translated into Arabic by Muḥammad ibn Ibrâhîm al-Fâzârî (d. 806) and others as the
Sindhind,
which became one of the foundations of Islamic astronomy and mathematics.
⁴⁴
The single most brilliant scientist of this period, Muḥammad ibn Mûsâ al-Khwârizmî (Algorithmus, fl. 807–847), wrote during the reign of al-Ma’mûn. He laid the foundations of modern mathematics with two of his works. In a book known in translation in medieval Europe as
The Book of Algorithmus,
he introduced Indian place-system numerals and “algorithmic” mathematical calculation; in a book that came to be known in the West as
The Algebra,
he reworked and systematized the algebraic calculation methods used in Indian astronomical works.
⁴⁵
One of the world’s earliest monuments of linguistic science, a careful description of Classical Arabic, was composed at this time by Sîb-awayh (Sîbawayhi, *Sêbôe, fl. late eighth century), a non-Arab scholar who studied in Basra and was perhaps Persian in origin. The approach to phonology in the work appears to derive from the Indian linguistic tradition.
⁴⁶
Significantly, the text of the attested book,
al-Kitâb
(’The Book’), is known to be the work of Sîbawayh’s main pupil, al-Mujâshi’î (better known as al-Akhfash al-Ausaṭ), who was from Balkh in Central Asia and in his own day was accused of altering his teacher’s views in significant ways.
⁴⁷

Central Asian scholars also developed an Islamic system of higher education modeled on the Central Asian system of the Buddhist
vihâra,
or monastic college. The
vihâra
was supported by a tax-exempt pious foundation that paid the expenses of the students and also of the teacher or teachers, who lived in the
vihâra
with the students. The primary method of teaching was oral lecture and debate, and the main subject of study was the Dharma, or Buddhist law and theology. These fundamental elements were taken over wholesale by the Arabs, who adopted even the distinctively Central Asian form of the
vihâra
architectural plan—a square structure with a large courtyard, each side of which contained chambers for the students and teachers plus four
îwâns,
large half-open halls in the form of gateways. The
vihâra
seems to have been Islamicized as the
madrasa
in Central Asia in the eighth and ninth centuries, though it is only noted in historical sources somewhat later.
⁴⁸

Under the caliph al-Ma’mûn, Greek scientific and philosophical literature began to be translated in earnest, first from Syriac translations, and then directly from Greek. The Greek tradition rapidly submerged the Indian tradition, but many areas of knowledge in classical Islamic culture, including astronomy, linguistics, mathematics, metaphysics, meditational mysticism, and to some extent medicine, nevertheless remained largely Indian in their fundamental inspiration, as did the education system and educational methods of the
madrasa.
The Arabs had learned the secret of papermaking from captive Chinese soldiers in Samarkand after the Battle of Atlakh (Battle of Talas) in 751, so the production of books became easier and cheaper, and libraries multiplied.

Spread of Literacy and Knowledge across Eurasia

The official support of distinctive organized world religions spread literacy and developed distinctive literature-based cultures that further redefined the imperial states, leading to the establishment of most of the ethnolinguistic regions of the premodern Old World. Before the Early Middle Ages most of Eurasia, including nearly all of Central Eurasia, was essentially a blank. The languages spoken in most of its subregions before that time are unknown, and in many places not even a foreign literary language was written, so there is no local history, literature, or other record of the cultures there. This is true to a great extent even in some large technically literate areas, including the Iranian world and India, for which most historical information must be gleaned from numismatics, accounts written by foreign travelers, or comments in histories written in neighboring countries. By the end of the Early Middle Ages there are local literatures in nearly all areas of Eurasia except for the most remote areas, the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions and the mountainous jungles of Southeast Asia. By no means was everyone educated and literate, but in most kingdoms and empires throughout Eurasia those who needed to be able to read and write could do so in one language or another.

The literate areas and cultures include Ireland, where texts were composed in Old Irish as well as Latin; England, with Old English and Latin; Wales, with Old Welsh and Latin; the Scandinavian countries, with Runic Old Norse; Spain, with Arabic and Latin; the lands of the Frankish Empire, with Latin, Old French, and Old High German; Kievan Rus, with Old Russian; the Byzantine Empire, with Greek; the Arab Empire, with Arabic; the Khazar Kaghanate, with Arabic and Hebrew;
⁴⁹
Western Central Asia, with Arabic, Bactrian, Sogdian, and New Persian; Eastern Central Asia, with Sogdian, West Tokharian, East Tokharian, Old Khotanese, Old Tibetan, Old Turkic, and Chinese; Tibet, with Old Tibetan and other languages;
⁵⁰
India, with Sanskrit, Pali, various Prakrits, and Dravidian languages; Southeast Asia, with Pali, Pyu, Old Mon, Khmer, Cham, and Old Javanese; China, with Chinese; the Eastern Steppe, with Old Turkic and Sogdian; Korea, with Chinese; and Japan, with Old Japanese and Chinese.

This new literacy was in most cases the result of the conversion of these peoples to one or more of the great world religions, all of which are founded on literary texts. It was necessary to be able to read the holy texts in the original, to copy them to help spread the word throughout the people’s territory, and, if the language was sufficiently different, to translate them into the local language. A great copying activity took place under the Carolingians in Western Europe, where Classical Latin texts and Latin translations of Greek texts were copied; the Islamic world, where Sanskrit, Syriac, Greek, and Middle Persian texts were translated into Arabic; the Tibetan Empire, where Sanskrit and Chinese texts were translated into Tibetan; Turkic Central Asia, where Tokharian and Prakrit texts were translated into Old Turkic; and Japan, where Chinese texts were copied. This transmission activity was of permanent importance. The texts copied or translated, and thus transmitted from one culture and age to another, established the basis not only for the intellectual blossoming of the High Middle Ages but for premodern Eurasian civilization as a whole.