Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (67 page)

EPILOGUE

The Barbarians

The origins of modern civilization go back to the Indo-European migrations that began four thousand years ago in the center of Eurasia. The Proto-Indo-Europeans lived in a marginal region where they developed an innovative quickness unparalleled by any of the other Eurasian peoples of the periphery, none of whom adapted in time to prevent the Indo-Europeans from dominating their territory. The Indo-Europeans possessed a powerful dynamism that was generally passed on to other peoples directly, in many cases by outright conquest. Through their servitude, the subjugated peoples within Central Eurasia (and even in the periphery, if only temporarily) learned the First Story and adopted the Central Eurasian Culture Complex, as described in the prologue. In doing this, the Indo-Europeans mixed with local peoples wherever they migrated and developed distinctive local creoles, the daughter languages or ancestors of the branches of the Indo-European family, with cultures characterized by the dynamism of the Proto-Indo-Europeans and their early Central Eurasian daughter peoples.

Among the essential features of the Central Eurasian Culture Complex was the political necessity of supporting the comitatus warriors of the ruler and the lords subject to him and providing them with luxurious gifts. This created a powerful economic need that could only be satisfied by trade. With the establishment of the nomad-ruled empires, a trade-oriented Central Eurasian economy combining the efforts and products of the pastoral nomadic peoples, the agricultural peoples, and the urban peoples of Central Asia came into being. Although the popular term “Silk Road” is misleading, it can still be used to refer to the foreign trade component of this economy, as long as it is understood that what drove the economic engine of the Silk Road was first of all internal Central Eurasian trade, based on internal demand not only for the products of their own peoples but for those of neighboring Central Eurasian states and the peripheral states. Trade with the peripheral states created a demand there for the products of the Central Eurasian states or products acquired through them. The connection of these economies by interregional trade produced a healthy international commerce. At the center of the Silk Road system was the Central Eurasian aristocracy of the native states, in which most of the rulers were of steppe nomadic origin.

The destruction of the Silk Road is, or should be, no mystery. It is even precisely documented. In the late seventeenth century the Russians and Manchu-Chinese partitioned Central Eurasia between themselves. The Ch’ing then destroyed the last pastoral nomadic empire, that of the Junghars, seized their territory, and massacred most of the Junghar people. The Russians conquered and colonized most of the rest of Central Eurasia, through the middle of which closed borders were established. It is hardly surprising that the Silk Road economy—the economy of the Eurasian heartland—collapsed, and the peoples of Central Eurasia, including the once-great high civilizations of Central Asia and Tibet, sank into poverty and backwardness.

The nations who once dominated Central Eurasian history—the Scythians and Hsiung-nu, the Huns, Turks, Tibetans, Mongols, Junghars, Manchus, and others—and their descendants disappeared from world historical consciousness for a very long time. Now some of them have reappeared, sometimes under different names, in modern European-style nation-states, and in nearly all cases bereft of any real power. One is entitled to at least ask, “What happened to the old Central Eurasians?” Or to put it wrongly, “What happened to all the
barbarians?”
¹

The Idea of the Barbarian

History writing about Central Eurasia, from Herodotus down to the present day, has been dominated by stereotypes,
topoi,
and powerful biases. The problem ultimately goes back to the fully developed idea of the
barbarian
and its division of the world into good and bad peoples and cultures. Merely stating this is, of course, not enough, so this chapter is devoted to analyzing the rhetoric and the main arguments that tend to come up in any discussion of Central Eurasia—especially of the empires formed and ruled by people practicing the pastoral-nomadic way of life.

The essential difference between the pastoral nomad-dominated Central Eurasian states and the peripheral states not dominated by pastoral nomads was that the Central Eurasian pastoral nomads lived in the steppe zone, which was the home of the horse and the best pastureland for horses in Eurasia. They grew up with horses and on them; they were mobile and could easily traverse great distances in a short time. They also learned how to use the compound bow to protect their flocks and to hunt, so they already had some skills useful in war. All this is well known, and undoubtedly true. However, it has been taken much further in the theory of the natural warrior, which is based on ancient and medieval ideas that “associated physical and psychological traits with characteristics of the environment,” so that, because of their harsh steppe climate, the Central Eurasians were not only skilled at riding and shooting, they were tough, courageous, ruthless, and warlike, much “superior to the aristocratic and peasant armies of the sedentary states.”
²
While ancient and medieval theories of the climates and humors and so forth are no longer taken seriously, casting doubt on this stereotype, there is a more serious problem here: this seemingly innocent characterization is simply a cleaned-up, pejorative-free, modernized version of the two and a half millennium old idea of the
barbarian.

Central Eurasians are regularly castigated for their supposed aggression, ruthless cruelty, and love of violence in general—that is, after all, the core of the idea of the
barbarian.
It is noted throughout most writing on Central Eurasia that the rulers came to power only after brutal massacres, wanton murder, and so forth. Steppe empires were formed by “vicious and prolonged struggle amidst nomadic tribal formations,”
³
what has been called “bloody tanistry.”
⁴
It cannot be denied that Central Eurasian rulers were responsible for the deaths of many people in these and many other instances. But this too must be viewed in perspective. All historical Chinese, Persian, and Graeco-Roman empires or dynasties were founded in exactly the same way—after a long, bloody, treacherous civil war. And after the empire’s foundation, the “greatest” rulers of both kinds of empires were nearly always conquering heroes first—they killed their rivals and enemies, sometimes personally—and good administrators second. The most famous European empire builders, the Romans, were “morally speaking no better than, or even worse than, the barbarians” in “terms of their political ruthlessness, or of their frequent inhumanity to foreign peoples and their own slaves.”
⁵
All “great” realms were and are built on the same principles that “advanced” primate societies in general are built on, the alpha male hierarchy. There is thus no reason to single out Central Eurasians in this respect.

Yet, while the bloody victories of Attila, Chinggis, or Tamerlane are still deplored, the equally bloody victories of the Graeco-Roman, Persian, and Chinese emperors are related with enthusiasm by historians past and present. Non–Central Eurasian historians from Antiquity to the present have been blind to the savagery and unrelenting aggression of their own ancestors. The most famous, or infamous examples, the Romans, are chastised not because they were so cruel to their slaves and tortured and killed so many people for public entertainment in such vicious ways, but because some of those they tortured and killed were Christians.
⁶
Ancient and medieval sources reveal the extent of the aggression, treachery, and institutionalized brutality of ancient “civilized” cultures, but modern historians continue to praise those peoples for the successes they achieved against Central Eurasians, whom they accuse instead of being violent and cruel. Certainly there are plenty of instances of Central Eurasians’ inhumanity to each other or to peripheral peoples, but they cannot begin to be compared, for sheer cruelty and relentless aggression, to the Romans, the Persians, the Chinese, and their successors right down to modern times.

A reviewer of two recent archaeological monographs on the Scythians, after commenting on the well-known beauty of the golden artifacts found in Scythian burial mounds says:

This statement repeats the traditional view that the Scythians and other nomadic peoples acquired most of their wealth through their unusually expert use of violence and claims that there is little wrong with our understanding of them. Yet it is known even from ancient Greek sources that the Scythians acquired most of their wealth by trade and taxation, not war. About four centuries after Herodotus, Strabo discusses the agricultural exports of the nomads at some length and then remarks on their avoidance of war:

The misperception of the Scythians and other steppe zone peoples today is generally based on the widely held theory of the “needy nomads,” according to which steppe-zone Central Eurasians did not themselves produce enough of the necessities of life and depended on the agricultural products, textiles, and other goods of their peripheral neighbors, whose wealth they coveted.
¹⁰
When the Central Eurasians could not obtain what they needed or desired by trading their animals and other goods with the “advanced” peripheral empires—who did not need or want the nomads’ pitiful, barbaric products—the Central Eurasians invaded to take them by force. This theory has rightly been criticized at length by Nicola Di Cosmo, who points out that neither the historical sources nor the archaeological findings support it. It is now well established that Central Eurasians practiced agriculture themselves and either taxed or traded peacefully with peoples who provided what they needed or wanted but did not themselves produce. When the nomads did attack a peripheral area, for whatever reason, they invariably carried off livestock and people, not agricultural products.
¹¹
It needs to be emphasized here that the Central Eurasians, especially the nomadic peoples, actually produced more than enough food for their needs. As a result, they generally were bigger and healthier than the peripheral agricultural peoples.