Edgar Knobloch - Treasures of the Great Silk Road

W hen I first travelled in Central Asia, in 1959, the Soviet Union was a super-power, Khrushchevs Virgin Lands campaign was in full swing and Central Asia was a closed country. In most places my friend and I were probably the only foreigners the locals had ever seen. There was no tourism. The local Party organisation had the magic wand. It could find a room in an overcrowded hotel, get a light plane to drop us at a site in the desert, even send a parcel from the local post office. We travelled by public transport, trains and buses, and sometimes even by car, courtesy of the almighty Party. The roads were thronged with donkey carts, horse wagons, camels and lorries and an occasional bus. Cars were almost non-existent. We slept in local inns, the mehman-khanas, in ancient hotels dating from tsarist times or in various establishments destined for the apparatchiks travelling on a komandirovka (assignment). The only hotel worth its name was in Tashkent, where we started and finished our journey. We were, of course, closely surveyed. We had to argue constantly about our programme, which was repeatedly altered, scrapped, then allowed to go ahead again. We had to see things we did not want to see and were not allowed to go where we wanted to. But people, although they were sometimes reticent and cagey, were kind and helpful. In museums, we could take artefacts out into the courtyard to photograph them. On the other hand, the country police were wary of our cameras, and more than once wanted to confiscate them. There were no markets. Meat was sold in tiny scraps from fly-ridden stalls, but the plov (pilaf) and kebab sold in the streets tasted delicious.

How things change. In 1997, on my second visit, the Soviet Union was no more, Khrushchev was as good as forgotten, and the Central Asian republics, now independent, were called Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan. Frunze was again Bishkek, Stalinabad had metamorphosed into Dushanbe, Leninabad into Khodzhend. Istanbul had replaced Moscow as the main port of entry. Camels had disappeared from the streets, horse wagons had been converted into cars, and mobile phones were seen more frequently than donkeys. In offices and banks, abacuses sat next to computers. Every village had a lively market, butchers stalls had refrigerators and meat was sold in decent-sized cuts. In the main cities, Indian companies had built luxury hotels which the local staff still had some difficulties running. Tourists were everywhere. Foreign pilgrims flocked to the holy places and prayed in local mosques. On the other hand, frontiers had sprung up where none had been before, and visas were required at every crossing. Forms, in Cyrillic only, had to be meticulously filled in and checked, only to be stacked away and never looked at again. But in the streets, Cyrillic was in retreat, making way for a Latin alphabet modelled on Turkish.

And the women tall, leggy girls in fashionable dresses replaced the shapeless forms in their parandzhas. The progress of urbanisation was in evidence everywhere.

The famous monuments had been restored and rebuilt, some more skillfully than others. Tilla Kari had acquired a bulbous dome which it never had, the Gur Emir had got back its gleaming interior of shining gold, which, perhaps, it had when it was new. Only Khiva was a disaster. Some clever person had had the idea to make it into a museum city. So people had been resettled, rubble removed, crumbling walls restored, peeling tilework replaced. Gone were the camels loaded with brushwood, donkeys, stray cats and mangy dogs. There were workmen in overalls instead of playing children. The bearded old men in their leather boots and quilted khalats were gone.

On the Chinese side, Xinjiang is gradually opening up but still suffers much of the Soviet disease. Tourist facilities are few and inefficient, although accommodation is, by and large, acceptable. Movement is, as it was in the USSR, tightly controlled, but the bland Russian nyet comes here as a polite Chinese promise which never materialises. The Silk Road is fast becoming a popular tourist destination, but its southern branch is still quite difficult to get to. And the crossing of the Karakoram Range into Pakistan is one of the great experiences of our time.

Afghanistan, on the other hand, is an unmitigated tragedy. Since I was there, in 1978, there have been, firstly, three bloody coups detat followed by the Russian invasion in 1979, and ten years of guerilla warfare of unsurpassed cruelty. The Russian retreat in 1989 opened the gates to a civil war that is still raging. Very little archaeological work could be done during that time. Nevertheless, some excavations were going on, mainly in the Kabul area, where security conditions allowed it. Tourism was, and is, of course, non-existent and the only foreigners occasionally allowed into the country were a few journalists and aid workers. So, perhaps, the pictures that I took thirty years ago may, in some cases, be the last to show what splendours the countrys cultural heritage had to offer.

This book could not have been written without the help of my wife, who was my travelling companion, record keeper, researcher and, above all, my most persistent and merciless critic.

T he author and publishers wish to express their grateful thanks to copyright owners for the use of the illustrations listed below: Grgoire Frumkin, Archaeology in Soviet Central Asia, VII, Turkmenistan, Central Asian Review XIV, no 1, 1966 (for Fig. 23); L.I. Rempel, Arkhitekturnyi ornament Uzbekistana, Tashkent 1961 (Figs 8, 12, 15, 17, 18, 19); Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Museum fr Indische Kunst, Berlin (plate 48); S. Flury, Le decor epigraphique des monuments de Ghazna, Syria, VI, 1925 (Fig. 4); L. Dupre, Afghanistan (Fig. 29); The International Merv Project, University of London (Fig. 22); L. Golombek, The Timurid Shrine at Gazur Gah (Fig. 32); State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (plate 72).

And for quotations: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd (for extracts from Tamburlaine the Conqueror by Hilda Hookham); George Luzac Ltd and the Gibb Memorial Trust (for extracts from Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion by V.V. Barthald); Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd (for extracts from Clavijo, Embassy to Tamerlane, translated by G. Le Strange).

T o write a book on Central Asian civilisation without imposing some limits either to the area, to certain periods of history, or to the subject discussed, is an almost unmanageable task.

First, as an area, it had no fixed boundaries. Although its nucleus was what was later known as Russian Turkestan, its cultural influence extended at times far beyond its frontiers, to the Volga, the Ganges and the fringes of China. Secondly, its history is one of the most complex and fluid in the world, and yet without a historical introduction any talk of civilisation and art would be meaningless. Not only does this history go back some 2,500 years, but the nomads who so often played a key role in it had no written records of their own. Every piece of information about them had to be laboriously compiled from the scattered references in Greek, Arabic, Persian or Chinese writings. Differences in languages and scripts, in calendars, in pronunciation and transliteration make any verification and cross-checking of dates and names extremely difficult and often unreliable.

Four major invasions have altered the cultural pattern of the region: those of the Greeks, the Arabs, the Mongols and the Russians. Most writers select either the Arab or the Mongol invasion as a limit to their work. It has been, therefore, a challenging task to try and sum up the areas development both the transient and the permanent features right up to the last of these milestones. It could, and should, give the reader the opportunity to judge for himself the importance of the changes that have occurred in this region during the last 100 years.