D. G. Tor - The History and Culture of Iran and Central Asia

THE HISTORY AND CULTURE OF IRAN AND CENTRAL ASIA

The History and Culture of Iran and Central Asia

From the Pre-Islamic to the Islamic Period

EDITED BY

D. G. Tor and Minoru Inaba

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright 2022 by the University of Notre Dame

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021948795

ISBN: 978-0-268-20209-5 (Harback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20211-8 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20208-8 (Epub)

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CONTENTS

FIGURES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors are deeply grateful to the many organizations and individuals that made possible the scholarly exchange both of the conference and of this volume. The fruits of this project are the outcome of the scientific cooperation agreement signed in 2016 between Kyoto University and the University of Notre Dame. Without the generous support of the Medieval Institute and the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame, and of Kyoto Universitys Institute for Research in Humanities and Graduate School of Letters, this undertaking would never have been realized. One of us, D. G. Tor, is also indebted to generous fellowship funding provided by the American Council of Learned Societies.

We are above all grateful to both the original conference participants and to the contributors to this volume, whose groundbreaking scholarship constitutes the heart of this endeavor.

CHAPTER 1

The Enduring Significance of the Iranian World in the First Millennium CE

Transformation and Continuity

D. G. TOR

One of the most formative times and places in world history was the Iranian linguistic and cultural world of the first millennium CE. This cultural zone comprised what one might call Greater Inner Asia: roughly, the classical lands of Iran, including Khursn, to the end of the Iranian Plateau in the west; the ancient lands of Bactria and Soghdia, which include all or part of todays Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tjikistn, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan, to the east and north; and the adjacent nomadic steppes that were under their influence, up to the borders of China in the east. In fact, proportionally to its historical significance, Iranian Inner Asia in this period is probably the least known and most grossly understudied time and place in world history.

Indeed, the Iranian civilizational world at this time was comparable in size, scope, cultural creativity, and influence to the Roman one; yet today only a greatly truncated and diminished remnant of it survives: the Islamic Republic of Iran, along with Afghanistan and Tjikistn. For among many other historically significant events, this time and place produced great movements of people, goods, ideas, and religions, from the Soghdians

This transformation from Iranian to Turkic predominance was a protracted, centuries-long process. The end and culmination of itthe Seljuq, Mongol, and Timurid conquests of all of the lands that had once constituted the Iranian cultural worldfalls outside the scope of the millennium covered in this volume, but the first stage of the process of the transformation of Central Asia from a civilizationally Iranian population to a Turkic one, including the beginning of the conquest stage, signaled by the Qarakhanid Turkmen conquest of Transoxiana in 999, certainly falls within its purview.

The second of the greatest transformations that took place was religious and cultural. The victory of Islam over Buddhism and Christianity in Iran and the steppes

Iranian Inner Asia in the first millennium also produced some of the greatest empires the world has known, from the Hephthalite Empire to the Sasanian Empirewhich was the most formidable enemy of the Roman Empireto the Abbsid Caliphate of Islam, all of which profoundly affected not only every surrounding civilization, but also those much farther afield, throughout the continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

This last historical occurrence in particular, the Abbsid Revolution, was of incalculable importance to subsequent world history. Taking place around AD 750, the Abbsid dynasty, heading a messianic movement whose headquarters were located in Marw, in todays Turkmenistan, and whose armies came from Khursn (todays Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and parts of both Iran and Turkmenistan),

Despite the astonishing richness, historical importance, and cultural fecundity of the Iranian world in the first millennium, and the fact that it is vital to understanding world history in both Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the Iranian world of this era has been, and still is, woefully understudied; due, no doubt, to the very high scholarly demands required for such study of Iranian Central Asia in particular. Such an attempt requires not only collaboration among historians, philologists, paleographers, archaeologists, and numismatists, but also the knowledge of many different languages, some archaic, ranging from Bactrian and Soghdian to classical Arabic, Persian, and Chinese. When one undertakes to examine change and transformation from the pre-Islamic period of late antiquity through the early Islamic period (up until the eleventh century, when Turkic political domination entered a new phase), matters become even more complex and the obstacles more formidable, since it requires full mastery of both civilizational worlds.

The rationale behind this volume, therefore, is that such an undertaking can only be accomplished collaboratively, by bringing together the various experts on these two completely different eras and the discrete linguistic areas: no one can possibly be a real master of all of the various demanding areas of study. This kind of collaborative effort to cast light on the transition from pre-Islamic to Islamic Iran and Inner Asia is therefore also, unfortunately, rare, since the resources required for bringing the various experts together from the far-flung corners of the earth are considerable. Such an enterprise, in fact, has been undertaken only thrice before the present volume, and the aim of the present work is to extend a bit farther the trailblazing path laid out by those works.