Reconfiguring the Silk Road: New Research on East-West Exchange in Antiquity 9781934536698

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
FIGURES
CONTRIBUTORS
Foreword. The Silk Roads before Silk
Introduction. Reconceptualizing the Silk Roads
Chapter 1. At the Limits
Chapter 2. The Silk Road in Late Antiquity
Chapter 3. The Northern Cemetery: Epigone or Progenitor of Small River Cemetery No. 5?
Chapter 4. More Light on the Xinjiang Textiles
Chapter 5. Seeds for the Soul
Chapter 6 Horseback Riding and Bronze Age Pastoralism in the Eurasian Steppes
Chapter 7. Indo-European Dispersals and the Eurasian Steppe
Chapter 8. Concluding Comments
Index

Citation preview

RECONFIGURING THE

SILK ROAD New Research on East-West Exchange in Antiquity

RECONFIGURING THE

SILK ROAD New Research on East-West Exchange in Antiquity

The Papers of a Symposium Held at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology March 19, 2011

Edited by Victor H. Mair and Jane Hickman

university of pennsylvania museum of archaeology and anthropology philadelphia

© 2014 University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Philadelphia, PA 19104-6324 Published for the University of Pennsylvania Museum by the University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved. Published 2014.

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN-13: 978-1-934536-68-1 ISBN-10: 1-934536-68-7 The conference Reconfiguring the Silk Road: New Research on East-West Exchange in Antiquity, held at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology on March 19, 2011, was made possible by grants from the Henry Luce Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Ancient Studies. The publication of the proceedings was funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.

The camel logo used throughout the book was drawn by Kevin Schott.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

CONTENTS List of Figures

vii

Contributors ix Foreword: The Silk Roads before Silk, Colin Renfrew xi Introduction: Reconceptualizing the Silk Roads, Victor H. Mair 1 Chapter 1: At the Limits: Long-Distance Trade in the Time of Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Kings, J.G. Manning 5 Chapter 2: The Silk Road in Late Antiquity, Peter Brown 15 Chapter 3: The Northern Cemetery: Epigone or Progenitor of Small River Cemetery No. 5?, Victor H. Mair 23 Chapter 4: More Light on the Xinjiang Textiles, Elizabeth Wayland Barber 33 Chapter 5: Seeds for the Soul: Ideology and Diffusion of Domesticated Grains across Inner Asia, Michael D. Frachetti 41 Chapter 6: Horseback Riding and Bronze Age Pastoralism in the Eurasian Steppes, David W. Anthony and Dorcas R. Brown 55 Chapter 7: Indo-European Dispersals and the Eurasian Steppe, J.P. Mallory 73 Chapter 8: Concluding Comments: Reconfiguring the Silk Road, or When Does the Silk Road Emerge and How Does It Qualitatively Change over Time? Philip L. Kohl 89 Index

95

FIGURES (The color insert appears after page 32)

1.1 Map with sites discussed in the text color insert 1.2 Timeline: major ruling groups broken down by geographical areas color insert 1.3 Chart: prehistoric periods discussed in the text xv 1.4 Participants in the Penn Museum Silk Road Symposium xvi 3.1 Map of Xinjiang archaeological sites 24 3.2 Wooden posts from the Northern Cemetery color insert 3.3 Mummy wearing a felt cap color insert 3.4 Woven basket color insert 3.5 Wooden figurine color insert 3.6 Boots worn by mummy color insert 3.7 Mummies from the Northern Cemetery color insert 4.1 Woolen cloak or blanket color insert 4.2 Wool blanket-wrap color insert 4.3 Wood figurine of a child color insert 4.4 Felt hats color insert 4.5 The Beauty of Xiaohe color insert 4.6 Early Central Asian loom 35 4.7 Infant mummy color insert 4.8 Horsemen with shabraks color insert 4.9 Common knots used in Eurasian carpets 36 4.10 Tapestry boots color insert 4.11 Tapestry bag color insert 4.12 Garments of a warrior color insert 4.13 Male and female burial color insert color insert 4.14 Garments of Yingpan Man color insert 4.15 A and B: Obverse and reverse sides of fabric color insert 4.16 Yingpan Man’s trousers color insert 4.17 Yingpan Man’s robe Central Eurasia map color insert 5.1 5.2 Drawing of burial cist with adjacent evidence of charcoal 44 5.3 Xiaohe coffin burial color insert

5.4 2005 Excavation at Begash color insert 5.5 Dzhungar Mountains color insert 6.1 Eurasian steppes topographical map color insert 6.2 Chart showing percentages of animal bones at selected sites through time color insert 6.3 Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope averages for 59 individuals color insert 7.1 Map of the European steppelands at the beginning of the Neolithic 76 7.2 Map of the European steppelands in the Eneolithic 79 7.3 Map of the European steppelands in the Eneolithic showing the general location of horse-head sceptres 82

viii

CONTRIBUTORS DAVID W. ANTHONY Professor of Anthropology and Anthropology Curator of the Yager Museum of Art & Culture Hartwick College Oneonta, NY ELIZABETH WAYLAND BARBER Professor Emerita of Archaeology and Linguistics Occidental College Los Angeles, CA PETER BROWN Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History and Director, Program in Hellenic Studies Princeton University Princeton, NJ DORCAS R. BROWN Research Associate Hartwick College Oneonta, NY MICHAEL D. FRACHETTI Associate Professor Department of Anthropology Washington University St. Louis, MO JANE HICKMAN Editor, Expedition Magazine Special Assistant for Museum Programs University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Philadelphia, PA PHILIP L. KOHL Professor of Anthropology and the Kathryn W. Davis Professor of Slavic Studies Wellesley College Wellesley, MA

VICTOR H. MAIR Professor of Chinese Language and Literature Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Universi­ty of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA J.P. MALLORY Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland JOSEPH G. MANNING William K. and Marilyn Milton Simpson Professor of Classics and History Yale University New Haven, CT COLIN RENFREW Disney Professor Emeritus of Archaeology Former Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research University of Cambridge Cambridge, England

x

FOREWORD The Silk Roads before Silk Colin Renfrew

T

he routes and highways that linked East with West, the Silk Roads, carried with them an allure of romance, attractive both for the world of China and for those of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium, which these highways brought together. They have fascinated travelers, from Strabo and Zhang Qian to Marco Polo and on to Aurel Stein. For us today they are brought to vivid life again by the tangible material reality of the wonderfully preserved finds which the archaeologists of Xinjiang have brought to light in recent years. Many of these were seen in the exhibition Secrets of the Silk Road, which prompted the symposium leading to the present volume. This gives an excellent idea of the increasing research activity which these important finds have stimulated. And it indicates also how many outstanding problems remain to be resolved. It is indeed time now to “reconceptualize” the Silk Roads, as Victor Mair sets out to do so effectively in his Introduction. By re-examining the material realities which are increasingly well documented through on-going excavation, we can perhaps now step aside from the potent mirages which have fascinated scholars and the general public for so long, as Peter Brown well evokes in his contribution. The wonderfully preserved textiles unearthed in recent decades are replacing those mirages with a splendor all of their own which is palpable: you can see

them and admire them today. Yet when we see this rich material dating from the last two millennia BC onwards, we begin to realize how little we yet know about the very early days of this key region of Xinjiang and about the lands lying immediately to the west. The remarkable finds from the Xiaohe burials, so successfully recovered and published by Idris Abdurssul and his colleagues of the Xinjiang Institute (Xinjiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology 2003, 2008), followed by their work at the so-called Northern Cemetery, reported here by Mair, have opened a new chapter in the prehistory of this crucial region. Yet it is scarcely conceivable that those buried at Xiaohe around 2000 BC were the first inhabitants of this region with all its rich variety of habitats. These people were farmers, already using both wheat and millet, crops that were originally domesticated in lands that lie far to the west (for wheat) and to the east (for millet) of Inner Asia. These farmers must have had hunter-gatherer predecessors, benefiting from the rich waterways and lakes in the Taklamakan area, which is so difficult to imagine today in this now desiccated landscape. These new discoveries hint at how much we still have to learn. Comparable research is now being undertaken to the west, in Kazakhstan, as Michael Frachetti reports here. He presents good eco-

nomic data which show that at the key site of Begash sheep and goat were abundant, with fewer cattle and with a relative lack of horses until the 1st millennium BC. Here too wheat and millet were known and used from around 2200 BC, partly for ceremonial purposes. And here too their use implies much earlier contact with the lands lying away to the east and far to the west where these crops were first cultivated. Frachetti’s work has the merit of examining the local ecological and environmental conditions with some care. He makes the important point that at Begash the use of these domesticated plant resources, particularly wheat—first domesticated far from Kazakhstan—was initially undertaken in a ritual or ceremonial context. For him, in contrast to the chapter by Anthony and Brown, the domestication of the horse is not of prime concern, since the horse did not have a major role until the 1st millennium BC. At Begash, as in Xinjiang, the place of the horse is not a central one. The finds in Xinjiang grow progressively richer with the passing of the centuries, the clothing more elaborate, and the horse is first seen here in the 1st millennium BC, as documented so clearly by the excavations of Lü Enguo (2002) and his colleagues at the important cemetery of Subeishi. It is around this time that silk clothing is first seen in the burials, whose textiles are discussed with such expertise in this volume by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. By this time the Silk Roads constituted important commercial highways, as Brown and J.G. Manning bring out effectively. Manning sees the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms lying some way to the west as “the principal engine” of their development at this time. He recalls the remark of the Greek scholar Apollodorus (reported by the Roman geographer Strabo) that “Bactriana is the ornament of Ariana as a whole”—so introducing into the discussion the term (“Ariana”) which the Aryans (Old Iranians) used for their mother country in what is today Afghanistan. The distances of which we are speaking are vast, yet they were covered by travelers in these early days. There were, of course, many Silk Roads, as

xii

Foreword: The Silk Roads before Silk

several authors here emphasize, yet their main highways extended via Xinjiang through Inner Asia and on towards Syria on the Mediterranean coast and so to the Classical world. It is perhaps worth making the point here that the Silk Roads should not be too readily equated with the Eurasian steppe lands to the north, which form the principal focus of the contributions of J.P. Mallory and of David Anthony and Dorcas Brown. Their well-informed reviews of the problems of Indo-European origins lead us on to the realms north of the Black Sea, the proposed home of succeeding groups of nomad pastoralists, active already in the 1st millennium BC before the Scythians—the “barbarians” who resided there at the dawn of history, as first recorded by Herodotus. The aforementioned two chapters lay emphasis upon the steppe lands as a major corridor for the dispersal of languages, and in particular on a possible steppe homeland for the Indo-European language family. But it is worth noting that recent phylogeographic approaches in historical linguistics (Bouckaert et al. 2012) discount such a view, seeing Anatolia rather than the steppes as a more appropriate area of origin for that great language family. That is an issue which will certainly be further debated in the future, but it is worth noting here that the paths of communication which later became the Silk Roads would already, on such a view, have been very much those trodden some millennia earlier by the early Indo-European speakers (in this case with their developing Proto-Indo-Iranian dialects) as they expanded east and south from Anatolia. Yet Anthony and Brown may well be right that the steppe lands did nonetheless play a role. For the easternmost land where any language of the Indo-European language family was spoken seems to have been precisely Xinjiang, towards the eastern end of the Silk Roads. For it is there that the languages now termed Tocharian were spoken in the 1st millennium of the Common Era. Although Tocharian is indeed classified among the Indo-European family, it does not belong in the Indo-Iranian sub-family, and its speakers may have reached Xinjiang by a route along the steppes, far north of the main Silk

Roads, taking a path from Anatolia through the Balkans, and from there running north of the Black Sea towards Xinjiang—just as Anthony and Brown describe. In this volume it is Mallory who is here primarily concerned with the problems of Indo-European origins. Anthony and Brown focus here particularly on the domestication of the horse and on the origins of horse riding, and downplay the wider significance of those processes, which is emphasized more prominently in the subtitle of Anthony’s recent book: How Bronze Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (2007). Both chapters, however, downplay the importance of the different positions within the Indo-European family classification of the Tocharian languages, on the one hand (spoken in Xinjiang in the 8th century of the Common Era), and of the Indo-Iranian languages, including Scythian and Sogdian, spoken in Central Asia including parts of Xinjiang in Classical times, as may be gathered from Classical writers and is documented in the texts found locally. This is a distinction whose importance I myself have on an earlier occasion failed to emphasize (Renfrew 2005:209). But Tocharian and the Indo-Iranian language sub-family are so different that they cannot plausibly share a recent evolutionary history in their descent from some much earlier Proto-Indo-European ancestral language. Indeed recent phylogeographic studies (Bouckaert et al. 2012) open the way to the speculation (see Heggarty and Renfrew, 2014) that the Indo-Iranian sub-family had its origins not in the Eurasian steppe lands, but much further south, in what is now Afghanistan or Pakistan. On this model, Scythian and Sogdian would be relatively recent newcomers to the steppes, arriving from the south in the 1st millennium BC. The predecessor to the Tocharian languages may well have reached Xinjiang long before the 1st millennium of the Common Era, perhaps from north of the Black Sea, as Anthony and Brown suggest. But early Indo-European speech in that area is, in my view, more likely to be the result of the expansion from Anatolia of the early farmers in that area.

The phylogeography of the early Indo-Iranian languages remains one of the most puzzling problems in early Indo-European historical linguistics. Their development in Central and South Asia may have taken very different paths and histories, following the inception of wheatbased cereal farming in Central and South Asia, than those experienced by the ancestors of the Tocharians. Some of these controversial issues are well addressed by Philip Kohl in his concluding comments. He is rightly cautious about the possibility of equating the populations buried in Xinjiang in the last two millennia before the Common Era with the Indo-European-speaking Tocharians in the succeeding millennium. His remarks serve, in effect, to highlight the timeliness of this publication. Its lead editor, Victor Mair, who has done so much to rejuvenate this subject, speaks of “reconceptualising” the Silk Roads, and Philip Kohl talks of “reconfiguring.” Both are right. Both recognize that the pace of discovery has been rapid in recent years, and that further progress will come mainly from new discoveries of the kind discussed in this illuminating volume. It is appropriate perhaps to conclude by saluting our archaeological colleagues of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Republic of the People’s Republic of China, whose systematic researches have made possible the discussions here. It is their future work which will one day resolve many of the problems which have been highlighted so effectively here. In publishing their work they generally follow the convention of collective responsibility practiced in the People’s Republic of China, where they are credited as authors not by individual names but jointly as the Xinjiang Wenwu Kaogu Yanjiusuo: the Xinjiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology. Many of them are indeed thanked by name in the notes following Victor Mair’s chapter on the Northern Cemetery. I have myself benefited from their kindness and their experience when visiting the museums in Urumqi and Turfan and exploring nearby sites in Xinjiang. It is their work that has brought to light the brilliant discoveries reviewed here (some of them well displayed

Foreword: The Silk Roads before Silk

xiii

in the exhibition that accompanied the original symposium). From this lively, stimulating, and sometimes controversial publication, they will, I hope, feel supported and encouraged by the vigorous interest which their work has generated. The task of reconfiguring the Silk Roads is indeed initiated very effectively in this stimulating volume. It promises to lead on to a much deeper understanding of early exchange between Eastern and Western Asia.

Bibliography Anthony, D.W. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bouckaert, R., P. Lemey, M. Dunn, S.J. Greenhill, A.K. Alexyenko, A.J. Drummond, R.D. Gray, M.A. Suchard, and R.D. Atkinson. 2012. Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-Eu-

xiv

Foreword: The Silk Roads before Silk

ropean Language Family. Science 357:957–60. Heggarty, P., and C. Renfrew. 2014. Western and Central Asia: Languages. In Cambridge World Prehistory, ed. C. Renfrew and P. Bahn. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress. In press. Lü Enguo. 2002. The Mummies of Subeshi. In The Peoples of Ancient Xinjiang and Their Culture, ed. Wang Binghua, pp. 95–112. Urumqi: Xinjiang People’s Press. Renfrew, C. 2005. The Tarim Basin, Tocharian and Indo-European Origins: A View from the West. In The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia, vol. 1, ed. V.H. Mair, pp. 202–l4. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Man. Xinjiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology. 2003. “Xiaohe Cemetery, in 2002.” In Cultural Relics of Xinjiang 70.2: 8–64. ———. 2008. The Archaeological Investigation in Xiaohe Valley, Lop Nur. Studies on Border Archaeology 7:371–407.

Upper Paleolithic Period: 50,000–10,000 BC (general dates for Eurasia) Mesolithic Period: ca. 9000–8000 BC Neolithic Period: The surface sites with microliths tend to be called Neolithic rather than Mesolithic in Xinjiang and are not dated. Debaine-Francfort in a 1988 article gave a possible date of 9000–8000 BC. Obviously, in this period, “Neolithic” has nothing to do with food production, for which there is no evidence in Xinjiang earlier than the Bronze Age. For Western readers, “Neolithic” as a period is essentially meaningless in Xinjiang; the incredibly long hiatus after the Mesolithic Period is conspicuous. Eneolithic Period: This distinction cannot be made for Xinjiang until the appropriate sites are found. Botai-Yersek Period: 3700–3100 BC Yamnaya: 3600–1900 BC Afanasievo: 3300–2500 BC Xia Dynasty: not historically attested, generally thought to be 2nd millennium BC Andronovo: 1700–1500 BC. These dates are for the eastern region where Andronovo is replaced by the Karasuk culture; it lasts longer in the western steppe. Early Bronze Age: 2000–1700 BC Middle Bronze Age: It is difficult to make this distinction with so few sites. Late Bronze Age: 1700–1000 BC, starting with Andronovo. Shang Dynasty: ca. 1600–1045 BC Western Zhou Dynasty: ca. 1045–771 BC Early Iron Age: 1000–300 BC N.B.: As shown above, some of these periods are very problematic and probably cannot be ascribed to Xinjiang without solid evidence from excavation.

FIG. 1.3. Prehistoric periods discussed in the text.

FIG. 1.4. Participants in the Silk Road Symposium included, from left: Richard Hodges (Williams Director of the Penn Museum, 2007–2012), Victor Mair, Christopher Thornton (who delivered remarks prepared by Philip Kohl), Peter Brown, Joseph Manning, David Anthony, J.P. Mallory, Elizabeth Barber, Michael Frachetti, Wang Binghua (Director Emeritus of the Xinjiang Institute of Archaeology, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region), and Colin Renfrew.

INTRODUCTION Reconceptualizing the Silk Roads Victor H. Mair

T

he chapters in this volume were originally presented as papers at the symposium entitled “Reconfiguring the Silk Road: New Research on East-West Exchange in Antiquity” (March 19, 2011) at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in conjunction with a major exhibition, Secrets of the Silk Road (February 5–June 5, 2011). The purpose of the symposium, as the title indicates, was to reassess the trans-Eurasian trade and migration routes that arose in the Bronze Age and even earlier, and continued up through the medieval period and, in a greatly diminished state, to the 20th century.

History of the Silk Roads It is by now common knowledge that the term “Silk Roads” (die Seidenstrassen) was invented by the German geographer Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen (1833–1905) in the late 19th century. This is in contrast to the old, romantic notion that the expression came from the exotic Orient and that it coexisted with the trade routes that it supposedly signified and that allegedly stretched hazily back in antiquity to the beginning of history. As a matter of fact, we can now pin an approximate date to the inception of the Silk Roads, such as they were imagined in the minds of late 19th and early 20th century Euro-

pean scholars and explorers. That is when the Western Han ruler, Wu Di (“Martial Emperor”) sent his emissary, Zhang Qian (200–114 BC), off to Central Asia to track down the elusive Yuezhi/ Rouzhi/Ruzhi to form a united front against their dreaded common enemy, the Xiongnu (in Old Sinitic reconstruction, the name would have sounded like “Hun” and is undoubtedly cognate with it). Zhang Qian failed in his mission to gain the allegiance of the Yuezhi to fight against the Xiongnu, but the intelligence he brought back about the products and peoples of Central Asia led to the formalization and expansion of trade between East and West. The ultimate result was a system or network of communication and exchange that stretched from the shores of the seas adjacent to East Asia and Southeast Asia to the Mediterranean. Ironically, the name Xinjiang (“New Borders” or “New Territories”), which is the Chinese political designation for Eastern Central Asia, was similarly coined by the Chinese general Zuo Zongtang (1812–1885), who used military force to bring the region under the control of the Manchu empire, around the same time as von Richthofen created the term “Silk Roads.” Xinjiang occupies the center of Eurasia and sits at the heart of the Silk Roads, yet—like the term “Silk Roads”—it too is a modern invention. The old Chinese name for Eastern Central Asia and

contiguous areas was Xiyu (“Western Regions”). From the other side of Eurasia, the ancient Greeks and Romans were referring to that murky back of beyond with vague terms such as “Scythia” and versus Orientem (“towards the east”). It is curious that, in their mythopoeic geographies, the Chinese, on the one hand, and the Greeks and Romans, on the other hand, shared similar notions about Amazonian warrior women, fabulous creatures like the griffin, and strange humanoids with holes in their torsos, extra eyes, and so forth. Thus, even before the opening of the Silk Roads by Zhang Qian in the late 2nd century BC, there was an informal system of contact and exchange across the expanse of Eurasia, and already at that time it did not consist solely, or even largely, of silk. Many other goods and ideas were transmitted along these pre-Silk Roads. For example, recent archaeological evidence has shown that jade from Eastern Central Asia has been recovered from a Shang Dynasty tomb dated ca. 1200 BC. And beads from the distant West have been found at locations throughout the length and breadth of the Zhou Dynasty (1046– 256 BC). Glass, furs, medicines, gold, silver, tea, grapes and wine, clover, peaches, and countless other objects and products passed along the pre-Silk Roads and Silk Roads at different times during history. What is most exciting about the latest archaeological revelations is that they are demonstrating that wheat, ovicaprids, horses, chariots, bronze and iron metallurgy, and other fundamental aspects of civilization had also passed along the pre- and epi-Silk Roads in the 3rd, 2nd, and 1st millennia BC.

Peoples and Places of the Silk Roads One of the most fascinating aspects of the Silk Roads is the nature of the inhabitants who lived in the areas through which they traversed. Perhaps more than anything else, the discovery of manuscripts in long-dead languages has brought to life the peoples and places of the Silk Roads. Not much more than a century ago, before the great age of exploration in Cen-

2

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

tral Asia, we had never heard of groups like the Tocharians, Sogdians, and Khotanese. Now they are as familiar to us as the Scythians, Sarmatians, Avars, Cimmerians, and other Central Asian peoples who had been known from classical texts. It is essential to note that the Tocharians, Sogdians, and Khotanese were all Indo-European speakers; the study of their languages, in relation to their cultures, holds the key to unlocking some of the most difficult puzzles concerning the spread of the Indo-Europeans from wherever their homeland may have been located. Tocharian, for instance, is the second oldest Indo-European language (after Hittite), and it is linguistically related more closely to northwest European languages than it is to geographically more proximate Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic, yet it was also the easternmost Indo-European language, and it can be proven to have been in contact with Sinitic by the 2nd century BC or earlier. In striving to sort out the identities of the various archaeological cultures of Eastern Central Asia, this type of linguistic evidence should not be dismissed or ignored. Nonetheless, just as precipitously as the Tocharians, Sogdians, and Khotanese have reemerged in our midst, they suddenly disappeared from their Central Asian dwelling places. This took place at precisely the same time that Turkic peoples (especially the Uyghurs) began to move into the Tarim Basin. Just as the careful study of the characteristics of Tocharians, Sogdians, and Khotanese provides vital evidence for comprehending the identity of the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age inhabitants of Eastern Central Asia, so does exacting research on the history of their survival and demise help us to understand the movements and identities of those with whom they interacted. All of these topics were addressed in depth at an earlier international conference that was held at the Penn Museum in April 1996 and that resulted in the publication of The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications; Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man, 1998). In their heyday, roughly from the latter part

of the 2nd century BC to the beginning of the 10th century AD, the Silk Roads were a vibrant set of routes for communication and transportation that linked the extremities of Eurasia. Their role in the history of world civilization and economy during this key period is inestimable. Yet, with the advent of large-scale, long-distance shipping in the post-medieval era (smaller-scale shipping had, of course, existed before this time, but it was fundamentally shore-hugging, port-hopping seafaring that did not pose a mortal challenge to slower, more costly travel on land), trade along the Silk Roads diminished dramatically. Once human beings were able to build larger vessels and sail them across ever greater stretches of water, the land routes were doomed to relative obscurity, although they did experience a brief resurgence under the Pax Mongolica during the 13th and 14th centuries. Yet, even during the epoch of their greatest glory, the Silk Roads were not the sort of highway that many people picture them to be. Seldom, if ever, did merchants travel the breadth of the Silk Roads from one end of Eurasia to the other, and the volume of trade was much smaller than it is often thought to have been. Instead, traders would carry smaller quantities of goods along by stages, passing them off to someone else who would bring them to the next stage. It is easy to see that this very quickly becomes an expensive proposition and that it was extremely slow, particularly in light of the perils (including bandits and other types of ruffians) that one was apt to encounter along the way.

New Research on East-West Exchange Clearly, we can no longer accept the simplistic picture of a neat trade route stretching from Rome to Chang’an, with exotic camel caravans laden with silk traversing its length. But if such an image of the Silk Roads is no longer acceptable, with what are we supposed to replace it? I believe that cogent answers to this question are to be found in the pages of this book, as we move back in time from a discussion of more recent periods along the Silk Roads; to detailed

analyses of burials, textiles, and domesticated grains; to descriptions of the earliest periods associated with these great trade routes. We begin with J.G. Manning’s examination of the Silk Routes, where trade formed a dense network of contacts across millennia. Manning encourages us to take a long view as we delve into ancient Near Eastern, Persian, and Greco-Roman interactions with the east. Peter Brown’s evocative essay follows with a discussion of the Silk Road in late antiquity, the period that spanned AD 300–700. This was a time when the ancient world was changing “under the impact of new ideas, of new religious forces, and of new horizons.” We then move back in time to the Bronze Age, with Victor H. Mair’s study of the mysterious Northern Cemetery, which strongly resembles the celebrated Small River Cemetery No. 5, some 600 km to the east. Mair investigates whether those buried in these cemeteries originally came from the same place, or whether one group developed from the other. Elizabeth Barber re-examines previous descriptions of textiles buried in the Uyghur Autonomous Region. In her detailed report on specific textiles and how they were woven, she concludes that these artifacts are far more remarkable than originally thought. Michael Frachetti writes about his recent research into the spread of domesticated grains across Inner Asia. What can be learned by the presence of grains in Inner Asian burials during the Bronze Age? Our last chapters include two in-depth analyses related to the domestication of horses in the Eurasian steppe, by David Anthony and Dorcas Brown, and the spread of Indo-European languages by J.P. Mallory. Anthony and Brown discuss the role of horseback riding in warfare, when and where horse domestication occurred, and the role of the horse in Bronze Age pastoralism. They suggest that movements of people and trade goods around 2000 BC, which led to the occupation of the Tarim Basin, may have been due in part to advances in the forest-steppe zone. Mallory suggests that languages, while generally found moving from east

Introduction: Reconceptualizing the Silk Roads

3

to west, were also dispersed at an earlier time from west to east. In his chapter, he reviews evidence related to the “steppe hypothesis,” as well as other models used to explain language dispersal in the region. The volume concludes with an essay by Philip Kohl, discussing key points raised in the individual chapters. Kohl also puts forth a series of critical questions related to on-going research on east-west interconnections along the Silk Roads. Although there is still much about the Silk Roads that remains to be explored and explained, we believe that the chapters in this volume will help measurably to clarify many of the central issues concerning the Silk Roads and their prehistory. Finally, before closing, I wish to pay trib-

4

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

ute to a scholar who bridged the gap between the watershed 1996 “mummies” conference and the 2011 symposium upon which the present volume is based. That is Andrew Sherratt, who delivered a remarkable paper before yet another Penn Museum conference: “Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World,” held May 5–6, 2001. Sherratt’s paper, as published, was entitled “The Trans-Eurasian Exchange: The Prehistory of Chinese Relations with the West,” and it appeared posthumously in Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), pp. 30–61. Andrew Sherratt’s participation in the 2001 conference provided the vision that ultimately inspired the present volume.

1

AT THE LIMITS Long-Distance Trade in the Time of Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Kings J.G. Manning

T

he origin of the Silk Road, perhaps more accurately described as the Silk Routes, or more broadly as interregional Eurasian trade, has often been discussed in relation to exchange between two great empires, namely the Roman and Han, the termini of the routes, as one recent monograph about Silk Road history emphasizes (Liu 2010). It has in times past evoked an east-west orientation to exchange, one that was conducted overland and over long distances along a single trunk road. Such a simple understanding of the Silk Road, driven in large part by the specific survival of textual evidence and from the point of view of later Roman and Han history, has given way recently to a far more complex picture. This view posits extensive historic trade networks and patterns of exchange, both overland and by sea routes, that linked Central Asia to the Far East and to ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, Mediterranean, and Aegean civilizations for many centuries before Rome and Han China.1 Indeed much recent work has tended to emphasize the middle ground and the sea routes, through Egypt and India especially, as the center of east-west long-distance exchange.

It appears increasingly clear that with respect to the last centuries BC and the first few centuries AD, we must also contend with a history of two great bodies of water, the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, each associated with a different balance of political and economic power.2 To fully understand the precursors or “prehistory” of the Silk Road, multiple perspectives are required. Indeed to understand the Silk Road in its full historic context would require retracing the history of eastern Mediterranean trade, trade in the ancient Near East, in India, and in Central Asia before turning to Hellenistic and Roman trade, the rise of the Parthian and Han empires and the role of “shadow empires,” and secondary state formations (Barfield 2001) such as the Xiongnu. I shall focus here on the “western” history of the exchange routes, and in particular how it was that the classical world became increasingly connected to Central, South, and East Asia.3 That is a story, in large part, that connects Assyrian and Achaemenid historical experience with the classical world of Mediterranean history, which became increasingly linked in the last four centuries BC. I will not devote too much

attention to Roman trade with the East itself. This is already an enormous and very rapidly evolving field, especially because of the intense archaeological work in India and elsewhere.4 Understanding the deeper history of exchange in western and central Asia would properly require not only knowledge of the political and social history over the course of the last four millennia BC, but also an awareness of how trade was organized, what was traded over what routes, and the role of states in the organization, administration, and taxation of this trade. In spatial terms, the Silk Road linked seaborne and overland trade flows oriented both east-west and north-south. But just as Bowersock (2005) reminds us that “East-West” has only a relative and contingent meaning in history, so too does a fixation on a singular east-west trunk road linking China to the Mediterranean world. The focus on that one aspect of Eurasian exchange patterns misses what was a much more connected world (Ray 2003). The Silk Road carried more than high value, comparatively lightweight silk, and was far more than a single road running from Syria to China. Indeed, it was a complex and very dense exchange system of networks of roads, tracks, and canals, the core of which were the central Asian steppe lands that joined together in an enormous land mass, and brought together pastoralists and settled populations, and traders as well as soldiers, not always happily. The movement of people as well as animals, products, and ideas, as well as disease across the “Afro-Eurasian landmass,” to use David Christian’s term, provides the wider context in which the history of the Silk Roads—emphasis on the plural—and land as well as maritime traffic should be understood. To be sure, large empires—the Persian, the Seleukid, the Parthian, the Roman, and Han China—all played major roles in increasing exchange connectivity in Afro-Eurasia.5 This deep history of the Silk Road has been rightly emphasized by Christian, who stressed “trans-civilizational” as well as “trans-ecological” exchange (2000). Over the long course of Eurasian history, Silk Road trade probably

6

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

expanded and contracted in cycles associated with primary and secondary state formation, as well as migration patterns. Over the course of the last two millennia BC long-distance trade was increasingly integrated, and often dominated, by ethnic group “trade diasporas,” a common feature of pre-modern trade (Curtin 1985; Seland 2010:79–80). This is not to diminish the expansion of trade once Rome had established a new political equilibrium by the middle of the 2nd century BC. But it is simply to suggest that much recent work on both what we think of as the Silk Road and the maritime routes that ran through India demand a longue durée perspective and an examination of the history of trading patterns across the whole of Afro-Eurasia (Ray 2003). Christian’s deeper and wider understanding of the ecology of east-west exchange is supported by the ancient Near Eastern evidence. With expanding imperial states in the Near East, one such well-documented trade cycle is the interregional trade in the Bronze Age (Christian 2000). From an Iranian core, the Persian empire expanded in both directions. This process can be traced back to the ancient Near Eastern empires that preceded the Persian. Indeed trade between the Indus River valley and southern Mesopotamia is documented by the middle of the 3rd millennium BC (Ray 2003). The segmentary trading mechanism appears increasingly to be a precursor of what Abu Lughod (1989) proposed in her medieval regional system. And long-distance trade, of course, however we model it, dates back before “civilization.” The trade in jade between Khotan and China, for example, is documented at least as far back as 4000 BC. Indeed as Mallory and Mair (2000) and others have shown, the contact between Central Asia and civilizations to the west began much earlier than that. By around 2000 BC, inner Eurasian exchange networks were well established (Christian 2000), and notable institutional shifts in trading occurred in the Near East (Warburton 2007). Long-distance trade is well documented in the ancient Near East at this time by both land and sea routes.

Trade connections, however indirect, were already established between the Harappan civilization in the Indus valley and Oman and southern Mesopotamia by the last quarter of the 3rd millennium BC (Potts 1995). But by 2000 BC, exchange across wide networks begins to become much better documented in the archaeological and textual records of the ancient Near East (Cline 1994). Kings traded among each other in high-value prestige goods on one level, and merchants plied their goods along the Mediterranean coast on another. Beneath the exchange patterns of kings lay a dense and ancient pattern of exchange throughout the Near East that linked the Aegean to Central Asia at least as far back as ca. 2000 BC. The best documentation for the early development of long-distance trade between Central Asia and the Mediterranean/Aegean worlds are the Old Assyrian trade networks from the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 1900 BC). This trade is exceptionally well documented from texts discovered at Kanesh (Kültepe), located in central Anatolia some 1,000 km northwest of the Assyrian capital at Assur.6 Textiles and tin were moved into central Anatolia, and silver and gold were taken back. But these merchants were involved in “a much larger interregional system of exchange” (Barjamovic 2008:97 and map 3, p. 98) than merely this transit trade. Wool and copper were also carried within a central Anatolian circuit as well. The considerable volume of goods that were traded over this interregional network were taxed by the cities through which the traffic went, by the distance the donkey traveled along the route, and the business by and large appears to have been in the hands of family-run firms cooperating through a kind of “board of trade” located at Kanesh. The interregional trade between northern Mesopotamia and central Anatolia in fact extended much farther afield, stretching from Turan in the east to the Aegean in the west, and served as a catalyst for integrating commodity flows between the Aegean and Central Asia. The Achaemenid Empire, expanding in all directions from its Iranian core in the 6th century BC, was heir to this Assyrian tradition, despite Herodotus’

(2.158–9) famous emphasis on the routes and the messengers who traveled along them being a Persian invention (Astour 1995:1417). As the Achaemenid was the largest of the empires of the ancient Near East, trade that moved through it circulated in a considerably larger and politically more integrated territory. Persian interest in trade flow capture is well documented in Herodotus, and it extended through Egypt and across North Africa in the west, as well as into Central Asia in the east. It is with the Persian empire that we begin to get hints at extensive trade from India through the Persian core into Arabia, Egypt, and Asia Minor. This great Near Eastern empire Mediterraneanized Silk Road trade for the first time. All of this was facilitated by the imperial building and maintenance of canals and roads: the Tigris and Euphrates waterways—as well as the canals that fed off them—that connected important cities like Babylonia and Elam and, outside of the Persian core, Egypt (Herodotus 2.158–9) are just two examples.7 Caravan routes also extended into North Arabia into Gaza and the Egyptian Delta. The Persian king grew wealthy in controlling and taxing this trade, and we have good documentary evidence of this taxation.8 Egyptian trade, particularly through the Eastern Desert and in the eastern Delta, out to the Red Sea, is another important part of the story, whose history is too lengthy to detail here. By the 1st millennium BC Egypt had become an important link that joined trade coming from Red Sea ports to the Mediterranean. An Aramaic customs account from Elephantine, an historic entrepôt at the southern border of Egypt (= TADAE III 282–93; Kuhrt 2007:681–703) dated either to 475 or 454 BC, for example, itemizes cargoes loaded onto Ionian ships, which included wood and Sidonian wine from Phoenicia, metals, wool, and clay, taxed on the value of the load. The dues were paid into the Persian royal treasury. This brief sketch of patterns of long-distance exchange networks in Central Asia and the Near East is important background for under-

Long-distance Trade in the Time of Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Kings

7

standing a new phase in the history of trade inaugurated by Alexander the Great. His military campaigns, reaching eastward as far as Afghanistan and the Indus River valley, have often been understood as a watershed in the history of exchange between the Mediterranean and Central Asia. In fact, in the Near East, in the world that was created after the death of Alexander (323 BC) by the rise of new polities of the Hellenistic period, trading patterns were built on earlier exchange patterns in the Near East and in the Central Asian steppes.9 Alexander’s admiral Nearchus, for example, followed directly in the footsteps and no doubt built on the knowledge of the Greek explorer Scylax, who was hired by the Persian king Darius to explore northern India. The expansion of new political power by the Hellenistic states, formed by Alexander’s successors at the end of the 4th century BC, and the consolidation of political power by Rome beginning in the 2nd century BC, were themselves part of a larger and complex set of processes of expansion, what Morris (2003) refers to as “Mediterraneanization.” Hellenistic trade and traders are essential in understanding later developments in the economic history of the Mediterranean, and indeed much farther beyond the Mediterranean. Hellenistic trade networks linked ancient trade routes of the Near East deep into Central and South Asia, for which there is increasing material evidence. As studies of “peripheral” areas—such as the Red Sea, the Black Sea, and the Indian Ocean—have increased in recent years, the overall appearance of Hellenistic trading appears even more complex. We need not go all the way with Rostovtzeff’s views that the Hellenistic world was a unified trading sphere in suggesting that the Hellenistic period marks an important shift in economic history and is crucial in understanding later developments of Silk Road exchange patterns (Fitzpatrick 2011). The wide use of coinage in trade in the Hellenistic world, including Bactria and India, is one key institution that altered exchange behavior substantially. Clearly, we must include, however different its ecology must have been, Indian Ocean and Red Sea trade

8

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

in the context of Hellenistic trade. This in turn opened up the Greek world to an even greater extent, to an exchange network that included India and Central Asia. For example, Alexander’s encounter with war elephants in India led to their use in Hellenistic armies. The Seleukids, in this case, had the advantage as they had direct access to the Indian elephant. In response, the Ptolemaic kingdom built an extensive trading network in the Eastern Desert and along the Red Sea coast to support elephant hunting and shipping from east Africa up to Memphis, the location of the facilities that housed the Ptolemaic elephants preparing for war. Alexander himself may have served as a catalyst for the founding of the Mauryan kingdom in India. Contact with the Greek world may have even inspired what is perhaps the most iconic feature of the new dynasty, Ashoka’s pillars (Stone 2002). In his wake, many new Greek settlements were established and trade from the east Mediterranean littoral to the Greek world was more strongly integrated than ever before (Leriche 2002). The early Seleukids were especially active in founding cities in Central Asia and in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian peninsula, and these certainly supported the administration of trade flows through them which suggests the overriding commercial interest in Seleukid state expansion (Salles 1987). One thinks of Failaka in the Gulf and of Aï Khanum, “Lady Moon,” a military settlement on the Oxus river in Bactria and certainly a regional capital (Leriche 2007). Aï Khanum was excavated by the French in the 1970s and has yielded marvelous material culture, however fleeting its existence, showing Greek cultural elements, a gymnasium and theater, mosaics made with local river pebbles, and Delphic maxims among other things (Leriche 2002, 2007). Although originally a part of the Seleukid kingdom, the area quickly became an independent Greco-Bactrian kingdom when Diodotus, a satrap of the Seleukids, asserted independence around 250 BC. It grew wealthy, as the gorgeous coins issued by the kings reflect, no doubt in large part because of its superb location along

a major trade route. The eastern campaigns of Antiochus III may, in part, have been motivated by commercial concerns (Salles 1987:91–92). The Greco-Bactrian kingdom that emerged in the middle of the 3rd century BC was an important driver in the development of the Silk Road trade that would become so important by the early Roman empire. The Greco-Bactrian kingdom also extended northward and through another city established by Alexander the Great, Alexandria Eschate, “Alexandria at the limits”; the trade network may already have been extended as far as Urumqi by about 220 BC, and by extension into China, as reported by the Roman historian Strabo (11.11.1): As for Bactria, a part of it lies alongside Aria towards the north, though most of it lies above Aria and to the east of it. And much of it produces everything except oil. The Greeks who caused Bactria to revolt grew so powerful on account of the fertility of the country that they became masters, not only of Ariana, but also of India, as Apollodorus of Artemita says: and more tribes were subdued by them than by Alexander—by Menander in particular (at least if he actually crossed the Hypanis towards the east and advanced as far as the Imaüs), for some were subdued by him personally and others by Demetrius, the son of Euthydemus the king of the Bactrians; and they took possession, not only of Patalena, but also, on the rest of the coast, of what is called the kingdom of Saraostus and Sigerdis. In short, Apollodorus says that Bactriana is the ornament of Ariana as a whole; and, more than that, they extended their empire even as far as the Seres and the Phryni.

A 2nd century BC Indian merchant, Sophytos, with his sources of capital, provides a striking example of a private merchant and his networks outside of the Mediterranean.10 The epitaph on his quite remarkable funerary stela, found at Kandahar, written as an acrostic poem, tells us among other things that he had “accumulated a vast fortune” as a merchant, the result of years

of adventure: “having received money from others to ‘invest,’ I left my country determined not to return there before having raised well high a heap of riches.” So goes his poetic monument. He had benefited from his well-connected family, from the power of the Mauryan and Greco-Indian empires, and from the intense trade networks that transected central Asia.11 At the western end of developments, Ptolemaic Egypt deserves special attention. And we must credit the Ptolemaic state and Greek traders in Egypt with opening up trade through the Red Sea and Indian Ocean (Bresson 2005). Internally, the development and extension of the road networks greatly facilitated trade coming from and moving through the Eastern Desert via Berenike, a port that would have great significance in later Hellenistic and Roman trade with the East (Sidebotham 2011). The building of the two new deepwater ports at Alexandria played a great role in both the increased capacity of shipping moving in and out of Egypt, and in security.12 In terms of scale, compared to Piraeus at Athens and to Roman ports, the Great Harbor (Portus Magnus) at Alexandria was of average size.13 The founding of many settlements along the Red Sea coast that supported trade as well as activities such as mining (Mueller 2006), the improved roads and increased presence of guards, however modest, in the Eastern Desert, and the erection of mile stones along the routes at road stations with cisterns, all attest to improved conditions for long-distance overland trading.14 Other ports in the Delta, Pelousion for example, remained important (Bresson 2012). We should be careful not to overestimate the impact of all of this—the provision of internal security, guards on ships, and so on—as it also suggests problems with brigandage. Whatever the details, although much of the early Ptolemaic activity in the desert appears to be state-directed, it seems clear that early Ptolemaic activity improved conditions for trade. The demand for trade goods from and through Alexandria, a new city of some 300,000 in the middle of the 3rd century BC, would have been considerable although impossible to quantify today. Urban demand, along with state

Long-distance Trade in the Time of Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Kings

9

taxation along the network of tollgates on the Nile, kept prices high in the city, to the extent we know them. Here again we are at some difficulty assessing the balance between private and state-driven mechanisms. To be sure, supply to places like Alexandria would have been driven by rent and tax demands of the Ptolemaic state, conducted largely through private ship owners (Thompson 1983). But the channels of supply distribution, for example, whether by market or by the state, is not well understood. The Ptolemaic state was certainly active in other aspects of long-distance trade, as the elephant hunting activities show. Sea routes played the major role in Hellenistic and Roman trade with the East (Millar 1998a, 1998b). The Periplus of Erythraean Sea is a fascinating text that documents a wealth of information on trade between Red Sea and Arabian Gulf ports and south India during the early Roman empire.15 The text is invaluable in listing ports and types of commodities that can be traded in them. Among other commodities mentioned, “Chinese cloth” (i.e., silk) is mentioned among the traded items, coming via the Indus River valley (Periplus 56:18.24). As such it stands as perhaps the single most important early document in the history of trade between the Mediterranean worlds, through Egypt, and India and China. The text, written by a Greek merchant (remarkable enough!) living in Roman Egypt, dates to ca. AD 60, but it reflects developments and geographic information that had been accumulated for two centuries before. It is the Ptolemaic state in Egypt, and probably Ptolemy VIII and his explorer Eudoxus of Cyzicus, that should get the credit (Desanges 1978). Already under Ptolemy II there was intense interest in India. The Roman geographer Strabo (Geography 2.3.4) reports stories of lost Indian sailors who were found washed up on the shores of the Red Sea coast. They were nursed back to health and accompanied merchants from Egypt back to India. The discovery of the monsoonal winds that were the impetus to seaborne trade between Egypt and India, and that lie behind the writing

10

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

of the Periplus, was no doubt not a moment of revelation but involved a long series of dangerous and eventful sailings by trial and error. The 2nd century BC was certainly a watershed in Silk Road history: an expanding Roman empire in the eastern Mediterranean and Roman demand for south Indian commodities such as pepper and nard (a perfumed ointment), are certainly an important part of the story. Not only the evidence for trade but the volume of trade increased in both directions, as did the location of the key ports of trade. Archaeological research has documented a shift from northern to southern Indian ports like Muziris (Tomber 2008). One such indication of the volume, value, and kinds of commodities shipped between India and the Mediterranean in the Roman Imperial Period is documented in the now famous Muziris papyrus, a contract between a very wealthy financier (see Rathbone 2001 on the value of the cargo) and a merchant for a cargo (primarily of textiles, ivory, and nard) shipped between Muziris and Alexandria.16 The text cannot have been an isolated one.17 Such high-value shipments may have reached their zenith in the 2nd century AD traffic between China, India, and Egypt (and via Egypt to Rome and other places in the Mediterranean), but the pattern continued for many centuries. Trade during the first two centuries AD moved on a different scale than before. The Roman imperial system in the Mediterranean lowered transaction costs (including the costs of bargaining), which was the principal determinant in “scale and productivity of international trade” (Scheidel 2011:23). The political economic power of the Roman state, not technological improvement, was the main driver in trade productivity (Menard 1991). In other words, changes in the stock of knowledge, as well as technical changes in ship building and design, navigation, and so on, were endogenous to the large shift in the political framework of the Mediterranean that allowed Rome to reduce predation on shipping, which in turn lowered transaction costs as well as the costs of financing.18 These political processes in turn allowed

for increased investment that produced significantly larger ships, and therefore larger cargoes than before. The precursors of economic and cultural exchange along the Silk Road can now be traced for thousands of years between China, Central Asia, India, Egypt, the Near East, and the Mediterranean world. I have suggested that examining the Silk Road from the point of view of Rome and China misses much historical continuity. A view from the longue durée helps us in understanding both this continuity as well as the changes and disruptions in long-distance trade between the Mediterranean world and India and China. I have emphasized here some of these “punctuated” shifts in the history of this trade, particularly the increase in connectivity in the Hellenistic period driven by new state formation, the widespread use of coinage, and new settlements, and the political and technological changes in the Roman empire that produced far larger ships and increased trade volume. But historical continuity in trade through the Eurasian steppes and western Asia is equally important. The Silk Road was one of the most important conduits not only for economic exchange, but also for the exchange of ideas, artistic styles, animals, and many other things. But understanding the history of the Silk Road should take into account its precursors in Afro-Eurasia. The longue durée of the history of the Silk Road is only beginning to be told.

NOTES 1. See e.g. the excellent introduction to Silk Road history by Hansen (2012). For a good general survey of early trade, see Smith (2009). 2. Well stressed by Fitzpatrick (2011). 3. I have found Kuzmina’s 2008 publication an invaluable orientation to the complexities of Bronze Age trade in the Eurasian Steppe. 4. See e.g. Fitzpatrick (2011) with the literature cited there, esp. at p. 29, n. 10. For an orientation to Indo-Roman trade, see the bibliography developed by Wilson (2012). 5. For the history of the connectivity of trade, see Sherratt (2004). 6. See the excellent summary and maps provided in

Barjamovic (2008). I have also found Astour (1995) on the history of overland trade in western Asia a good starting point. 7. There is an excellent summary of Persian communications in Briant (2002:357–87). 8. TADAE C.3.7 was published by Porten and Yardeni (1993), and discussed at length by Briant and Descat (1998). Cf. Briant (2002:385–87). 9. For a good survey of the evidence, see Pierce (2007). 10. Bernard, Pinault, and Rougemont (2004), Rouge­ mont (2005). I am grateful to my colleague Andrew Johnston for alerting me to this fascinating text. 11. Surveys in Thapar (2002:174–279) and Avari (2007:105–54). 12. The logistics of the ports at Alexandria, and the relationships between these and the older port at Thonis (Heracleion) have now been brilliantly analyzed by Fabre and Goddio (2010) and Goddio (2011). For Ptolemaic development of Eastern Desert roads, see most recently Sidebotham (2011:28–31). 13. Goddio and Bernand (2004:153). 14. For one milestone marker, which could not have been unique, found at Bir ‘Iayyan along the Edfu-Barramiya road leading out to Marsa Nakari on the Red Sea (SEG XLVI 2120, 257 BC), see Bagnall et al. (1996). 15. Casson (1989). 16. On the Muziris text, see the important study by Morelli (2011) with previous literature cited therein. 17. On the limits of direct Roman presence in India, see Seland (2007). 18. Some nuanced disagreement with Scheidel’s institutional argument is expressed by Wilson (2011:231–33) in the same volume, arguing for more weight to technological improvements reducing both cost and risk. See also Bang 2007 for a powerful analytical framework of Roman trade, developed further in Bang 2008, which emphasizes market exchange within a tributary mode of production.

Bibliography Abu Lughod, Janet L. 1989. Before European Hegemony: The World System AD 1250–1350. New York: Oxford University Press. Astour, Michael C. 1995. Overland Trade Routes in Ancient Western Asia. In Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, ed. Jack M. Sasson, Vol. 3,

Long-distance Trade in the Time of Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Kings

11

pp. 1401–20. New York: Scribner. Avari, Burjor. 2007. India, the Ancient Past: A History of the Indian Sub-Continent from c. 7000 BC to AD 1200. London: Routledge. Bagnall, Roger, J.G. Manning, Steven Sidebotham, and Roger Zitterkopf. 1996. A Ptolemaic Inscription from Bir ‘Iayyan. Chronique d’Égypte 71:317–30. Bang, Peter. 2007. Trade and Empire. In Search of Organizing Concepts for the Roman Economy. Past and Present 195:3–54. ———. 2008. The Roman Bazaar: A Comparative Study of Trade and Markets in a Tributary Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barfield, Thomas J. 2001. The Shadow Empires: Imperial State Formation along the Chinese-Nomad Frontier. In Empires. Perspectives from Archaeology and History, ed. Susan E. Alcock, Terence N. D’Altroy, Kathleen D. Morrison, and Carla M. Sinopoli, pp. 10–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barjamovic, Gojko. 2008. The Geography of Trade. Assyrian Colonies in Anatolia c. 1975–1725 BC and the Study of Early Interregional Networks of Exchange. In Anatolia and the Jazira during the Old Assyrian Period, ed. Jan Gerrit Dercksen, pp. 87–100. PIHANS 111. Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten. Bernard, Paul, Georges-Jean Pinault, and Georges Rougemont. 2004. Deux nouvelles inscriptions grecques de l’Asie central. Journal des Savants 2004.2:227–356. Boardman, John. 2007. Central Asia: West and East. In After Alexander. Central Asia before Islam, ed. Joe Cribb and Georgina Herrmann, pp. 9–25. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bowersock, G.W. 2005. The East-West Orientation of Mediterranean Studies and the Meaning of North and South in Antiquity. In Rethinking the Mediterranean, ed. W.V. Harris, pp. 167– 78. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bresson, Alain. 2005. Ecology and Beyond: The Mediterranean Paradigm. In Rethinking the Mediterranean, ed. W. V. Harris, pp. 94–114. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2012 . Wine, oil and delicacies at the Pelou-

12

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

sion customs. In Das imperial Rom und der hellenistische Osten. Festschrift für Jürgen Deininger zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. Linda-Marie Günther and Volker Grieb, pp. 69–88. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Briant, Pierre. 2002. From Cyrus to Alexander. A History of the Persian Empire. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. Briant, Pierre, and Raymond Descat. 1998. Un Registre douanier de la Satrapie d’Égypte à l’époque achéménide. In Le Commerce en Égypte ancienne, ed. Nicolas Grimal and Bernadette Menu, pp. 59–104. Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale. Casson, Lionel. 1989. The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Christian, David. 2000. Silk Roads or Steppe Roads? The Silk Roads in World History. Journal of World History 11.1:1–26. Cline, Eric H. 1994. Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: International Trade and the Late Bronze Age Aegean. Oxford: Tempus Reparatum. Curtin, P.D. 1985. Cross-cultural Trade in World History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Desanges, Jehan. 1978. Recherches sur l’activité des méditerranéens aux confins de l’Afrique. École française de Rome 38. Rome. Fabre, David, and Franck Goddio. 2010. The Development and Operation of the Portus Magnus in Alexandria: An Overview. In Alexandria and the North-Western Delta. Joint Conference Proceedings of Alexandria: City and Harbor (Oxford 2004) And, The Trade and Topography of Egypt’s North-Western Delta (Berlin 2006), ed. Damian Robinson and Andrew Wilson, pp. 53–74. Oxford: Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology. Fitzpatrick, M.P. 2011. Provincializing Rome: The Indian Ocean Trade Network and Roman imperialism. Journal of World History 22.1: 27–54. Goddio, Franck. 2011. Heracleion-Thonis and Alexandria, Two Ancient Egyptian Emporia. In Maritime Archaeology and Ancient Trade in the Mediterranean, ed. Damian Robinson and Andrew Wilson, pp. 121–37. Oxford: Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology.

Goddio, Franck, and André Bernand. 2004. Sunken Egypt: Alexandria. London: Periplus. Graf, David F. 1996. The Roman East from the Chinese Perspective. Les Annales archéologiques arabes syrienne. Revue d’Archéologie et d’Histoire 42:199–216. Hansen, Valerie. 2012. The Silk Road. A New History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kuhrt, Amélie. 2007. The Persian Empire. A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period. London: Routledge. Kuzmina, E.E. 2008. The Prehistory of the Silk Road, ed. Victor H. Mair. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Leriche, Pierre. 2002. The Greeks in the Orient: From Syria to Bactria. In The Greeks beyond the Aegean: From Marseilles to Bactria. Papers presented at an International Symposium held at the Onassis Cultural Center, New York, 12th October, 2002, ed. Vassos Karageorghis, pp. 78–128. New York: Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation. ———. 2007. Bactria, Land of a Thousand Cities. In After Alexander. Central Asia before Islam, ed. Joe Cribb and Georgina Herrmann, pp. 121–53. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Liu, Xinrin. 2010. The Silk Road in World History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mallory, J.P., and Victor H. Mair. 2000. The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West. London: Thames & Hudson. Menard, R.R. 1991. Transport Costs and LongRange Trade, 1300–1800: Was There a European “Transport Revolution” in the Early Modern Era? In The Political Economy of Merchant Empires, ed. J.D. Tracy, pp. 228–75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Millar, Fergus. 1998a. Looking East from the Classical World: Colonialism, Culture, and Trade from Alexander the Great to Shapur I. International History Review 20.3:507–31. ———. 1998b. Caravan Cities: The Roman Near East and Long Distance Trade by Land. In Modus Operandi: Essays in Honour of Geoffrey Rickman, ed. M. Austin et al., pp. 119–37. London: Institute of Classical Studies.

Morelli, Franco. 2011. Dal Mar Rosso ad Alessandria. Il verso (ma anche il recto) del ‘papiro di Muziris’ (SB XVIII 13167). Tyche 26:199–233. Morris, Ian. 2003. Mediterraneanization. Mediterranean Historical Review 18:30–55. Mueller, Katja. 2006. Settlements of the Ptolemies: City Foundations and New Settlement in the Hellenistic World. Leuven: Peeters. Pierce, Richard Holton. 2007. Strabo and the Eastern Desert of Egypt and Sudan. In The Indian Ocean in the Ancient Period. Definite Places, Translocal Exchange, ed. Eivind Heldaas Seland, pp. 33–44. Oxford: Archeopress. Porten, B., and Yardeni, A. 1993. Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt. Vol. 3, Literature, Accounts, Lists. Jerusalem: Department of the History of the Jewish People, Hebrew University. Potts, D.T. 1995. Distant Shores: Ancient Near Eastern Trade with South Asia and Northeast Africa. In Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, ed. Jack M. Sasson, Vol. 3, pp. 1451–63. New York: Scribner. Rathbone, Dominic. 2001. The “Muziris” Papyrus (SB XVIII 13167): Financing Roman Trade with India. In Alexandrian Studies II in Honour of Mostafa el Abbadi, pp. 39–50. Alexandria: Société d’Archéologie d’Alexandrie. Ray, Himanshu Prabha. 2003. The Archaeology of Seafaring in Ancient South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rougemont, G. 2005. Nouvelles inscriptions grecques de l’asie central. In Afghanistan, ancien carrefour entre l’Est et l’Ouest, ed. O. Bopearachchi and Marie-Françoise Boussac, pp. 127–36. Turnhout: Brepols. Salles, Jean-François. 1987. The Arab-Persian Gulf under the Seleucids. In Hellenism in the East. The Interaction of Greek and Non-Greek Civilizations from Syria to Central Asia after Alexander, ed. Amélie Kuhrt and Susan Sherwin-White, pp. 75–109. Berkeley: University of California Press. Scheidel, Walter. 2011. A Comparative Perspective on the Determinants of Scale and Productivity of Roman Maritime Trade in the Mediterranean. In Maritime Technology in the Ancient Economy:

Long-distance Trade in the Time of Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Kings

13

Ship-Design and Navigation, ed. W.V. Harris and K. Iara, pp. 21–37. Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplement 84. Portsmouth, RI. Seland, Eivind Heldaas. 2007. Ports, Ptolemy, Periplus and Poetry: Romans in Tamil South India and on the Bay of Bengal. In The Indian Ocean in the Ancient Period. Definite Places, Translocal Exchange, ed. Eivind Heldaas Seland, pp. 69–82. BAR International Series 1593. Oxford: Archaeopress. ———. 2010. Ports and Political Power in the Periplus: Complex Societies and Maritime Trade on the Indian Ocean in the First Century AD. Oxford: Archaeopress. Sherratt, Andrew. 2004. Trade Routes: The Growth of Global Trade. ArchAtlas, Version 4.1, http://www.archatlas.org/Trade/Trade.php. Accessed 05 June 2013. Sidebotham, Steven E. 2011. Berenike and the Ancient Maritime Spice Route. Berkeley: University of California Press. Smith, Richard L. 2009. Premodern Trade in World Prehistory. London: Routledge. Stone, Elizabeth Rosen. 2002. Greece and India: The Ashokan Pillars Revisited. In The Greeks beyond the Aegean: From Marseilles to Bactria, ed. Vassos Karageorghis, pp. 167–88. New York: Alexander S. Onassis Foundation. TADAE III = B. Porten and A. Yardeni, eds. 1993. Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient

14

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

Egypt. Vol. 3, Literature, Accounts, Lists. Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Dept. of the History of the Jewish People. Winona Lake, IN: distributed by Eisenbrauns. Thapar, Romila. 2002. Early India. From the Origins to AD 1300. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thompson, D. J. 1983. Nile Grain Transport under the Ptolemies. In Trade in the Ancient Economy, ed. Peter Garnsey, Keith Hopkins and C.R. Whittaker, pp. 64–75. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tomber, Roberta. 2008. Indo-Roman Trade: From Pots to Pepper. London: Duckworth. Warburton, David A. 2007. What Happened in the Near East ca. 2000 BC? In The Indian Ocean in the Ancient Period. Definite Places, Translocal Exchange, ed. Eivind Heldaas Seland, pp. 9-22. BAR International Series 1593. Oxford: Archaeopress. Wilson, Andrew. 2011. The Economic Influence of Developments in Maritime Technology in Antiquity. In Maritime Technology in the Ancient Economy: Ship-Design and Navigation, ed. W.V. Harris and K. Iara, pp. 211–33. Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplement 84. Portsmouth, RI. ———. 2012. Indo-Roman Trade Bibliography. The Oxford Roman Economy Project: http:// oxrep.classics.ox.ac.uk/bibliographies/indoroman_trade_bibliography/.

2

THE SILK ROAD IN LATE ANTIQUITY Peter Brown

T

he Silk Road has long been known as a place of mirages. There are two academic mirages that account, in large part, for the fascination which the Silk Road holds, both for scholars and for the general public. Largely as a result of the spectacular discoveries of manuscripts and artifacts in the deserts of Xinjiang, at the very beginning of the 20th century, the Silk Road has been associated with a remarkable eastward expansion of forms of art and religion whose origins lay in the long familiar world of Greece and Rome. To talk about “The Silk Road in Late Antiquity” is not simply to talk about a region in a given chronological period (from AD 300–700). It is to talk about the last and most mysterious mutation of the classical world that took place in an environment as distant from the inhabitants of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean as the face of the moon. It is not to talk about “The Silk Road in Late Antiquity,” but about “Late Antiquity in the Silk Road.” For what Sir Aurel Stein discovered in the dead cities of the southern reaches of the Taklamakan Desert (in the first decade of the 20th century) and what Albert von Le Coq discovered farther to the north, around the oasis of Turfan (at much the same time, and which he published under the suggestive title of Die buddhistische Spätantike in Mittelasien [1922–1923]), were fragments of a world where it appeared that

Greek forms of art that had originated on the eastern marches of the empire of Alexander— in modern Afghanistan and northern India— appeared to have undergone a last and magical sea change. In the sands of the Taklamakan Desert, they came upon distant echoes of Hellenistic elegance, now lingering in the soft lines of Buddhas, of apsaras or lovely female spirits, and in the innumerable plump cousins of Dionysos who peopled the heavens of Buddhist cosmology, scattered along a trail that led from Gandhara in northern India, through the passes of the Pamirs and along the foot of the Himalayas, to Dunhuang and thence to China. It was a revelation for them. In the words of Sir Aurel Stein, “To be greeted once more at these desolate ruins far away in the heart of Asia, by tangible links with the art of Greece and Rome seemed to efface all distance in time and space” (1964:85). It is easy to understand the almost uncanny thrill of this discovery. For those who study it, a large part of the magic of late antiquity consists in watching the ancient world of classical Greece and Rome changing under one’s eyes under the impact of new ideas, of new religious forces, and of new horizons (Brown 1971, 1997). If that is so, then the mutation of the culture of the Greek colonies of Afghanistan as this culture encountered the Buddhism of northern India and reached across the high Karakorum towards

China, was the most thrilling and unexpected mutation of all of the familiar classical gene. For persons such as Le Coq and his advocates in Berlin, the Silk Road was always far more than a road. It was nothing less than a missing link in the cultural history of Eurasia. In the words of a memorandum to the Prussian Ministry of Culture, written in 1914, “We can now recognize the threads that run from Greece and Rome through Persia and India, running out as far as China, Tibet and Japan. West and East are no longer cleft by the gaps that we previously had to postulate” (Marchand 2009:422). I think that we must bear this thrill in mind when we approach the other mirage of the Silk Road. That is, the view of the Silk Road as a purely commercial highway. Here we should note that the first person to coin the term “Silk Road” (Seidenstrasse—though he used the term in the plural, Seidenstrassen), Ferdinand von Richthofen, was a geographer. Unlike Le Coq and Stein, his concern was not with rare mutations of art and culture but with space and with a conquest of space that seemed to echo and predict the modern shrinking of the globe. As a result, the Silk Road quickly settled down, in the popular imagination, as the ancient equivalent of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Goods were imagined to whizz briskly along the Silk Road between Rome and China. But, as on the long stretches of the Trans-Siberian Railway, little thought was given to the sheer diversity of the regions through which it passed (Marchand 2009:371). What I would like to do here is suggest what we might gain by stepping aside from these two potent mirages. Instead of seeing the Silk Road either as a fascinating conservatory of exotic mutations of Western forms of art and religion on their long way across Eurasia, or as a corridor of trade, in a modern manner, I would like to attempt to catch the Silk Road in the heavy gravity of the distinctive societies—from China through Inner Asia and Iran to Byzantium—through which it passed in the late antique period. I have been encouraged to do this by recent publications which (each in their different way) have folded the Silk Road back into the liv-

16

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

ing texture of the societies which produced it. Here I wish to refer in particular to the work of Jonathan Skaff on Chinese relations with the nomads of Inner Asia: Eurasian Entanglements. Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors, 580-800 (2012); of Étienne de la Vaissière, Les marchands sogdiens (now translated as Soghdian Traders) (2002, 2005); of Xinru Liu on the relations between India and China and on the role of Buddhism in the circulation and valorization of silk, now summed up in her synthesis, The Silk Road in World History (2010); and the recent book of Matthew Canepa, The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran (2009). I would now also include the masterly survey of Valerie Hansen: The Silk Road. A New History (2012). To put it very briefly: what emerges from these studies is the inextricable connection between what we might call commerce—the movement of goods—politics, and state formation throughout Eurasia in the late antique period. This seems to me to be the message of de la Vaissière’s splendid study of the “internal” history of the Sogdian merchants. He has placed these merchants back into the structures of Sogdian society both in Sogdia itself and in Inner Asia and China. He likens the Sogdian “merchants” to the Italian merchants of the later middle ages. But, for a western medievalist, this is to open a sociological can of worms such as delights social historians of medieval Italy. As in medieval Italy, the merchant identity of the Sogdians—which seemed so straightforward to outsiders—immediately becomes entangled (like that of the Italian merchants) in their identity as nobles, as heads of city republics, and as leading figures in frontier societies where nomads and Han Chinese met. These were the Sogdians known to the Chinese not for their commercial but for their political savvy. “Cruel and perspicacious,” it was they who acted as political advisers to the Turkish qaghans and as mediators between the world of the China and the steppes (de la Vaissière 2002:163, 2000). In the same way, the study of the workings of Chinese imperial society and its relations with the nomads have engulfed silk itself in a fiscal

and diplomatic system from which commerce developed not for its own sake, but, in the first instance, as a highly suspect “commoditization”—one might even call it a “privatization”— of articles that were thought to belong more properly to the world of diplomacy, not of commerce. Silk and similar items were as central to the flow of power and prestige in eastern Eurasia as is the movement of enriched uranium between modern states. For Sogdians to attempt to buy bales of silk and to redistribute them for gain simply proved, to the Chinese, that they were low fellows, who came from a world devoid of kings and hierarchy (de la Vaissière 2002:33–37). As for the Chinese peasant, he and his family labored over the silkworm to pay his taxes, not to feed the markets of a distant Silk Road. Although coins and grain were also used for currency, it is said that 55 percent of the budget of the T’ang was raised in bales of silk (de la Vaissière 2002:172). Silk entered the world of Inner Asia, not to be traded, but to add glory to the qaghans and their dependents. What reached the West were mere pickings from the vast stores of goods that remained in eastern Inner Asia to fill the tents and tombs of nomadic overlords. State formation, not trade, was uppermost in the horizons and calculations of the rulers of the steppes (Beckwith 2009:197–99). Often embraced as an example of an almost miraculous flow of goods, in the modern manner, from one end of Asia to the other, the Silk Road has been effectively “de-modernized.” The movement of silk is swallowed up by ancient needs—to pay taxes, to conduct diplomacy, to show glory. With this, the social historian of the ancient world usually heaves a sigh of intellectual self-satisfaction. He or she has, yet again, nipped a seductive anachronism in the bud. The ancient economy is put back in its place—among the primitives—sternly denied any pretensions to modernity (Bang 2009; see also J. Manning in this volume). But what does this mean? Here I suggest that we look more closely at the substances and the circumstances of the interchanges with which the Silk Road has been associated in late antiquity.

This involves, first and foremost, an imaginative leap to capture what it meant to engage in a trade in “luxury goods” in the first place (Liu 1996:2–3). Luxury goods were not only easy to move and expensive to buy. They were “charismatic” goods. They carried a charge of life-enhancing energy, delight, and majesty brought from the ends of the earth. To the mid-6th-century Byzantine, Cosmas Indicopleustes, to go in search of silk was a fitting metaphor for the Christian’s yearning for paradise (Cosmos Indicopleustes, Christian Topography 2.4 [see Wolska-Conus 1968:353]). It was a search for the ultimate Out There. For the Chinese, by contrast, what we call the Silk Road could equally well be called the Road of Glass. Glass was not produced (or eventually produced only in poor quality) in China. It carried with it the magic of purity and transparency brought from the unimaginably far west. Not surprisingly, the most exquisite examples of Syrian glass to be discovered in China were found in a box of relics placed at the base of the great Famen pagoda in the Tang period. Taken from the unseen, western end of the earth, returned to the unseen along with relics of the Buddha, they only emerged, a thousand years later, when the great pagoda was excavated in 1987 (An Jiayao 2002). Speaking of an analogous phenomenon— the dependence of the medieval West on spices— Paul Freedman, in his delightful book, Out of the East. Spices and the Medieval Imagination, points to the literal “craving” which was engendered in the upper classes of the medieval West by fantasies of spices taken from the very foothills of Paradise. Spices did more than tickle your taste buds. They brought with them, from the distant Indian Ocean, nothing less than the death-defying taste of Paradise (Freedman 2008). It is important to recover the imaginative weight of such substances. But that is not enough. What we have to imagine is their role in what Chris Bayly—writing of the commerce of Asia and Africa between 1750 and 1850—has called a moment of “archaic globalization.” In this pre-modern pattern of globalization, great men and their women set themselves

The Silk Road in Late Antiquity

17

off against the all-pervasive drabness of ordinary life—whether in the village or on the steppes— by prizing difference: difference in goods, learned servants, women, and even animals. One thinks of the pair of male and female little “dogs of Rome”—probably miniature Maltese terriers, whose plump forms appear, duly mourned, on grave stones in the Italy of Augustus—that were offered as tribute by the king of Turfan to the Chinese emperor in 624 (Schafer 1963:77). Such persons were collectors rather than consumers. What they did was more than merely collect…the people, objects, food, garments and styles of deportment thus assembled changed the substance of the collector. They sought to “capture the qualities” of these rare goods by making themselves stand out in their own society as rare, because touched by the rareness of exotic goods. (Bayly 2002:51–52)

And when it came to the venues where such “collecting” occurred with greatest intensity, we would not be well-advised to wander into the bazaar. We would be better placed to see the Silk Road in action at Summit Conferences. This does not simply mean that the vast sum—thousands of bales of silk on the northern frontier of China (de la Vaissière 2002:197); mule loads of silver coins on the Central Asian marches of Iran (Banaji 2006); gold solidi and knock-off “barbarian” belts and swords, complete with garnets from Afghanistan, manufactured at Constantinople for the use of clients across the Danube (Arrhenius 1985)—did not change hands in the form of subsidies and tribute. There was more to it than that. The principal substances and modes of deportment that passed up and down the Silk Road were put to use to create a magical Middle Ground—at once local and international—in which rulers and aristocrats met in an environment carefully constructed to be a world out of this world. Here I would refer you particularly to the work of Jonathan Skaff and Matt Canepa. What Skaff has shown in his studies of the diplomatic relations between the nomads of

18

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

Inner Asia and the Chinese court is the remarkable degree of conscious juxtaposition between the local and the exotic which occurred when Han Chinese, Sogdians, and nomads met. The strict Confucian view was that only the Han were capable of observing ritual and that the outer barbarians were, to put it mildly, ritually challenged. But this was not at all the case. The leaders of the great Turkic hegemonies of the late 6th and 7th centuries were as punctilious as any Chinese. In 568, Zemarchus, the Byzantine ambassador to Qaghan Istemi (Sizabul) at the foothills of the Altai Mountains, was treated “according to all the rites of friendship.” Over the days, he was moved solemnly from one tent to another, in order to approach the Qaghan in due form (Menander the Guardsman [see Blockley 1985:115]; also Theophylact Simocatta, Histories 7.8.6–12, [see Whitby and Whitby 1986]; de la Vaissière 2010). In 631, the Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang professed to be surprised at what he saw at the camp of Tong Yabghu (across the Tien Shan near the Yssyk Köl): “Even though he ruled over felt tents, his court had a noble beauty” (Beal 1911:42–43). Indeed, not to hold court with such solemnity was a danger signal. The lack of mutually intelligible ceremonials was both disorienting and frightening. The account of the embassy of the Katholikos Viroy to the camp of the Khazars, in 626, after they had descended unexpectedly from the northern steppes into the rich plain of trans-Caucasian Albania, catches a moment of terror in the face of an unreadable enemy: There we observed them kneeling on their couches like rows of heavily laden camels… with their bellies like bloated goatskins. There were none of our customary cup bearers before them and no servants behind them, not even in the case of the king’s son; soldiers armed with shields and spears, however, kept a careful watch. (Movsěs Dasxuranc’i [see Dowsett 1961:99])

Such scenes of naked power were rare on the steppes and in the relations between the

great empires. Most encounters took place in a carefully constructed world in which motifs from the nomad and the settled world were combined. But this bricolage was not limited to the conduct of diplomacy. Let me end by suggesting that we view the theme of culture contact along the Silk Road in the light of such moments of deliberate juxtaposition of the known and the exotic. For it strikes me that the old debates on the nature of cultural contact between China and the nomad world, between Inner Asian hegemonies and the settled populations, and, far to the west, between Byzantium and Iran have been bedeviled by false models of cultural interchange. “Influences” appear to travel mindlessly from distant regions. They are absorbed or rejected on an organic—indeed, a medical—model. Byzantium catches “oriental influences” much as one would catch a common cold. But what happens if we see cultural contacts in terms of a process of “archaic globalization” in which differences were valued, in their own right, and consciously set in place as markers of distinction? This would be particularly the case when the principal loci of culture contact were situations—such as courts and diplomatic interchanges—where juxtaposition was the name of the game. In these privileged environments the skillful collage of elements from different cultures came together to create a world of its own. The palaces, tents, and governmental centers at which diplomatic interchanges took place were never simply condensations of the central values of the host society. Far from it. They were carefully constructed “non places.” Those who moved against this backdrop were somehow made to seem a little “out of this world.” They were as distant from the average members of their own society as they were from the foreign world represented by their diplomatic interlocutors. This impression is confirmed by Matt Canepa’s study of the artistic and ceremonial relations between Byzantium and Persia. It is a study that challenges us to measure the psychological effect of deliberate transgressions of the normal environment brought about through the display of exotic motifs, substances, or spaces.

What did it mean for a Byzantine to come upon, in the church of Saint Polyeuktos in Constantinople, surfaces of marble carved in such a way as to make them look like Sasanian stucco work; to know that there was a polo field in the imperial palace; to sense the Hagia Sophia, through the motifs placed on the mosaic ceilings of its side aisles, as a building swathed in robes of eastern silk? (Canepa 2009:210, 220). Last but not least, the pursuit of differences may throw some light on the fate of the religions of the Silk Road—Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity, and Manichaeism. Take the example of Manichaeism. It is, indeed, remarkable that the lavishly illuminated manuscripts of a religion which once claimed Saint Augustine of Hippo as a youthful adherent were among the first to be discovered in the oasis of Turfan. As one walks the empty adobe streets of Jiaohe and Qočo (Gaochang), one realizes, with something of a shudder, that—at the time when Charlemagne ruled in western Europe—Manichaeism, known to most of us as the most bleak, the most furtive, and the most fiercely persecuted Christian sect in the later Roman Empire, was for some centuries the established religion of the Uyghur kingdom. But how did this Manichaeism fit in? Here the work of Xavier Tremblay, Pour une histoire de la Sérinde (2001), offers a way in to the strange world of the Manichaeism of the Uyghur empire. Manichaeism was there because (like many other luxuries) it was different. Like the Judaism patronized, at roughly the same time, by the Khazars in the western steppes, Manichaeism distinguished the Uyghur kingdom from its Chinese neighbors. It also distinguished the court of the qaghan from his largely Buddhist subjects. Frozen in liturgical texts in a long-dead Parthian, the Manichaeism of Turfan was a baroque religion. It was a religion of great ceremonies and opulent prayer books, perched on top of a Buddhist population, much as, in the 18th century, the Catholic court of Dresden ruled (with brittle splendor) over the overwhelmingly Lutheran population of Saxony (Tremblay 2001:121–22). Manichaeism was a mark of difference, quite as

The Silk Road in Late Antiquity

19

striking, in its way, as was the great golden tent of the Uyghur Qaghan which perched on top of the citadel of his new city of Ordu Balik , surrounded by an impeccably Chinese rectilinear wall (Skaff 2012: chap. 5). What does this all add up to? Let me end by suggesting that these elements of an “archaic globalization” were brought to the fore by constant diplomacy and warfare, and not by the invisible hand of the market that pulled goods along a Silk Road as if it were a modern commercial highway. These elements converged with particular vividness in the 6th and early 7th centuries, so as to bring about a rare moment of intervisibility among the kingdoms that lay along and around the Silk Road. The game of the day was not the Great Game of modern imagination. I am skeptical of views that posit the direct involvement of the great powers of the Middle East—Byzantium and Persia—in wide-ranging trade wars along the western end of the Silk Road. Nor did they fight proxy wars that reached as far south as Yemen and Ethiopia. We are dealing with a world still made up of local units without the extensive outreach of modern states. But the intervisibility was there. This means that, from one end of Eurasia to the other, the game of the day was the game of the competing glory of the kings. Byzantine and Persian ambassadors at the court of Ceylon would pull coins out of their pockets to display, in the alloy and quality of their respective coinages, the glory of their respective empires (Cosmas Indicopleustes, Christian Topography 11.18 [see Wolska-Conus 1973:349–51]). It is interesting to note that dreams of universal empire—such as had circulated in the Italy of Augustus (Parker 2008:203–21)—were quietly abandoned. Instead, Byzantines, Iranians, and even Chinese accepted a world of many kingdoms. But these kingdoms were now ranked in complex hierarchies. For Cosmas Indicopleustes, a Christian Byzantine, the Roman Empire was Numero Uno: its association with the birth of Christ ensured that—though often battered—it would survive until the end of time.

20

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

Persia, by contrast, was placed an honorable second: for the Three Kings of the East who had worshipped Christ had come from Iran (Cosmas Indicopleustes, Christian Topography 2.75–77 [see Wolska-Conus 1968:391–95). In Axum at the foot of the Red Sea—if we are to accept an early dating for the Ethiopic Kebra Nagast—Byzantium was placed second after the orthodox Monophysite Negus of Abyssinia, the descendant of King Solomon (Debié 2010). At the great palace ascribed to Khusro I Anoshirwan, at Ctesiphon south of Baghdad, three thrones were said to have stood beneath the great Arch of the Taq-i Khusro. These were prepared for three vassals of the king of kings— the King of Rum of Byzantium, the King of the Turks, and the King of China—should they ever wish to pay court to their overlord (Payne, forthcoming). In China, gazetteers of the Western Lands reached out, kingdom by kingdom, up to Constantinople. The arrival of embassies from those distant western lands—Maltese terriers and all—were duly noted in the Chinese official annals (Mikawaya and Kollautz 1984). It was the westernmost of these kingdoms—the Qaysar of Byzantium, the Kisra of Iran, and the Negus of Axum—who were the “significant others” to whom the Prophet Muhammad was believed to have addressed (ca. 630) a famous set of letters. They were urged to submit to Islam or to face the consequences. The game had changed. In the course of the 7th century, a universal religion impatient of the hierarchies of an ancient world order replaced the jockeying of courts that had driven a system of “archaic globalization” along the Silk Road. The kingdom of Persia fell. Byzantium was pinned to the wall for centuries. By the mid-8th century Muslim armies had chased the T’ang back across the Pamirs and had absorbed the merchant cities of Sogdia. The life of the Silk Road continued. But it was no longer the distinctive cultural, religious, and diplomatic life of a late antiquity all of its own, that had been lived with such vividness along the Silk Road between AD 300 and 700.

Bibliography An Jiayao. 2002. When Glass Was Treasured in China. In Nomads, Traders and Holy Men along China’s Silk Road, ed. A.L. Juliano and J.A. Lerner, pp. 79–94. Silk Road Studies 7. Turnhout: Brepols. Arrhenius, B. 1985. Merovingian Garnet Jewelry: Emergence and Social Implications. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell. Banaji, J. 2006. Precious Metal Coinages and Monetary Expansion in Late Antiquity. In Dal “Denarius” al “Dinar.” L’Oriente e la moneta romana, ed. F. De Romanis and S. Sorda, pp. 265–303. Rome: Istituto italiano di numismatica. Bang, P. 2009. Commanding and Consuming the World: Empire, Tribute, and Trade in Roman and Chinese History. In Rome and China. Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires, ed. W. Scheidel, pp. 100–120. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bayly, C. 2002. “Archaic” and “Modern” Globalization in the Eurasian-African Arena. In Globalization in World History, ed. A.G. Hopkins, pp. 47–93. London: Pimlico Press. Beal, S. 1911. The Life of Hieuen-Tsiang by Shaman Hwui-li. London: Kegan Paul. Beckwith, C. 2009. Empires of the Silk Road. A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Blockley, R.C., ed. and trans. 1985. The History of Menander the Guardsman. Liverpool: Francis Cairns. Brown, P. 1971. The World of Late Antiquity: From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad. London: Thames and Hudson. ——— 1997. The World of Late Antiquity Revisited. Symbolae Osloenses 72:5–90. Canepa, M. 2009. The Two Eyes of the Earth. Art and Ritual Kingship between Late Rome and Sasanian Iran. Berkeley: University of California Press. Debié, M. 2010. Le Kebra Nagast éthiopien: une réponse apocryphe aux événements de Najran? In Juifs et chrétiens en Arabie aux Ve et VIe siècles: regards croisés sur les sources, ed. J. Beaucamp, F.

Briquel-Chatonnet, and C.J. Robin, pp. 255–78. Paris: Centre d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance. de la Vaissière, É. 2002. Histoire des marchands sogdiens. Bibliothèque de l’Institut des Hautes Études chinoises 32. Paris: de Boccard. ——— 2005. Sogdian Traders: A History, trans. J. Ward. Leiden: Brill. ——— 2010. Maurice et le Qaghan: à propos de la digression de Théophylacte Simocatta sur les Turcs. Revue des études byzantines 60:219–24. Dowsett, C.J.F., trans. 1961. The History of the Caucasian Albanians by Movses Dasxuranc’i. London: Oxford University Press. Freedman, P. 2008. Out of the East. Spices and the Medieval Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hansen, V. 2012. The Silk Road: A New History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Le Coq, A. von. 1922–1923. Die buddhistische Spätantike in Mittelasien. Berlin: D. Reimer. Liu, X. 1996. Silk and Religion. An Exploration of Material Life and the Thought of People, AD 600–1200. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ——— 2010. The Silk Road in World History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marchand, S. 2009. German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Religion, Race, and Scholarship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mikawaya, M., and A. Kollautz. 1984. Ein Dokument zum Fernhandel zwischen Byzanz und China. Byzantinische Zeitschrift 77:6–19. Parker, G. 2008. The Making of Roman India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Payne, R. 2013. Cosmology and the Expansion of the Iranian Empire in Late Antiquity, 502–628 CE. Past and Present 220(1):3-33. Schafer, E. 1963. The Golden Peaches of Samarkand. A Study of T’ang Exotics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Skaff, J. 2012. Eurasian Entanglements. Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors, 580– 800. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stein, A. 1964. On Ancient Asian Trails. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Tremblay, X. 2001. Pour une histoire de la Sérinde: Le manichéisme parmi les peuples et religions de l’Asie Centrale d’après les sources primaires.

The Silk Road in Late Antiquity

21

Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Whitby, M., and M. Whitby, eds. and trans. 1986. The History of Theophylact Simocatta: An English Translation with Introduction and

22

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

Notes. Oxford: Claredon Press. Wolska-Conus, W., ed. 1968–1973. Cosmas Indicopleustes. Topographie chrétienne, Sources chrétiennes 141 [1968], 159 [1970], and 197 [1973]. Paris: Éditions du Cerf.

3

THE NORTHERN CEMETERY Epigone or Progenitor of Small River Cemetery No. 5?1 Victor H. Mair

Introduction

A

lthough it was only excavated in 2002– 2005, Small River Cemetery No. 5 (also called Xiaohe Mudi and Ördek’s Necropolis; SRC5) is already well known, both to archaeologists and to the general public (Fig. 3.1). A clearly related site, called simply the Northern Cemetery (Beifang Mudi in Chinese; Ayala Mazar in Uyghur), has been discovered even more recently approximately 600 km to the southwest. The resemblances to SRC5 are so close and so numerous that there can be no mistaking their consanguinity. The puzzle that remains to be solved, however, is how these two closely related sites, which are so far apart on the map, came to resemble each other so nearly. Since the people of both SRC5 and the Northern Cemetery seem to have entered the Tarim Basin with their cattle, ovicaprids (goats and sheep), and wheat—all of which were domesticated in Southwest Asia thousands of years earlier—we shall attempt to determine whether the people of these two sites embarked from a common staging ground and went their separate ways, or whether one of the two groups sprang from the other. The purpose of this chapter is to explore these various possibilities in a provisional fash-

ion and to provide a hypothetical solution to the problem of their obvious relatedness. Considering the fact that we do not yet have even a preliminary archeological report for the Northern Cemetery, merely sketchy and informal descriptions by the few who have been there for short periods of time and some scattered artifacts that have been recovered from the badly looted site, this is all that can be done for the present moment. Perhaps our tentative discussion will encourage a timely excavation of what remains at the largely destroyed site, and publication of the findings.

Xiaohe (Small River, Ördek’s Necropolis) In the summer of 1934, the Swedish archaeologist Folke Bergman discovered an important Bronze Age burial ground in the desert about a hundred miles to the west of the fabled ruins of Kroraina (Uyghur: Krorän; Modern Standard Mandarin [MSM]: Loulan). This hillock-shaped cemetery came to be known as Ördek’s Necropolis (after a Uyghur peasant who had initially located it years before), but is more precisely referred to as Small River Cemetery Number 5

86°

87°

88°

Khotunsumbul (Heijing) Hoxud

89°

90°

*1 *

Qarashähär (Yanqi)

Bagrash Köl (Bositeng Hu)

42°

3 4

Korla

Qinggir

T

ar

im

R iv er

U

K

T A G

U K

H

Yakinlik Köl Kuni Köl

Yingpan

5. Small River Cemetery (Xiaohe Mudi)

*

Lop Nur

7

Qäwrighul (Gumugou)

Tikanlik

Yangi Sudake Oi (Yingsu) Kurbane Oi

2 Miles 2 Kilometers

*

Kurghan Temenpu Tarim Erchang

1

*

ver l Ri

Kö (K nch on i gq D a ue r ya He )

R

*

1

0

S m al

Yuli (Lopnur)

41°

0

2

6

*

Patalik Köl

Sakirtma Kadike

Small River Cemetery (Xiaohe Mudi) (see inset)

*

Tughemen

Abdul Bakin Oi

Krorän (Loulan)

Ayagh Arghan (Alagan) Merdek

40°

Tokum (Tehemang)

Lop

25

0 25

0

39°

86°

N 8

Kara Buran Köl (Taitema Lake)

Miran

50 Miles

*

Donglik

39°

50 Kilometers

87°

88°

Charqilik (Ruoqiang)

89°

90°

91°

92°

Mair Xinjiang, Loulan Yiji area Type Style: Helvetica Size: 42p x 27p CARTO-GRAPHICS 2005

FIG. 3.1. This map of Xinjiang archaeological sites includes Small River Cemetery 5. [Photo by Victor Mair]

(in MSM it is called “Xiaohe Mudi,” a translation of the English). After Bergman published a detailed report in 1939 on his investigations at the cemetery, the site went unvisited for more than half a century until the year 2000, when it was rediscovered by a Chinese documentary crew using Global Positioning System (GPS) instrumentation. Because of serious looting that had occurred at the site, the government permitted rescue operations. In the three seasons between 2002 and 2005, the Small River Cemetery was completely excavated, and an abundant

24

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

amount of textiles, ornaments, implements, and other artifacts have been recovered. In addition, more than 30 well-preserved mummies, together with the coffins in which they were buried, were exhumed from the sandy necropolis. These latest findings match those of Bergman very closely, but multiply them greatly. Although it will take years to analyze all of the new materials, already we can draw some important inferences from them about the religious beliefs and practices of the community who buried their dead here. The recent excavations have also yielded

rich resources for the study of the ethnic identity and cultural affiliations of the deceased. Altogether, 167 graves were excavated, yielding more than a thousand artifacts, with dates ranging from around 2000 to 1450 BC. There were five levels of burials with coffins in the shape of overturned boats. Live oxen were slaughtered at the site and their still-wet hides were used to wrap the coffins. After they had dried, the hides sealed the coffins tight as a drum, so that not even a speck of sand could enter the burial. Four coffins were coated with a layer of mud. Inside each of these special rectangular outer coffins was a boat coffin. The recipients of these special burials were all adult females with rich burial goods. It is quite clear that there was a gender bias in favor of women at the Small River Necropolis. The most peculiar burials at Small River 5 were six coffins with wooden bodies in them. These ersatz mummies were treated the same as actual corpses. It is noteworthy that all six of the wooden mummies were male. Moreover, it is evident from the stratigraphy, placement, and other factors that they were all made within the same time period. It is tempting to speculate that these substitute bodies were meant to represent men from the community who were lost in some tragedy that befell them away from their homes, but were cherished by the community who honored them with a proper burial, the same as for real human beings. These replacement bodies were carved from diversiform poplar trunks and are about 1.35 m in length, with wooden sticks for arms. Their faces are flat and have red markings on them. The wooden male corpses are wrapped in intact lynx skins, with holes cut in them for eyes and mouth; eyelashes and hair are stitched to the skin, giving the appearance of a real person. The most famous of the mummies from this fabled necropolis is the so-called Beauty of Small River. She is 1.52 m in height, and fetchingly wears a fine felt hat and fashionable leather boots. Around her waist is a white woolen string skirt, and she was shrouded in a bulky woolen

cloak with tassels toward the top (the tassels of men’s cloaks were positioned toward the bottom). Like the other women at the Small River Necropolis, she had a wooden phallus near her chest (strong sexual symbolism pervaded the site), a leather bag lay on her abdomen, and she was covered with ephedra branches and grains of wheat (typical of the deceased at the site). Archaeologists have not been able to find any trace of settlements within several kilometers of the necropolis in every direction, only adding to the mystery of who these people were, where they came from, and what happened to them. Some possible answers are suggested in the next section. Many of the objects from the Small River Necropolis vividly reveal aspects of the daily life of the Bronze Age inhabitants of the area during the first half of the 2nd millennium BC. It has also become apparent that the other major Bronze Age sites that are located nearby (viz., Gumugou/Qäwrighul) share many cultural affinities. But it was not until 2008 that another site that lay far to the southwest, the so-called Northern Cemetery, was discovered and revealed to belong to the identical cultural complex as the Small River Necropolis. Aspects of their common symbolism and material culture will be discussed below.

Northern Cemetery (Beifang Mudi) During the 1990s, a joint Chinese-French group made repeated investigations of the desert settlements in the Taklamakan north of the oasis city of Yutian (Keriyä). Following the ancient riverbed of the Keriyä River northward, after 180 km they reached the 3rd–4th century fortified town of Qaradöng (“Black Hill”), where some of the world’s oldest Buddhist wall paintings were found. From Qaradöng, they proceeded 40 km farther to the north, where they discovered the remains of a previously unknown Iron Age city which they named Yuansha Gucheng (Ancient City of Round Sands; Yumulak Kum in Uyghur, Djoumboulak Koum in French transcription). A further 14 km into the Taklamakan, the archaeologists found

The Northern Cemetery

25

pottery and other artifacts that bore a conspicuous resemblance to the Bronze Age items found earlier along the northern parts of the Niyä River (Debaine-Francfort and Idriss 2001). In general, along rivers flowing out of the Qurum Tagh and Altyn Tagh northward into the desert, the older sites lie deeper in the desert, while younger sites lie closer to the foothills. For example, as the Keriyä River extends toward the north, we find first the 7th–8th century AD site of Dandan Oilik, then the 3rd–4th century site of Qaradöng, the 2nd–1st century BC site of Yuansha, and finally the Bronze Age Northern Cemetery and other nearby sites of a similar age that have recently been discovered. Indeed, there was once a river passage that went all the way from Keriyä (Yutian) to the Tarim River at the northern edge of the Tarim Basin. Radiocarbon dating indicates that the Yuansha city walls are 2,200 years old, making it the oldest city ever found in Xinjiang. Of 20 graves found in the settlement, only 3 were still intact. The human remains in these burials, of apparent Caucasian origin, were clothed in woolen textiles. Animal bones from a variety of domesticated species were found in the graves, including goats, sheep, camels, horses, dogs, and cows. Sheep bones recovered from the environs indicate that the inhabitants were adept at animal husbandry. Irrigation ditches were found throughout the settlement area, as well as traces of wheat and millet, millstones, and grain storage facilities, demonstrating their mastery of agriculture. Thus the people of ancient Yuansha were indubitably agropastoralists of the sort known throughout the entire prehistory and history of human habitation in the Tarim Basin. Satellite images reveal a dried-out delta north and west of the Keriyä River beyond Yuansha. They also indicate that the waters of the Keriyä and Niyä rivers must have been connected by tributaries in ancient times. Furthermore, ice cores from the Qurum Tagh provide evidence that, by around AD 500, temperature and precipitation had significantly decreased. Both of these related factors resulted in diminished flow of the rivers and the abandonment of cities far

26

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

out in the desert that depended on river water for their very existence. The dramatic reduction in the size of Lop Nor, the disappearance of the communities who buried their dead at Loulan, Yingpan, and other sites in the region, and other remarkable environmental and demographic phenomena that occurred in the two centuries before the middle of the 1st millennium CE were in all likelihood caused by lower temperatures and the consequent diminution of precipitation. Even more astonishing than the finds around the Yuansha Ancient City were those of the so-called Beifang Mudi (Northern Cemetery), which was located approximately 70 km farther along a branch of the Keriyä River. Although the Northern Cemetery of Yuansha Ancient City (officially called Keriyä River Northern Cemetery) lies more than 500 km (595 km, to be exact) to the southwest from Small River 5, it unmistakably belongs to the same time period and culture. Discovered only in 2008, it is situated in an even more remote and isolated setting than the Small River Necropolis. Like Small River 5, the Northern Cemetery was discovered by a Uyghur peasant wandering in the desert (January, 2008) and was relocated by archaeologists using GPS on March 20, 2008. During their initial investigation on that occasion, the archaeological team engaged only in surface recovery; excavation must await future seasons.2 Strangely, the Northern Cemetery is also a built sand dune necropolis like Small River 5, but on a smaller scale. In 2005, after following the course of the Keriyä River northward for 28 days, a small team of archaeologists led by Idris Abdurssul from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) Institute of Archaeology discovered a Bronze Age site only 15 km from the Northern Cemetery. If they had been that close to Small River 5, they would have been able to see it with binoculars, but in 2005 they missed the Northern Cemetery (which is a little over half the height of Small River 5), even though they were tantalizingly close. The Northern Cemetery is a mound of sand 4 to 5 m in height, whereas Small River 5 is 7 m high.

Like Small River 5, the Northern Cemetery has a north-south orientation and oval shape. At 34 m wide by 50 m long, it occupies a total of 1,700 m2, making it about half the size of Small River 5, which occupies 2,500 m2. Just as the Small River Necropolis had a palisade wall of vertically placed logs running east-west that divides the sacred ground into a northern and a southern sector, so does the Northern Cemetery. Aside from dividing the necropolis into two sections, I have theorized that the palisade wall more importantly served to catch the aeolian (wind-driven) sand and thus grow the burial mound. This theory, first proposed by me for Small River 5 (Mair 2006), has now been confirmed by the aerodynamic studies of Pablo Barrera (2012). The Northern Cemetery had at least two levels of burials, compared with the five levels at Small River 5. The archaeologists who visited the site in 2008 noted that 50 tombs had been looted, with more than 20 coffins strewn on the surface. As at Small River 5, the wooden coffins at the Northern Cemetery were encased in oxhides (and some were covered with a layer of mud). Also found was the same forest of posts rising out of the surface of the sand at the head of each grave and with the identical sexual symbolism: oar-shaped (vulvate) posts at the head of male burials and multi-angled (penile) posts at the head of female burials (Fig. 2). All of these features of the Northern Cemetery are startlingly like their counterparts at Small River 5. Even the wood carving, shaping, and decorating techniques are identical. Other common attributes of the two cemeteries are leather or felt boots (often with red cords), peaked felt hats with cords and feathers, string skirts, woolen capes, wooden sculptures of human figures, finely woven baskets made of plant material, wooden substitute corpses, and so forth (Mair and Cheng 2013) (Figs. 3.2–3.6, see color insert). Not only are the characteristics of the burial grounds at Small River 5 and the Northern Cemetery virtually identical, the physical appearance of the people’s faces and the clothing they are wearing are strikingly similar. During their

reconnaissance, the archaeologists recovered a considerable amount of human remains, including six skulls and four mummified heads (two male and two female). Regrettably, the skeletons and corpses they encountered were left behind in the desert. All of the heads of individuals from the Northern Cemetery that were taken back to Urumqi possessed European features (e.g., long noses and deep, round eyes). One of the mummified heads is that of a female with blond hair, wearing a peaked felt hat with cords wrapped around it and a feather stuck in the side, exactly the same as found at the Small River Necropolis (Fig. 3.7; see color insert). So uncannily alike are Small River 5 and the Northern Cemetery that we are undoubtedly dealing with the same culture and probably also the same (or very closely kindred) population. Consequently, in the following paragraphs, I will describe what may be called the SR-NC (Small River-Northern Cemetery) cultural complex. Although most of this discussion will be based on data from the comprehensive excavations that were undertaken at Small River 5 between 2002 and 2005 (cited in Mair 2006), enough material has been recovered from the Northern Cemetery that we can expect to find further confirmation of the intimate relatedness of the two sites after thorough excavations have been carried out at the Northern Cemetery, or, if that is not possible, when the material held by various owners and the observations recorded by those few individuals who have visited the site are made public. The SR-NC deceased were placed on the bottom of the tomb, after which a coffin in the shape of a date pit (or overturned boat) was constructed around him or her, then covered with the hides of freshly killed oxen, as described above. Mud casings at first were reserved only for select females, but later this practice was gradually applied to males too. Typically, the head of the deceased was oriented toward the east. The deceased generally wore a jade bracelet (a woolen cord running through a round piece of jade) around their right wrist. Along the right side of the body was invariably found a basket woven so tightly of plant fibers as to be waterproof. Inside

The Northern Cemetery

27

the basket were found foodstuffs (most often wheat grains) or ephedra twigs. Some burials at Small River 5 were literally smothered in ephedra, which clearly held special importance for the Bronze Age people of the Tarim Basin. At Small River 5, one male burial received unusual treatment. On his chest were placed seven snakes (seven was a special number with the Small River people and is present in many contexts). Unlike his compatriots, he had a leather decoration around the brim of his felt hat and feather ornaments pointing forward, perhaps signifying that he was a religious leader. Occasionally a burial might be distinguished by having a comb in a woman’s grave and one or two rods with the sculptured figure of a human or god near the uppermost part of a male body. In rare cases, the rod might have a stone mace head, which makes one think of West Asia and Northeast Africa, Sanxing Dui in Sichuan, or Bronze Age sites in northwest China. Such maces were not found in the heartland of East Asia. The major difference between male and female burials is that deceased males held in their hands a horseleg-shaped implement constructed of two pieces of wood. At the end of the wooden piece would be inserted a strip of stone that had been heated in fire before insertion. We know this to be the case because many of the wooden pieces are scorched from the stone. A characteristic attribute of female burials is the placement on the abdomen or lower chest of a carefully constructed, composite (wood, yarn, tufts of hair) phallus. Sometimes a snake or lizard was encased within the two halves of the phallus. Very few people at SR-NC lived to the age of 60. Most of the deceased were relatively young and many human remains are disfigured or incomplete (limbs missing, skulls with holes in them, etc.). Occasionally wooden prostheses are found. Life was harsh, but possible to maintain at a more than merely subsistence level. The dates for the Northern Cemetery were originally thought to be slightly earlier than Small River 5, approximately 2000–1500 BC. When I first heard these dates, they led to great

28

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

consternation, because I could not imagine how the Northern Cemetery could be earlier than Small River 5. NC has all the earmarks of being an offshoot of SR5, not the other way around (see Conclusion below). Furthermore, it is hard to envisage how settlers could have entered the Tarim Basin with their cattle and other aspects of steppe culture over the massive soaring Pamirs to the west, much less across the Hindu Kush or over the high mountains to the north of the Tibetan Plateau. The entire trajectory of entry into the Tarim Basin by agropastoralists during the Bronze Age—based upon cultural attributes, physical and genetic characteristics, archaeological features, language spreads, ease of travel, and so forth—would have been to come from the northwest through the Dzungarian (or Dzhungarian) Gate and other passes (archaeological evidence for this is now being found [Jia and Betts 2010]), around the eastern edge of the Tängri Tagh/Tian Shan (Heavenly Mountains), and then end up in the northeast corner of the Tarim Basin, south of the Quruk Tagh (Sandy Mountains), which is precisely where we find the earliest inhabitants of the basin (at SRC5, Gumugou/Qäwrighul, and closely associated sites). Recent preliminary surveys of this area have uncovered scores of Bronze Age sites, making it the indubitable center and jumping-off point of Bronze Age civilization in the Tarim Basin (Guo Wu 2012, Xinjiang Wenwu Kaogu Yanjiusuo 2008). After having established themselves there, it would make sense for a colony to branch off and head west along the Tarim River. Fortunately, my consternation over the alleged priority of that site in relation to Small River 5 was decisively resolved after J.P. Mallory and I returned from our expedition of June 2011 and had various organic samples from the Northern Cemetery subjected to C14 dating. The series of dates we received was consistent and credible, ranging roughly from 1800 to 1500 BC,3 making it slightly later than Small River 5. This is exactly what I had expected. East of the Northern Cemetery, archaeologists encountered over a hundred dried-up streambeds of what must once have been part

of the northward-running Keriyä River system. Here they found shards, stone tools, querns, and so forth. It took the team three days to cross a large expanse of ancient, withered poplar trees. Some were as large as 1.5 m in diameter. It is interesting that the trees became smaller as the team walked toward the southeast. Judging from the stark, harsh desert around the Northern Cemetery today, it is difficult to imagine that 4,000 years ago an agropastoral, fishing, and hunting people would have managed to survive here. The same was true of the people who lived along the branches of the Small River (which is also now largely dried up) around the same time. Yet we must remember that, even then, clearly their ability to exist in the heart of the desert depended entirely upon the bountiful waters of the ancient Keriyä and Small rivers. Once those rivers disappeared, the communities whose lives depended on them were doomed. The members of the fated communities simply had to move elsewhere. After walking for 13 days and emerging from the desert, the strongest impression of the team of archaeologists who visited the Northern Cemetery in March 2008 was that the stark expanse through which they had passed was once a string of oases. Sic transit gloria mundi (Chen and Zhang 2008).

Conclusion Similar climatic distress as that which occurred around AD 500 (see above) may well have provided the impetus that sent the ancestors of the Small River Cemetery people and the Northern Cemetery people across the steppes and down into the Tarim Basin at the end of the 3rd millennium and beginning of the 2nd millennium (Anthony and Brown, this volume). Who were these people who entered the Tarim Basin around the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC? Genetically, the later Bronze Age people of the western Altai had both maternal (MtDNA) and paternal (Y chromosome) traits that indicate a western European source (Keyser et al. 2009), although there is some indi-

cation that they also picked up maternal genetic traits locally before heading southward into the Dzungarian Basin and thence to the Tarim Basin (Li et al. 2010). Afanasievo (ca. 2500–2000 BC) is a contender as the source for the earliest Tarim Basin settlers. As an outlier, it makes a good candidate for the cultural parallel to Tocharian, which would have been a linguistic outlier in the same region. Afanasievo and Andronovo together center around the 2000 BC cusp which would have been the time when the first Tarim settlers would likely have been assembling in the north before heading southward toward the Tarim Basin. Both had the requisite economies, with an emphasis on cattle and ovicaprids. Though it seems strange for pastoralism to be taking place out in the center of the desert, we know that both at Small River 5 and Northern Cemetery cattle and ovicaprids were relied on heavily. Moreover, Andronovo (2100–1400 BC), the successor to Afanasievo, snugly abuts the Dzungarian Gate and other passes into the Dzungarian Basin, through which the earliest migrants most likely would have passed on their way to becoming the first settlers in the Tarim Basin. In our forthcoming book that is meant to follow up on The Tarim Mummies (2000), Mallory and I will report on new archeological findings that support this sequence of events. It is likely that horses did not fare well in this initial foray into the Tarim Basin during the early 2nd millennium because the environment was so poorly suited to them. Nonetheless, horseleg-shaped ritual implements found in some of the graves indicate that these early settlers had at least a memory of the horse (Mair 2010c:180, No. 67). Later, during the 1st millennium, especially the second half, there is evidence for horses in the Tarim Basin, though not in great numbers; this is no doubt due to the fact that those who had by that time become thoroughly accustomed to horse riding on the steppes figured out ways to maintain limited numbers of horses in niche conditions afforded by oasis habitation. Based upon currently available data, I hypothesize that the people who buried their

The Northern Cemetery

29

dead at Small River 5 were the main trunk of the aeolian sand-mound-building culture. Perhaps because of population pressure or environmental deterioration, a smaller group branched off and headed westward along the Tarim River within about a century of the initial settlement of the area around SRC5. It would have been possible for them to follow the Tarim River all the way to the junction where the Keriyä River flowed into it. Turning south along the Keriyä, they would soon have come to the neighborhood of the Northern Cemetery. Pursuing an identical riverine, agropastoral lifestyle as their compatriots in the environs of SRC5, they would have thrived, but evidently not to the degree of the trunk community in the east. I would not be surprised if, in future years, additional aeolian sand tumuli were discovered in the expanse between SRC5 and the Northern Cemetery, but they would surely have to be located within striking distance of a river that flowed northward into the Tarim River (like the Keriyä River) or flowed southward out of the Tarim River (like the Small River). The scenario outlined above explains how steppe-oriented agropastoralists who were expert at making felt and woolen textiles settled at two distant sites in the midst of a huge desert. Yet many questions remain, and they can only be solved by comprehensive, multidisciplinary research involving geneticists, physical anthropologists, archaeologists, paleobotanists and paleozoologists, ancient textile specialists, and so forth. Ideally, such investigations should be carried out with international cooperation to insure that the most advanced techniques and equipment as well as the highest standards are employed. For example, only in exceedingly rare instances (e.g., the Hami fragment studied by Irene Good [1995]) have ancient textiles from sites in the region undergone the most advanced types of fiber and dye analysis. More immediately, there is a great need for C14 dating of materials from Small River 5. Genetic testing of human remains from the Northern Cemetery (as well as from many other sites throughout the region) is also an urgent desideratum, particularly in light of environmental degradation and the danger of

30

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

contamination by modern humans. Despite the limited investigations and minimal scientific analysis that have been carried out for SRC5 and NC, we at least now have a basic understanding of their intrinsic nature and key significance for comprehending the development of Eurasian civilization during the Bronze Age.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to Pablo Barrera for exacting research with Google Earth on the location and configuration of key sites in the Tarim Basin. My indebtedness to Wang Binghua for his masterful familiarity with Xinjiang archeology of the last 40 years and Lü Enguo for his amiable guidance over decades is beyond measure. Thanks are due as well to Idris Abdurssul for lengthy conversations about his excavations at Small River Cemetery and his reconnaissance expedition to the Northern Cemetery. Guo Wu kindly made available various publications and reports. Finally, without the assistance of Liao Zhaoyu and his colleagues (of the Western Regions Research Institute at Tarim University in Alar) in gaining access to materials and sites, this project would have been severely circumscribed.

NOTES 1. For the general archaeology of the Tarim Basin and a description of the main sites where desiccated corpses (“mummies”) have been found, see Mair 2010b. I have relied on that account for parts of the present chapter, but have revised, enlarged, and updated it extensively. The description of Small River Cemetery 5 is based on Mair 2006, where full references may be found. To date, there have been no archaeological reports on the Northern Cemetery, nor do I expect any for several years, if ever. Consequently, my account of the Northern Cemetery has necessarily been dependent on personal communications from archaeologists, museum workers, and looters, none of whom wished to be identified. Many of my remarks are based on personal observation of artifacts recovered from the Northern Cemetery on two recent trips to the Tarim Basin (June 2011 and May 2012) and currently kept in undisclosed locations. Although it is extremely regrettable that published sources are not available for citation, the tremendous importance of the Northern Cemetery for understanding not only the prehistory of the Tarim

Basin, but for coming to grips with key questions in Eurasian prehistory on the whole, has compelled me to present these provisional findings. It is my earnest desire that—despite its devastation at the hands of looters—the site will eventually be duly described by archaeologists, and the materials that have been recovered from it will be properly conserved and exhibited. 2. Most unfortunately, the site has been so savagely ravaged by looters that archaeologists have little heart to survey or describe it in detail. 3. Summary of radiocarbon dates of material received from Tarim University. All calibrated radiocarbon dates are presented at 2σ, i.e., at 95% probability.

Northern Cemetery Radiocarbon Dates Radiocarbon dates provided by 14CHRONO Centre at Queens University, Belfast, Northern Ireland; measurements taken on 2011–08–27; certificates on file. BFM 1 UBA-18273 BFM 2 UBA-18274 BFM 3 UBA-18275 BFM 4 UBA-18276 BFM 5 UBA-18277 BFM 6 UBA-18278 BFM 7 UBA-18279 BFM 8 UBA-18280

wheat seeds from within textile pocket 3422±44 BP 1879–1622 Cal BC ephedra stalks from within textile pocket 3505±48 BP 1950–1693 Cal BC seeds (possibly from pea family) from within textile pocket 3365±38 BP 1744–1533 Cal BC cord of animal hair 3306±29 BP 1665–1506 Cal BC textile of animal hair 3315±26 BP 1677–1521 Cal BC textile of animal hair 3239±29 BP 1607–1437 Cal BC textile of animal hair 3302±56 BP 1733–1453 Cal BC organic residue from basket 3372±34 BP 1746­–1536 Cal BC

Bibliography Anthony, David W. 2001. Tracking the Tarim Mummies: A Solution to the Puzzle of Indo-European Origins? Archaeology 54.2:76–48. Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. 1999. The Mummies of Ürümchi. New York: W.W. Norton.

Barrera, Pablo N. 2012. Wind and Water: Anthropogenic Use of Landscape at Small River Cemetery No. 5. In The Silk Roads in Time and Space: Migrations, Motifs, and Materials, ed. Victor H. Mair, pp. 20–54. Sino-Platonic Papers 228 (July). Philadelphia: Dept. of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Univ. of Pennsylvania. Available online at http://www.sino-platonic.org/ complete/spp228_silk_roads.pdf. Baumer, Christoph. 2012. The History of Central Asia. Vol. 1: The Age of the Steppe Warriors. London, New York: I.B. Tauris. Bergman, Folke. 1939. Archaeological Researches in Sinkiang, Especially the Lop-Nor Region. Reports from the Scientific Expedition to the North-Western Provinces of China under the Leadership of Dr. Sven Hedin. The Sino-Swedish Expedition, Publication 7. VII. Archaeology, 1. Descriptive lists of textiles by Vivi Sylwan; appendices by Sten Konow and Hjalmar Ljungh. Stockholm: Aktiebolaget Thule. Translated into Mandarin by Wang Anhong as Xinjiang kaogu ji [A Record of Xinjiang Archeology]. Xiyu tanxian kaocha daxi [Series on the Exploration and Investigation of the Western Regions], Ruidian dongfang xue yicong [Translations of Swedish Oriental Studies]. Ürümchi: Xinjiang renmin chubanshe, 1997. Chen Yiming and Zhang Yingchun. 2008. Beifang mudi jingxian ji [An Account of the Startling Discovery of the Northern Cemetery]. Nanfang zhoumo [Southern Weekend] (June 12): D27. Debaine-Francfort, Corinne, and Abduressul Idriss, eds. 2001. Keriya, mémoires d’un fleuve: Archéologie et civilisation des oasis du Taklamakan. Suilly-la-Tour: Findakly. Good, Irene. 1995. Notes on a Bronze Age Textile Fragment from Hami, Xinjiang, with Comments on the Significance of Twill. Journal of Indo-European Studies 23.3-4:319–45. Guo Wu. 2012. Xinjiang shiqian wanqi shehui de kaoguxue yanjiu (Archeological Studies on the Late Prehistoric Society of Xinjiang). Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. 郭物:《新疆史前晚期 社会的考古学研究》 , 上海古籍出版社， 2012年 Hansen, Valerie. 2012. The Silk Road: A New History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The Northern Cemetery

31

Jia, Peter Wei Ming, and Alison V.G. Betts. 2010, A Re-analysis of the Qiemu’erqieke (Shamirshak) Cemeteries, Xinjiang, China. Journal of Indo-European Studies 38.3-4:275–318. Keyser, Christine, Caroline Bouakaze, Eric Crubézy, Valery G. Nikolaev, Daniel Montagnon, Tatiana Reis, and Bertrand Ludes. 2009. Ancient DNA Provides New Insights into the History of South Siberian Kurgan People. Human Genetics 126:395–410. Available online at http://www.springerlink.com/content/4462755368m322k8. Li, Chunxiang, Hongjie Li, Yinqiu Cui, Chengzhi Xie, Dawei Cai, Wenying Li, Victor H. Mair, Zhi Xu, Quanchao Zhang, Idelisi Abuduresule, Li Jin, Hong Zhu and Hui Zhou. 2010. Evidence that a West-East Admixed Population Lived in the Tarim Basin as Early as the Early Bronze Age. BMC Biology 8:15. Available online at http://www.biomedcentral. com/1741-7007/8/15. Mair, Victor H. 1995a. Mummies of the Tarim Basin. Archaeology 48.2:28–35. ———, ed. 1995b. The Mummified Remains Found in the Tarim Basin. Special issue of The Journal of Indo-European Studies 23.3-4. ———. 1996. I corpi essiccati di popolazioni caucasoidi d’ell Età del Bronzo e del Ferro rinvenuti nel Bacino del Tarim (Cina). In Cina e Iran: Da Alessandro Magno alla Dinastia Tang, ed. Alfredo Cadonna and Lionello Lanciotti, pp. 3–27. Orientalia Venetiana V. Florence: Leo S. Olschki. ———, ed. 1998. The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia. 2 vols. Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph Series, 26. Washington, DC, and Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Man in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications. ———. 2005. Genes, Geography, and Glottochronology: The Tarim Basin during Late Prehistory and History. In Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference. Los Angeles, November 5–6, 2004, ed. Karlene JonesBley, Martin E. Huld, Angela Della Volpe, and Miriam Robbins Dexter, pp. 1–46. Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph Series vol.

32

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

50. Washington: Institute for the Study of Man. With an appendix by Gerd Carling, “Proto-Tocharian, Common Tocharian, and Tocharian— On the Value of Linguistic Connections in a Reconstructed Language,” pp. 47–71. ———. 2006. The Rediscovery and Complete Excavation of Ördek’s Necropolis. Journal of Indo-European Studies 34.3-4:273–318. ———. 2010a. The Mummies of East Central Asia. Expedition 52.3:23–32. ———. 2010b. The Archeology of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. In Secrets of the Silk Road, ed. Victor H. Mair, pp. 26–52. Santa Ana, CA: Bowers Museum. ———, ed. 2010c. Secrets of the Silk Road: An Exhibition of Discoveries from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China. Santa Ana, CA: Bowers Museum. Mair, Victor H., and Cheng Fangyi. 2013. Kungang (昆岗): The Making of an Imaginary Archaeological Culture. Sino-Platonic Papers 237 (April). Philadelphia: Dept. of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Univ. of Pennsylvania. Available online at www.sino-platonic.org/ complete/spp237_kungang.pdf. Mallory, J.P., and Victor H. Mair. 2000. The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West. London: Thames & Hudson. Romgard, Jan. 2008. Questions of Ancient Human Settlements in Xinjiang and the Early Silk Road Trade. Sino-Platonic Papers 185 (November). Philadelphia: Dept. of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Univ. of Pennsylvania. Available online at http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp185_silk_road.pdf. Wang, Binghua, ed. 2001. Xinjiang gushi: gudai Xinjiang jumin ji qi wenhua (The Ancient Corpses of Xinjiang: The Ancient Peoples of Xinjiang and Their Culture), trans. Victor H. Mair. Ürümchi: Xinjiang Renmin Chubanshe. Xinjiang Wenwu Kaogu Yanjiusuo [Xinjiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archeology]. 2008. Lobubo diqu Xiaohe liuyu de kaogu diaocha (The Archaeological Investigation in Xiaohe Valley, Lop Nur). Bianjiang kaogu yanjiu [Studies on Border Archaeology] 7:371–407.

DIT

ER

RA

NE

AN

SE

SEA

1500km

1

Cultural Area

Silk Road - Sea Route

Silk Road - Steppe Route

lga



Vo R.

Volg a- U ral Stepp es  S’yezzhe Sergeivka Botai

2

ca

Elam

IRAN

 Azov area

UR A Tob L M T S. ol R . mR .

O C E A N

us

R.



Muziris

INDIA

 Karachi

Ind

BACTRIA

AFGHANISTAN

I N D I AN

XINJIANG

Quruk Tagh

.

 Kandahar

Gandhara 

Y

t ang

Yellow

R.

R.

MeYingpan 

ze

 Chang’an

 Northern Cemetary

Niya

 Zaghunluq

Yuansha Gucheng

Loulan  Lop Nor  Gumugou Xiaohe

Turfan Subeixi

 Urumqi

Yutian (Keriyä)

Dandan-Öyliq  Qaradöng  Sampula  Khotan

R. Tarim

 Karakorum

Dunhuang 

Sogdia  Bukhara  Samarkand Sarazm   Pendjikent

Da

rya NEPAL R.

Syr

HIM A MTSLAYA .

Fergana Kara Kum Tarim Basin Desert TADJIKISTANValley Tarim R. Tak lamakan IR D eser t P A MT S . M

ARAL SEA

 Pazyryk A LT Dzungarian M A I TS. Gate

6

R.

LF

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

FIG. 1.1. Map with sites discussed in the text. Cultural areas (approximate) shown include: 1. Tripolye, 2. Babylonia, 3. Skelya, 4. Yamnaya, 5. Andronovo, 6. Afanasievo. [Map by Ardeth Anderson]

 City  Region  Site

RED

0

Assur

.

SAUDI ARABIA

Khvalysnk

Dn ie p er S te pp es Ishi

Donets 4 Ural R.  Basin 3 Po Orenburg Varfolomievka ntic 5 S te Ca s p i ppe an Karagash KAZAKHSTAN Begash Ca s  u

sR

R.

SYRIA

A 

SEA

rate

EGYPT

CK

h Eup R GU

ya R

Silk Road - Land Route

A

BLA

ANA Kanesh T (Kültepe)

GREECE

OLI

1 MOLDOVA Usatovo   Balkans

Dereivka 

Tigris R.

e Nil

R.

za

Tis

R. er nie p

D

be

Alexandria  Cairo 

ME

 Rome

nu

dy R .

Da

PE N SIA

a wad

r R. s su

Ir r

R. ste A

Khotan R.

ie Dn CA SP IA N SE

Am ar uD

ng Keriyä R.

Bug R.

AG TD . E S P T KO M

Small R.

Irty

. sh R

ko

A-1

A-2

Reconfiguring the Silk Road FIG. 1.2. Timeline: major ruling groups broken down by geographical areas.

Timeline by Anne Marie Kane, after Daniel C. Waugh

FIG. 3.2. Wooden posts marked cemetery sites in the Northern Cemetery. [Photo by Idris Abdursul]

FIG. 3.3. Northern Cemetery; the opened shroud revealed a mummy wearing a cap. [Photo by Idris Abdursul]

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

A-3

FIG. 3.4 (upper left). Northern Cemetery; climate conditions preserved organic materials such as this woven basket. [Photo by Idris Abdursul] FIG. 3.5 (upper right). Northern Cemetery; simple carved wooden figurines such as this were found in graves. [Photo by Idris Abdursul] FIG. 3.6 (left). Various items of clothing were recovered from graves in the Northern Cemetery. These boots were found on the feet of a mummy. [Photo by Idris Abdursul]

A-4

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

FIG. 3.7. These mummies were found in the Northern Cemetery. Hair and a mustache allow us to identify the mummy on the right as a male. The mummy on the left wears a felt hat. [Photos by Idris Abdursul]

FIG. 4.1. This striped woolen cloak or blanket was wrapped around the body of a mummy. Xiaohe (Small River) Cemetery 5, ca. 1800–1500 BC. [Photo by Elizabeth Barber]

FIG. 4.2. The top corner of a wool blanketwrap from a female mummy from Qäwrighul can be seen here. Xinjiang Institute of Archaeology, ca. 1800 BC. [Photo by Elizabeth Barber]

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

A-5

FIG. 4.3. This wood figurine of a female wearing a felt hat and woven clothing was excavated from Xiaohe (Small River) Cemetery 5, dated ca. 1800–1500 BC. [Photo by Elizabeth Barber]

FIG. 4.4. Many felt hats recovered from early burials are displayed at the Xinjiang Museum. [Photo by Victor Mair]

FIG. 4.5. “The Beauty of Xiaohe” is particularly well preserved. She was recovered from Xiaohe (Small River) Cemetery 5 and dates to ca. 1800–1500 BC. [Photo by Elizabeth Barber]

A-6

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

FIG. 4.7. This infant mummy from Zaghunluq wears a blue and red felt hat and is shrouded in deep purply-red plain-weave wool cloth tied with bi-colored cords. [Photo by Elizabeth Barber]

FIG. 4.8. One frieze of a huge wool pile carpet from the frozen tombs of Pazyryk (Kurgan 5), ca. 400 BC, shows a line of horsemen with shabraks (saddle blankets). The legs of the figure on the left extend over the shabrak. [Photo by Elizabeth Barber]

FIG. 4.10. Tapestry boots with leather soles were excavated from Tomb No. 5 of Cemetery No. 1, Niyä, 2nd–3rd century AD. [Photo by Elizabeth Barber]

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

A-7

FIG. 4.11. This multi-colored tapestry bag was recovered from Tomb No. 5 of Cemetery No. 1, Niyä, 2nd–3rd century AD. [Photo by Elizabeth Barber]

FIG. 4.12. To show the garments, this drawing adds the part of the tapestry warrior preserved in a second fragment. (Bottom half drawn after sketch by T. Vogel and description of colors in Wieczorek and Lind 2007:214). [Image by Elizabeth Barber]

FIG. 4.13. Intricate polychrome silk brocades mask the faces of a man and a woman buried together in Tomb 3 at Niyä (ca. 1st century BC/AD). [Photo by Victor Mair]

A-8

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

FIG. 4.14. The garments of Yingpan Man include a double-weave robe with designs of putti, goats, and trees, ca. 3rd–4th century AD. [Photo by Elizabeth Barber]

FIGS. 4.15A, B. The obverse (top) and reverse sides of a double-weave fragment from Sampula depict a bunch of grapes. [Photos by Irene Good]

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

A-9

FIG. 4.16. Yingpan Man’s trousers are colorfully embroidered. [Photo by Elizabeth Barber]

FIG. 4.17. The blue cuffs of Yingpan Man’s robe are carefully embroidered in chain-stitch. [Photo by Elizabeth Barber]

A-10

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

A-11

FIG. 5.1. Sites described in the text are included on this map. [Image by Michael D. Frachetti]

FIG. 5.3. This lateral view of a coffin from Xiaohe includes a mummy dressed in textiles and accompanied by a wheat basket (center). [From Wenwu (Cultural Relics) 10 (2007):12]

A-12

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

FIG. 5.4. View to the north of excavations at Begash in 2005. After Frachetti and Mar’yashev 2007. [Photo by Michael D. Frachetti]

FIG. 5.5. This photograph of the Chibandi range (Dzhungar Mountains piedmont zone) shows the site of Begash, located in the first ravine on the right. After Frachetti and Mar’yashev 2007. [Photo by Michael D. Frachetti]

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

A-13

FIG. 6.1. The Eurasian steppes with selected archaeological sites. Isolated outcrops of granite with pine forest are colored brown, and occur as islands in the steppes east of the Ishim River to the western Altai. Pastoralists from the western steppes might have followed these islands of pine forest through Karagash to colonize the western Altai mountain meadows. [Image by David W. Anthony and Dorcas R. Brown]

A-14

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

Western Steppes

Western Steppes

West 6th - 5th ml BC Dnieper-Donets II 6th-5th ml BC 10 sites 1,652 NISP Horse bones 12.90% Wild animals 64.60% Cattle 19.10% Sheep/Goat 2.23% Pig 0.25% Dog 0.92% 4th ml BC

Horse bones Wild animals Cattle Sheep/Goat Pig Dog

Sredni Stog 4th ml BC 4 sites 4,610 NISP 54.70% 20% 16.39% 5.33% 2.65% 0.90%

Horse bones Wild animals Cattle Sheep/Goat Pig Dog

2nd ml BC

Horse bones Wild animals Cattle Sheep/Goat Pig Dog

2 sites NISP 20654 11.70% 2.81% 18% 66.41% 0.20% 0.82%

Khvalynsk 4500 BC Cemetery 86 MNI 13% 0% 27% 61% 0% 0%

Repin 4th ml BC 1 site

Botai Tersek Kuznetsk-Altai 3500 BC 4th ml BC 5th ml BC 1 site 2 sites >300,000 NISP 93,000 NISP 99.90% 59.70% 0% 0.10% 40% 100% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0.30% 0%

54.54% 9.19% 18.18% 9.09% 9% 0%

HORSE

40 graves 8.11% 0% 16% 70% 0% 5%

Srubnaya Middle Volga 2nd ml BC 16.40% 0% 40.50% 32.30% 10.80% 0%

WILD

CATTLE

Atbasar 5th ml BC 1 site NISP 161 70% 30% 0% 0% 0% 0%

Yamnaya Burials 3300-2500 BC

Mikhailovka II and III 10.50% 0% 59.30% 29.10% 0.40% 0.70%

Srubnaya North Pontic 2nd ml BC 21.50% 0% 46.60% 24% 7.90% 0%

Western Altai

Volga-Ural 6th-5th ml BC 4 sites 8,064 NISP 39.50% 39.80% 11.45% 9.15% 0.02% 0.02%

Usatovo Yamnaya Settlements 3300-2800 BC 3300-2500 BC 3rd ml BC

Central Steppes

East

?

Afanasievo 3100-2300 BC Sergeevka 2600-2800 BC 1 site 636 NISP 20.30% 36.60% 2.50% 40.60% 0% 0%

Balyktyul settlement 8.20% 12.20% 12.60% 67% 0% 0%

Andronovo Central Kazakstan 2nd ml BC 24.20% 0% 29.40% 46.40% 0% 0%

Andronovo Eastern Kazakstan 2nd ml BC 16.80% 0% 38.90% 44.30% 0% 0%

SHEEP/GOAT PIG

DOG

Burial Context

Settlement Context

FIG. 6.2. Animal bone percentages in selected sites and site groups from the 6th millennium BC at the top to the 2nd millennium BC at the bottom, and from west on the left to east on the right. Cattle and sheep appear from the beginning, but do not constitute the majority until the 3rd millennium BC. [Image by David W. Anthony and Dorcas R. Brown]

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

A-15

16.0   Eneolithic   15.0  

EBA   MBA  

14.0  

MBA-­‐LBA   LBA  

12.0  

N  15  

13.0  

11.0   10.0   9.0   8.0   -­‐24.0  

-­‐23.0  

-­‐22.0  

-­‐21.0  

-­‐20.0  

-­‐19.0  

-­‐18.0  

-­‐17.0  

-­‐16.0  

-­‐15.0  

C  13   FIG. 6.3. Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope averages (d13C and d15N) for 59 individuals from the Eneolithic (Khvalynsk), the EBA (Yamnaya), the MBA (Poltavka), the transitional MBA–LBA (Sintashta-Potapoovka), and the LBA (Srubnaya) periods in the middle Volga steppes. The Eneolithic diet (blue diamonds) was significantly enriched in 15N and depleted in 13C compared to the diets of all Bronze Age individuals. The Bronze Age diet probably included less fish and more dairy and sheep-cattle products (Schulting and Richards, forthcoming). [Image by David W. Anthony and Dorcas R. Brown]

A-16

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

4

MORE LIGHT ON THE XINJIANG TEXTILES Elizabeth Wayland Barber

T

he remarkable geological conditions that preserve organic materials in the Tarim Basin have made the area a goldmine for textile history. Mere photographs of ancient cloth usually fail to reveal much that can be deduced from the objects themselves. But the arrival of a handsome group of these textiles at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California, in 2010, enabled me to discover that the fabrics were actually far more remarkable than stated in the exhibition catalog, and to piece together something more of early Eurasian textile history.1 But let us start at the beginning.

Earliest Culture Sheep were domesticated in the Near East around 8000 BC and inbred to the point of usable wooliness by about 4000 BC. Prior to that, plants alone had provided humans with the fibers they needed; the use of silk began even later than wool. The newly woolly sheep, from which both food (from milk) and clothing (from wool) could be continuously harvested, were then taken far and wide across western Eurasia by their herders. The earliest Bronze Age peoples of the Tarim Basin, found along the Quruk Tagh from around 1800 BC, brought along some of these sheep that had not yet been bred to be genetically white (or white with some black) like typical sheep today.

Instead, the animals retained their original camouflaging colors, variegated among white, beige, golden, chocolate brown, and black to blend in with the countryside. So, while still largely ignorant of the chemistry of making dyes colorfast, people simply sorted out the different natural colors in the fleeces in order to weave patterns into their cloth. We have suspected this to be the case in early Mesopotamia, where early textiles are preserved almost exclusively as colorless impressions and pseudomorphs; but in the Quruk Tagh textiles we have abundant proof of this practice. For example, we see this sorting in a wool blanket-wrap (Silk Road exhibition catalogue [hereafter catalogue] #64 or Fig. 4.1 in color insert). The warp in the middle is tan, but dark brown to one side and milk-chocolate to the other. Tightly packed weft in varying shades of tan cover the warp (that is, using weft-faced weave) in thin wedges, alternating with thin wedges of balanced weave—that is, where about the same number of threads run each way, so the dark warps show through to produce yet other color effects. The blanket thus appears to have three large stripes in the warp direction and many slim ones in the weft direction. To secure everything, the warp-ends have been braided and the last weft bound in by wrapping it with extra yarn. People must, however, already have been experimenting with dyes and with the problems

of making them chemically permanent—colorfast against both light and washing (cf. Barber 1999:72–80). A few strange supplementary threads that I noticed many years ago, woven as pinstripes into the blanket-wrap of a woman found at Qäwrighul, near Loulan (Barber 1999: pl. 10b) (Fig. 4.2, see color insert), made me wonder if the maker had dyed these threads some bright color to ornament the cloak, but the dye had faded. Further excavations at Xiaohe have confirmed that occasional ornamental pinstripes, preferably red, were indeed the favorite form of textile ornament at that early date. We see them often in the more recently excavated material, for example on the tunic-like wrapper of a little wooden doll (catalogue #59, Fig. 4.3, see color insert), constructed in weft-faced plain weave with strongly reinforced selvedges, and decorated at the bottom with several short redbrown stripes which were woven in on the loom (not embroidered afterwards, as non-weavers tend to assume). The tunic is fastened at the shoulders with two decorated wooden pins like those found on the mummies themselves, and is secured at the waist by a narrow white woven band or sash with twined selvedges. Like many of the mummies, the doll wears a felted woolen bonnet, and near her left shoulder are four little spherical bundles tied into the edge of the blanket-wrap with short lengths of red-brown yarn. Compare, for example, the female mummy found by Sven Hedin in 1934, with its hood, blanket-wrap, and three bundles containing ephedra (Barber 1999: fig. 5.8).2 Another wooden doll (catalogue #53), this one male, also sports a few short red pinstripes on his wrapper, which he wears much shorter as a belted tunic. Most remarkable, however, are his copper or bronze hoop earrings. We almost never find metal in the early Tarim graves, whether because of taboo or reuse, although this was already the Bronze Age, and we do find mummies with pierced earlobes. Here at last we get a glimpse of their jewelry. Red pinstripes also adorned hats and blankets, as seen in photographs of fiber-felt hats (catalogue #49, Fig. 4.4, see color insert) (Wieczorek and Lind 2007:109).

34

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

The “Beauty of Xiaohe’s” blanket-wrap (catalogue #61, Fig. 4.5, see color insert) provides another example of these techniques, and more. The cloak is entirely in plain weave (threads passing over-one-under-one in each direction—also known as “tabby”). The stripes were produced by several rows of thick weft in a balanced plain weave alternating with several rows of quite thin weft in weft-faced plain weave. The weft-faced stripes tend to look paler than the balanced weave. Often these stripes peter out in a skinny wedge-shape—that is, they do not go all the way across the fabric. That can be done deliberately, but it is typical of weaving in which the warp threads did not all have the same tension. (This is because the limper warp threads will prevent the rows of weft from packing closely, whereas tighter warp threads will allow the weft to lie closer together. As a result, the cloth builds unevenly during weaving, an unevenness that may require periodic correction by weaving in extra wedge-shaped patches of weft to straighten the line.) Another possibility is that three weavers were working on the cloth simultaneously, and instead of passing her bobbin along to the next weaver (as done in the huge woolen cloaks woven in Bronze Age Denmark), each woman worked back and forth in her own section, overlapping her returns with those of her neighbor so as not to cause slits in the cloth. Three of the original edges of the lady’s cloak are visible, showing us yet more about how it was woven. The weaver began at the edge now around her ankles. This starting border is a closed selvedge (where the threads—here, warp threads—loop back into the cloth), and the edge has been strengthened by twining the first two weft-threads around each other as they cross the fabric. This indicates that the beginning of the cloth must have been lashed to one beam of the loom, the cloth-beam. The side-selvedges were also reinforced, but by wrapping extra yarn around the outermost thread(s). (It is hard to tell, without a microscope, whether this was done during the weaving or after the piece was finished. The blanket shown in Fig. 4.1 is similar.) By the lady’s shoulder one can see part of

FIG. 4.6. The earliest Central Asian representation of a loom is from a painted panel of the 1st millennium AD found at Dandan-Öyliq (or Uiliq). [Image by Elizabeth Barber]

the closing border: the warp-ends were braided together and the last weft wrapped with extra yarn to keep it from raveling out. These details suggest that the loom used was a two-beam loom, almost certainly a ground-loom similar to that used in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia and in parts of the Middle East yet today (Barber 1991:83–91). Since you can peg it out as big as you please, it can readily produce these huge blanket-wraps, unlike the narrow backstrap looms that the Chinese show themselves employing for silks (Barber 1991: fig. 3.1). But since looms are merely clever aggregates of plain sticks, they are seldom identifiable in the archaeological record. The earliest Central Asian representation, from Dandan-Öyliq (or Uiliq), is AD and shows the narrow Chinese type (Fig. 4.6) (see Barber 1999:195). Two more remarks before we move to later cultures. First, the grass basket (catalogue #55) shows us that they were skilled in the weft twining technique, in which two weft twist around each other every time they go over or under a warp-element. This technique is attested back

to 25,000 BC in Europe, at Palaeolithic sites in Moravia (Soffer 2000:62–64 and fig.1), and again in the Early Neolithic in Israel (at Nahal Hemar ca. 6500 BC) and Turkey (at Çatal Höyük ca. 6000 BC; see Barber 1991:126–32, with references). Second, the gorgeous eyelashes of the Beauty of Xiaohe finally prove my earlier hypothesis, deduced from little details at Zaghunluq, that those bodies that mummified had to have died in early winter, flash-freezing and gradually freeze-drying over the next few months, whereas other bodies decomposed (Barber 1999:181– 82). People have repeatedly appropriated my deduction as truth or debunked it as wrong without citing any clinching evidence either way. Here at last is hard evidence. Eyeballs, being wet, cause rapid decomposition of both themselves and the eyelash-holding eyelids when warm; but by the same token, being wet, both they and the thin overlying eyelids will freeze rapidly when very cold, thus securing the eyelashes in place. Unlike putrefaction, the gentle process of freeze-drying will not dislodge eyelashes.3

More Light on the Xinjiang Textiles

35

Later Cultures By 1000 BC, people had clearly worked out the problems of fixing red, blue, and yellow plant dyes. In 1999, I described the fabrics excavated initially at Zaghunluq, including the 3-monthold baby with the blue bonnet (Fig. 4.7, see color insert). The gorgeous blue on the bonnet is almost certainly indican (whether from woad or indigo plants we do not know), and the remarkably bright hue is typically the result of indican on cashmere, a fiber Irene Good identified elsewhere in that tomb (Barber 1999:66). The weaves remain simple and the weavers inventive: the texture-stripe in the baby’s wrapper results from using three rows of overspun (that is, intensely twisted) yarn in plain weave, while the interesting border on the shawl results from alternating rows of red and blue weft in a weft-faced plain weave (Barber 1999:52–53 and fig. 5.6; pl. 4a). The baby’s presumed father, whose accompanying horsehide, saddle, and horse-sacrifice peg him as a horseman, wears a type of garment that must have been fairly new then: trousers, complete with a gusset set on the bias for more comfortable horseback riding (Barber 1999: fig. 2.11 and pl. 1). His are the earliest pants and gussets we have. The somewhat later pants in the exhibit (catalogue #42) are even roomier. Pants seem to have developed specifically for horse riding, in the 2nd millennium BC. Another piece of gear developed by the horsemen was the shabrak, or showy saddle-blanket spread between horse and rider. The one with a handsome leaf pattern from Sampula (catalogue #41) displays pile carpet technique. Close inspection of rips in the fabric shows that the weaver used the symmetrical pile-knot, exactly as in the famous Pazyryk carpet of the 4th century BC (see Fig. 4.8 in color insert and Fig. 4.9) and unlike the somewhat earlier shabrak from Bash Adar done in asymmetrical knotting. The Pazyryk carpet actually depicts horses wearing fancy shabraks. Long a mystery, the origin of pile rugs is strongly suggested by early pile fragments from Sampula. These scraps show that several rows of

36

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

FIG. 4.9. The two common knots used in Eurasian carpets are shown here: left, the symmetrical or Turkish knot, first attested at Pazyryk; and, right, the asymmetrical or Persian knot, first attested at Bash Adar. One or more rows of plain weave must be inserted between rows of knots to hold the rug together. Bottom: the two types of knots viewed sideways. [Image by Elizabeth Barber]

plain weave, which is quickly done, intervene between each time-consuming row of pile knotting. The pile is then left quite long to cover the plain weft—a much easier, quicker way of making a knotted rug than knotting every second row. The pattern of the Sampula fragments, when pieced together, consists of simple concentric rings of different colors, as in the very archaic tulu carpets woven the same way and still used as sleeping rugs by 19th-century Persian-speaking Kurds. Another technique handsomely represented in the Tarim Basin in the late 1st millennium BC is tapestry. Plain weave, faced weaves, and pile can all be monochrome. But tapestry is one of several techniques used specifically for making polychrome designs. Each color of weft is woven back and forth across the bare warp exactly where that color is needed, then packed tightly to cover the warp (that is, it is weft-faced). There is no other weft holding the cloth together, so it takes careful planning. Unfortunately, slits in the cloth will develop where two colors keep going around neighboring warp-threads, row after row. The solution for the weaver is to design the pattern to minimize straight lines parallel to the

warp; but for the analyst, the slits instantly indicate the patterning technique. So when we spot little telltale slits in the flowers on a pair of handsome boots (catalogue #83, Fig. 4.10, see color insert), we know the design was woven on the loom in tapestry, not embroidered (as the catalogue states). The decorative façade of the boots, including the rainbow-striped sides, is entirely woven and tightly weft-faced. (The weft runs parallel to the patterned band, and the warp at right angles to it.) You can see the slits developing between neighboring warp-threads as weft of different colors stop and turn around, row after row, so as to stay within their respective color fields. This slitting cannot happen with embroidery, since there the stitches are applied to an already woven cloth. In fact, the pattern has been cleverly designed by a master-weaver to minimize the instability in the cloth necessarily caused by slits. (The earliest preserved tapestry, both slit and dovetail, comes from Egypt, from about 1480 BC, although evidence suggests tapestry was already being woven in Syria by 2400 BC.) Another solution to the problem of slits can be seen in the woolen mirror-bag (catalogue #86, Fig. 4.11, see color insert). The little patterned strip down the middle of this attractive bag is done in pushed (or deformed) tapestry, woven in while the cloth was on the loom. The different colored weft threads, running parallel to the strip, were simply shoved around on the warp (which runs across the bag) to make them sit where wanted for the design, with others of a different color woven in to hold them there. Again, this technique is far more difficult, more virtuosic, than simple embroidery (see below). But the most magnificent piece of tapestry in the exhibit, and perhaps the finest that has survived from the ancient world, is the fragment of what must have been a huge wall hanging (catalogue #38), showing a centaur with a flying cape as part of a dark border full of foliage and critters above (originally around?) the main scene, and below this a guardsman with a long spear. The weaving is masterful, as fine as any Gobelin tapestry: the details around the man’s

eyes and mouth and on the spearhead intruding into the frame of the picture are exquisite. A pale yellow headband with a thin red stripe captures the guard’s long black hair, apparently braided in cornrows across his scalp. Both the man’s face and the centaur, a figure from Greek mythology, suggest origins farther west, perhaps Bactria or Persia. Although clearly woven as part of a wall hanging, this fragment and an adjoining piece, not in the exhibit, were found remade into a pair of trouser legs. If we add the second piece (see Fig. 4.12 in color insert), we can see that the spearman wears a hip-length red coat edged with a yellow band, over a fancy flowered vest held in by a belt of square silver plates (Wieczorek and Lind 2007:214). Beneath the vest he wears a pale pink shirt, distinguishable at its neckline. The headband, red coat, and other details suggest that he is dressed in accordance with Persian/Parthian royalty (Knauer 1998), another indicator of westerly origin. In addition to tapestry, the weavers produced numerous brocades, yet another pattern-weaving technique. Take, for example, “shoes with embroidered characters” in the catalogue (catalogue #7-2). The Chinese characters on this magnificently wrought pair of slippers are (again) not embroidered—that would have been easy. Embroidery refers specifically to adding ornamentation to an already woven cloth by means of stitches taken with a needle and thread. (Such stitches can form any pattern and move anywhere across the cloth.) Instead, the characters here have been woven in with colored weft, a process requiring far more skill. All the red characters are in one line, ending with little red triangles, all the blue ones in another, ending in little blue triangles. This is where supplementary threads of red or blue are running through the cloth. They typically float along beneath the ground weave that holds the cloth together and are brought to the surface exactly where needed for the design. This technique of brocading is particularly suited to bringing out the beauties of silk fiber, and Chinese artisans seem to have started experimenting with it already by 1500

More Light on the Xinjiang Textiles

37

BC. So when these shoes were woven, the weavers were already great masters at this technique. But there is more. The fabric has actually been shaped during the weaving to fit the toe of the shoe—another very difficult and masterful technique. Bands of a given width can be seen tapering to a point to shape the cloth (much as in knitting socks). Some of these bands—especially the dark blue bands with white edges near the top of the toe—were even woven as tapestry. (The entire cloth is faced. It appeared to me weft-faced, but Angela Sheng [2010:41] claims the bands are warp-faced and sewn together after weaving, to cover the toes. Either way, these are masterpieces of silk brocade.) Many other brocades exist in the collection. For example, excavators at Niyä unearthed the grave of a charming couple fairly smothered in brocades, although these were scattered about in the exhibit: a checkered dress, (catalogue #88); two oblong face-masks from the deceased man and woman (catalogue #84-1 and #84-2, see Fig. 4.13 in color insert), the latter made from the same brocade as a pair of mittens (catalogue #89); plus a large coverlet (catalogue #85, not, apparently, actually quilted as the label implies). These are warp-faced brocades—technically, warpface compound tabby. Yet another technique occurs on a fancy silk robe (catalogue #72). The pattern is so small that it is hard to see even up close, but there is a tiny lozenge-based design on the light blue silk and on the white silk patch on the right shoulder, which is, once again, not embroidered but woven in, apparently using damask technique. In damask, the threads of ground-warp and groundweft simply hop over and under more than one thread of the other system where needed to form the design. Among the most spectacular fabrics in the exhibit are those worn by “Yingpan Man” (catalogue #80; see Fig. 4.14 in color insert). And here we see yet another skill, for his woolen caftan is done in double-weave. This technique creates two complete layers of cloth at the same time, bound together by the threads crossing through each other where the designs occur. Thus on one

38

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

face, yellow warp and weft are brought to the surface to form the patterns (symmetrical goats, naked putti fighting, and foliage), while red warp and weft form the background. On the other face (which we cannot see, except where there is a small tear), the same figures occur in red on a yellow background. The patterns strongly recall Greco-Roman art, as does the grapevine pattern on the only other piece of double-weave I have seen from Xinjiang, from Sampula (Figs. 4.15A and B, see color insert). These designs suggest that such pieces were made around the eastern end of the Roman Empire and traded eastward into the Tarim Basin. (We know that patterned double-weaves were woven in the Mediterranean world from at least the Late Bronze Age (Barber 1991:156, 198–99, 325, 370n). Finally we come to true embroidery, for Yingpan Man’s trousers as well as his blue cuff and pillow are colorfully embroidered in chain-stitch with wool thread on silk cloth (Figs. 4.16 and 4.17, see color insert). Both the stitch used and some of the delicate curly patterns resemble the early silk embroidery found in a frozen tomb at Pazyryk (500 miles due north of Yingpan)—a 4th century BC Chinese silk made into a saddle-cloth (Rudenko 1970: figs. 89–92). A particularly interesting cloth (catalogue #25-1, like #84-4) bears the most popular textile pattern in Central and Western Asia from the 7th to the 13th century AD. Nicknamed the pearl-roundel, this pattern was woven chiefly by the Sogdians using an even more complex weave, samitum (a weft-faced compound twill), where an extra set of wefts form the design and the surface is satin-like. The design consists of row after row of small pearl-like circles framing a central field whose design, often of people or animals, repeats. Another repeated design fills the crevices between the rows and columns. What is particularly charming to a textile historian is that the exhibit happens to contain a nice example of the source of this design, which was inspired by popular jewelry: a gold ring from several centuries earlier (catalogue #79). Its stone bezel shows a seated girl, and the engraved scene is surrounded by round gold beads—exactly as

in the textile pattern. The cloths found so wonderfully preserved in the Uyghur Autonomous Region add enormously to our understanding of early textile history and development. I hope these descriptions of the actual techniques used to create this remarkable group of fabrics will be lastingly useful to textile historians. Here we can glimpse how much we have lost to the ravages of time.

NOTES 1. Boldface numbers with # refer to the numbering of the Silk Road exhibition catalogue (Mair 2010); generally excellent photographs of the items can be found there. Exhaustive descriptions (and photos) also sometimes occur in the superb catalogue of a similar but not identical exhibit held earlier in Berlin (Wieczorek and Lind 2007). Weaving terms are defined here as needed, but diagrams and the earliest history of these structures occur more fully in Barber 1991. We must be aware that some of the copious misinformation in the labels and catalogue stems from inadequate translation of technical textile terms. In our industrial era, few people—including dictionary-makers—know these terms in any language. But that makes it even more important, for science’s sake, to fix them here. 2. Ephedra is a reedy-looking plant that contains a mild amount of stimulant and bronchial dilator (Barber 1999:161–66 and fig. 8.4). It occurs in almost all these early burials, but we can only guess at why these people used it. Its earliest cultural attestation is in the Merv Oasis to the west, about 2100 BC. 3. Remarks at the conference showed me that people sometimes misunderstand the nature of freezedrying, believing that something that is quite dry with no ice-crystals could not be called “freeze-dried.” If anything with a high water content, such as a corpse or wet

cloth, is subjected to subfreezing temperatures, the water in it freezes. If it remains frozen for a long time in a dry environment (hours for laundry, months for a corpse or piece of fruit), the frozen water in it can evaporate even while frozen—a process physicists call sublimation and grocers call freeze-drying. When it is then dug up (or removed from the wash line or freezer), it may be completely dried out; and, since the water is now gone, the object will no longer have any ice crystals even if it is still at a temperature below freezing. It will simply look dry—it has freeze-dried.

Bibliography Barber, Elizabeth J. Wayland. 1991. Prehistoric Textiles. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1999. The Mummies of Ürümchi. New York: W.W. Norton. Knauer, Elfriede. 1998. The Camel’s Load in Life and Death. Zurich: Akanthus. Mair, Victor, ed. 2010. Secrets of the Silk Road. Santa Ana, CA: Bowers Museum. Rudenko, S.I. 1970. The Frozen Tombs of Siberia. The Pazyryk Burials of Iron Age Horsemen, trans. M.W. Thompson. Berkeley: University of California. First published in Russian 1953 by Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Sheng, Angela. 2010. Textiles from the Silk Road. Expedition 52.3:33–43. Soffer, Olga. 2000. Gravettian Technologies in Social Contexts. In Hunters of the Golden Age. The Mid Upper Palaeolithic of Eurasia, 30,000– 20,000 BP, ed. W. Roebroeks, M. Mussi, J. Svoboda, and K. Fennema, pp. 59–75. Leiden: Univ.of Leiden. Wieczorek, Alfried, and Christoph Lind. 2007. Ursprünge der Seidenstrasse. Stuttgart: Thiess.

More Light on the Xinjiang Textiles

39

5

SEEDS FOR THE SOUL Ideology and Diffusion of Domesticated Grains across Inner Asia Michael D. Frachetti

W

ell-known cradles of ancient civilization are associated most commonly with urban architecture, agricultural surplus, centralized and hierarchical rulership, writing, and extensive access to trade in commodities and luxury goods (Trigger 2003). The best documented archaeological examples include the Bronze Age societies of the Aegean, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China. Lying between these major centers of innovation is the rugged territory of Central Eurasia (here Inner Asia), defined geographically by high mountain chains, vast steppes, and formidable deserts (Fig. 5.1, see color insert). Perhaps as a result of its extreme environmental setting and its (historically) diversified societies, few have dared to deem Inner Eurasia a “cradle” of civilization in its own right. Rather, the ancient populations of the Eurasian steppe, Inner Asian mountains, and deserts of Xinjiang (western China) are more commonly viewed as peripheral to the main currents of sociopolitical development that have defined larger, centralized hegemonies of southwest Asia and the Far East. Of course, the importance of Eurasian societies has not gone unnoticed. Especially in the historical era, Inner Asian societies are credited for establishing key “linkages” that fostered the transfer of commodities between

eastern and western centers (Golden 2011). But as a result, significant innovations in technology, organization, and ideology, which took place within Central Eurasia, tend to be modeled as secondary processes of development. This view positions steppe and mountain societies of the region, such as mobile pastoralists from the Bronze Age to early historical times, as receivers of innovations rather than innovators themselves. New archaeological research, however, increasingly provides reasons to question this understanding. Revisionist paradigms illustrate that although the economic and political organization of early mobile pastoralists of Inner Asia was regionally diverse and certainly aided the transfer of technologies across Eurasia, Inner Asian pastoralists also played a formative role in defining key institutions that shaped ideological and practical aspects of regional civilizations from China to southwest Asia and beyond (Frachetti 2012). In this chapter, I discuss some of the new evidence that illustrates how Inner Asian communities defined important ideological practices and economic innovations and propagated them eastward and westward across Eurasia. International collaborative research over the past decade has already illustrated convincingly that horses were first domesticated in the

northern Eurasian steppe zone around 3500 BC (Outram et al. 2009). Recent studies also show that little more than a millennium later (ca. 2200 BC), the first fast-wheeled chariots were innovated in the southern Urals (Anthony 2007). By the late 2nd millennium BC they had spread as far as Egypt and Anatolia in the west and central China in the east. Bronze Age societies of Central Eurasia also played a key role in the mining and exchange of rich ore resources, especially copper and tin—the essential elements of tin-bronze (Parzinger and Boroffka 2003, Thornton 2009). Tin-bronze metallurgical techniques forged on the Eurasian steppe are increasingly recognized as having a major influence on the introduction of bronze widely across Asia (Higham et al. 2011). In addition to ores and metallurgy, the mountains of Inner Asia also provided a wealth of highly sought-after stone and mineral resources. Carnelian, lapis lazuli, and other precious commodities passed along far-reaching exchange networks thereby fueling ideological and economic developments among civilizations of Mesopotamia, Iran, and the Indus Valley from at least the mid-3rd millennium BC (Potts 2008, Law 2006). Yet more than brokers of specific commodities, trade items, and particular innovations, Bronze Age societies of Inner Asia also formatively defined institutions of value and ideology that transformed regional domestic economies and ritual practices beyond the steppe territory. For example, steppe societies were major innovators of animal domestication and quickly defined a vast territorial adaptation of mobile pastoralism throughout the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC (Frachetti 2012, Bendrey 2011). Differentially evolved forms of this distinctive Eurasian mobile economy bolstered the rise of expansive connections in material culture, indexes of social networks that aligned social institutions, art styles, and expressive modes of social identity and power from Mongolia and western China to the shores of the Black Sea by the early 1st millennium BC (Wagner et al. 2011). Historians have devoted considerable effort to trace how the institutions of Inner Asian

42

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

nomadic societies impacted dynastic China and empires of Persia and Greece (Turchin 2009, Beckwith 2009). Far less research has gone into the institutional impact of Inner Asian societies during the incipient and formative stages of the differentiated and continental network that defines the Eurasian Bronze Age. For example, the importance of Bronze Age mobile pastoralists in diffusing domesticated grains—like wheat, barley, millet, and rice—over the territories between China, SW Asia, and Europe and the ensuing impact on ideological and economic institutions across Eurasia remains largely speculative, primarily due to a lack of direct evidence. Although archaeologists have argued for decades that farming was part of the Bronze Age economy of Eurasian steppe communities (Kuz’mina 1986, 1994), the scarcity of direct botanical evidence of domesticated grains across Inner Asia has left this region a major frontier for understanding the complexity of economic transitions and the diffusion of regional assemblages of domesticated plants. When were the first domesticated grains used by Bronze Age societies of Inner Asia? How did these societies value and employ domesticated grains when they were first introduced? What were the pathways or vectors of interaction that brought grains to this region? Once domesticated plants were available, what were the driving forces behind their further diffusion among regional populations? By the mid-3rd millennium BC, most societies of the steppe were engaged in some form of mobile pastoralist economy and these diverse strategies are well documented in various regions across the steppe zone (Frachetti 2012). Until recently, the earliest dated botanical evidence for domesticated crops in Central Eurasia date only to the 1st millennium BC, representing a comparably late entrée of agriculture when compared with other regions of the Old World (Rosen, Chang, and Grigoriev 2000). Newly published evidence from the Middle Bronze Age site of Begash, in southeastern Kazakhstan, illustrates convincingly that domesticated grains, namely wheat (Triticum aestivum/turgidum) and broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum), were

available commodities to Inner Asian pastoralists already by 2300 BC, if not centuries before (Frachetti et al. 2010). However, at present it appears that these domesticated grains were introduced initially not as normal foodstuffs, but first appear to have been used ceremonially during cremation and interment rituals. In this chapter I examine this practice at Begash and compare it with related ritual uses of domesticated plants (and animals) among neighboring societies of Inner Asia. I propose that Eurasian mobile pastoralists emerged as central participants within a network of interaction that was fueled in part by ideological motivations, and which may outline a key vector for the spread of domesticated wheat from southwestern and south-central Asia to China in the mid3rd millennium BC. Likewise, broomcorn millet appears to have spread westward from China into Inner Asia at the same time. Throughout my argument I evoke as metaphors the dynamic geography and complex networks of interaction that underpinned the ancient Silk Routes to understand the incipient participatory networks that formed across Inner Asia during the Bronze Age, ca. 3000–1000 BC. Most models of east-west interaction for the Bronze Age view the Eurasian steppe as the most likely geographic conduit for the transfer of innovations, namely metallurgy, chariots, and mobile pastoralist economies. Yet if we look at the geography of interaction that was defined by the historical Silk Routes, the primary channels of connection fueling east/west trade flowed along the foothills and, in some cases, across high-elevation territories of Inner Asia. Elsewhere I have referred to this extended chain of mountain geography as the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor (IAMC) (Frachetti 2012). Although it is unlikely that the nodes and pathways of prehistoric interaction map directly onto those used by historical caravans, I demonstrate below that those societies who made the Inner Asian mountains their home were key founders of an ecumenical system of interaction across the Eurasian continent. I distinctly place emphasis on the ways local, small-scale populations repurposed

and transmitted regional innovations—such as domesticated grains—via networks between western China, Central Asia, and points farther west. Recent findings from across Central Eurasia illustrate the importance of an impressive array of innovations to the economy and culture of Eurasian populations starting at least by the Early Bronze Age. Extensively discussed in the literature, domestic horses, chariots, tinbronze, and other commodities shaped an iconic assemblage of the steppe territory that was adopted widely among neighboring civilizations throughout the 2nd millennium BC. Yet here we set aside horse domestication, chariots, and metallurgy to focus on the extensive and overlapping spheres of social interaction that grew out of the ceremonial use of domesticated grains across Inner Asia. This focus takes us first to the site of Begash, located in southeastern Kazakhstan, where the recent discovery of the earliest directly dated domesticated wheat and broomcorn millet in Central Eurasia introduces a new perspective on the connected nature of domesticated economies across Inner Asia.

The Site of Begash The more than ten-year goal of the Dzhungar Mountains Archaeology Project1 has been to document the development of mobile pastoralist society in the mountainous territories of southeastern Kazakhstan (Semirech’ye) from the earliest evidence to more recent times. Within the broader scope of the project, archaeological excavations at the site complex of Begash began in 2002 and have continued there and at neighboring sites for the past decade. The site of Begash is located in the foothill zone of the Dzhungar Mountains (ca. 950 m above sea level) and is one of the earliest dated Bronze Age site complexes in Semirech’ye, consisting of settlements, associated burial ground, and rock-art (Frachetti and Mar’yashev 2007, Frachetti 2008). Excavations at the burial ground and multi-period seasonal encampment illustrate that Begash was a seasonally occupied campsite,

Seeds for the Soul: Ideology and Diffusion of Domesticated Grains across Inner Asia

43

FIG. 5.2. Excavations were undertaken at Begash by the author. [Drawing by Michael D. Frachetti]

strategically situated in a protected lower elevation ravine that provided herders winter protection with easy access to richer highland pasture resources in the summer (Fig. 5.2). This vertical mobility pattern underpinned the emergent mobile pastoralist economy of mountain communities in the region from at least 2500 cal BC. Begash’s location also facilitated participation in wider currents of local and regional exchange with similar nearby communities, who accessed and propagated various forms of material culture and innovations within a broad network across Inner Asia from at least the 2nd millennium BC until historic periods (Chernykh 2004, Mei 2003, 2009, Frachetti 2008). In historic times, Semirech’yean pastoralists also occupied key segments of the Silk Route network between western China (and the Tarim basin) and points further west and south (Bartol’d 1956). Well-trodden pathways led from the deserts of Dzhungaria up the dry southeastern slopes

44

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

and over highland passes of the Tian Shan and Dzhungar Mountains, across rich highland pastures to the semiarid steppes of the Ili valley. Local nomadic communities linked with these trade routes and their seasonal mobility added pulses of energy into the flow of materials that linked China and the Near East. The northern foothills of the Dzhungar Mountains are particularly interesting because they also defined the contours of trade paths extending north and south from the Altai Mountains and Dzhungarian gates across the trans-Ili (Zaili) Mountains (or northern Tian Shan) into the Ferghana valley and Uzbekistan from at least the Late Bronze Age (Frachetti et al. 2010b). Begash impressively illustrates these connections in historical periods but also much earlier, at least by the mid-3rd millennium BC. The archaeological evidence of both early and repeated occupation at Begash by mobile pastoralist communities provides new perspectives for understanding the emergence and

continuities of local domesticated economies in Inner Asia as well (Frachetti and Mar’yashev 2007). The archaeological remains from Begash clearly document a fully developed mobile pastoralist strategy from 2500 cal BC, and possibly earlier (Frachetti and Benecke 2009). In fact, the faunal assemblages from the various occupation phases of the site show little change in terms of herd composition for the nearly 4,000 years that the location was utilized. In the earliest occupation, Phase 1a, discussed in greater detail below, faunal evidence reveals a diet rich in sheep/goat (75%), with lesser abundance of cattle (20%), and about 4–5% wild animals. Interestingly, there is no evidence for horses in the record at Begash in the late 3rd millennium BC. Percentages of horses slowly increase through the 2nd millennium BC (Phase 2) and we see a notable burst of horse remains around 500 BC. The relative lack of horses throughout the 2nd millennium BC importantly differentiates the pastoralist strategy at Begash from those of the western and central steppe region at that time (Bendrey 2011). These facts are compelling because they throw into question the developmental pathways of early steppe groups and specifically challenge models of initial eastward migration of mobile pastoralists during the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC (for discussion, see Frachetti 2012). Established wisdom from decades of research by preeminent scholars like Elena Kuz’mina indicated that steppe pastoralists first migrated into this region from the western/central steppe zone in the mid2nd millennium BC (Kuz’mina 2007:234). Yet the clear documentation of a developed mobile pastoralist economy by 2500 BC and distinctive from western Eurasian variants demands that we revise this view, at least as far as Semirech’ye is concerned. Furthermore, the repeated occupation and reconstruction of the settlement at Begash illustrates that through time the local population sustained a well-adapted and largely unchanged herding economy in this region for nearly 4,000 years. The strategic economic durability evident at Begash casts this small, seasonal location as one of many important nodes with-

in a wider network of social nodes that together shaped deeply historical landscapes across the region (Frachetti 2008). Although not a major urban center or even a central fortified settlement, Begash humbly provides important details of the functional parameters of local and regional social participation that engaged mobile pastoralists in the wider flows of material culture across Inner Asia throughout antiquity (Frachetti 2009). Of course, beyond adding a new page to our understanding of the evolution of Bronze Age civilizations of Eurasia, Begash also provides a new twist to debates concerning the interactive channels that link the evolution of domesticated economies from East Asia to SW Asia in the Bronze Age. Specifically, recent paleoethnobotanical studies at Begash have documented the earliest evidence of domesticated wheat and broomcorn millet in the Central Eurasian region (Frachetti et al. 2010a). Furthermore, the archaeological context of this discovery allows us to probe some of the ideological motivations that may have been important forces behind the movement of domesticated plants eastward and westward across Eurasia, and the subsequent incorporation of farming in the Late Bronze and Iron Age array of economic strategies employed in Inner Asia.

Regional Distribution of Domesticated Wheat and Millet Starting in the Neolithic, cereal agriculture became a core subsistence strategy in many parts of the world. In southwest Asia, domesticated glume wheats (emmer and einkorn), hulled barley, and legumes formed a farming package that diffused westward and eastward from the fertile crescent, extending to the northern edge of the Iranian plateau and the southern Caucasus by ca. 5000 BC, and as far as the Amu Darya watershed by 3000 BC (see Fig. 5.1, color insert). Before 3000 BC, domesticated wheat is not known in either Central Eurasia or China. The earliest evidence for wheat in China has been indirectly dated to roughly 2500 BC (Li et al. 2007),

Seeds for the Soul: Ideology and Diffusion of Domesticated Grains across Inner Asia

45

although the earliest directly dated evidence dates to ca. 1800 BC (Flad et al. 2010). In the Far East, ancient agricultural economies were based predominantly upon millet and rice, domesticates that were widely cultivated by the late Neolithic in the Yellow River basin and Loess Plateau. Recent research illustrates that broomcorn millet was likely domesticated in China as early as 8000 BC, and was already a major staple crop by 6000 BC (Lu et al. 2009, Barton et al. 2009). The earliest known sites in northern Afghanistan and southern Central Asia with clear evidence for broomcorn millet, such as Shortughai, date to only around 2100 BC (Willcox 1991). Yet as with wheat in China, broomcorn millet did not become a prevalent grain in southwest Asia until well after the 2nd millennium BC (Hunt et al. 2008). Current archaeology of the steppe and mountain regions lying between these major agricultural territories shows that intensive farming was not integrated into local economies until the Late Bronze and Iron Ages, leaving a vast geographic lacuna of information about potential pathways of diffusion for domesticated plants across Central Eurasia. Compelling evidence of the earliest agriculture at sites in Xinjiang (western China) indicate that farming was likely practiced in these arid zones by the late 3rd millennium BC, but the data is plagued by inconsistencies in chronology—especially where early wheat is concerned. For this reason, the domesticated wheat and broomcorn millet recovered at Begash provide a key source of new data that point to the important role of the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor in the spread of domesticated grains between southwest Asia and China. In light of the evidence from Begash, it appears that domesticated wheat rapidly passed northward from Central Asia to Begash along the Mountain Corridor and then eastward into China along the foothills of the Tian Shan range into the Hexi corridor around 2300–2200 BC. As I have proposed elsewhere, local interactions among mountain communities may have first moved grains (but not necessarily specific farming strategies) northward and eastward within

46

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

the span of only a few hundred years (Frachetti 2008, Frachetti et al. 2010a). Mirroring this diffusion, broomcorn millet apparently passed along the same vectors, yet via currents flowing in the opposite direction. For tracing the flows of wheat and millet, current evidence remains patchy. Part of this gap in knowledge is the product of limited application of archaeobotanical study in Central Asian archaeology. In particular, extensive and intensive recovery of archaeobotanical data from the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor and the arid territories of Western China is needed to more comprehensively trace the diffusion and use of these important grains.

Recovery of Ceremonial Grains at Begash Following the lead of a number of recent international collaborative projects across Central Asia and in western China, my team applied a comprehensive flotation and paleoethnobotanical recovery strategy as part of archaeological excavations at the site of Begash, in order to identify evidence for plant use in this pivotal region. Systematic soil sampling and flotation were carried out throughout all the seasons of excavation. Samples were taken from archaeological features such as hearths, floors, and pits, as well as from general fill layers for comparison. During the 2006 season, we discovered a cremation burial feature within the area of the settlement (i.e., not in the burial ground area). The burial was devoid of cultural artifacts, so artifacts were limited to highly fragmentary and burned human bone shards and a few fractured tooth crowns. Directly adjacent to the burial cist was a large, circular fire pit with a dense layer of charcoal, which we interpret as the actual funerary fire where the cremation was carried out (Fig. 5.2). We collected nearly 100% of the available sediment and ash from within the burial cist (ca. 30 L) plus an additional 10 L of soil from the associated funerary fire pit for flotation and macrobotanical analysis. Analysis of the flotation

samples from across the site revealed a predominance of wild seeds, whereas remains of both domesticated wheat (Triticum aestivum/turgidum) as well as broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) were recovered from the cremation context. Direct AMS/14C dating was carried out on the seeds and associated charcoal remains recovered from both the burial and the fire pit. Statistical averaging of the calibrated radiocarbon results dates the grains and the burial to 2280– 2130 cal BC, or roughly 2200 cal BC. Note that the direct date on the seeds is slightly older, with first sigma ranges from 2450–2100 cal BC. Thus, the date range of 2300–2200 cal BC is used here. Based on the current archaeological evidence, it appears unlikely that these domesticated grains were initially cultivated at or near the site of Begash. First, the specific location of the finding indicates that the seeds were used primarily in ceremonial context, rather than as everyday food. Out of all the soil samples taken from Bronze Age contexts across the site, 94% of the domesticated grains were found within just two samples, corresponding solely to the burial cist and the associated fire pit. Only two broomcorn millet seeds were recovered from a domestic hearth. Although it is certainly possible that grains were part of the diet and simply were not evident in the domestic hearths and trash pits across the settlement, the highly localized density of the finds indicates that wheat and millet held an important ceremonial significance. In addition, the fact that there is no evidence for agricultural processing within the entire assemblage is also consistent with the idea that these grains were likely traded commodities in this early stage, rather than raised and processed on site as everyday food. The grains were apparently winnowed and cleaned somewhere offsite, since no rachises were recovered from any of the soil samples. Finally, the environment around Begash is poorly suited for wheat farming generally; cultivation is limited in this mountain territory because of both the poor soil quality and seasonal weather extremes (Frachetti 2008). Broom-

corn millet, however, is more adapted to cultivation in mountainous regions and it certainly would have been ecologically possible to grow it in the vicinity of the site. At this stage, however, the similar usage and archaeological context of both seed types indicates that early domesticated grains were being used first in ceremonial fashion, perhaps being sprinkled over the burning body during the cremation or somehow included in the offerings made at the time of cremation/burial. This early ritual employment of these domesticates may have been a transformative motivation that led to later farming of these grains in the region as well as the introduction of new grains into regions both east and west along the Mountain Corridor.

Domestic Products, Burial, and Ritual Institutions across Inner Asia The wheat from Begash has been identified within the conservative category of Triticum aestivum/turgidum, largely because we lack the key chaff remains that allow more precise identification among free-threshing wheat varieties. Yet morphologically, the grains are very round and plump, and appear phenotypically similar to hexaploid “spherical” wheat types commonly known as “Indian dwarf wheat.” The roundness of the Bronze Age wheat from Begash is important because compact wheat forms are known prevalently in the Indus Valley region at Mehrgarh by at least the mid-5th millennium BC (Costantini 1984, Zohary and Hopf 2000) and at later Harappan sites, ca. 2500–2000 cal BC (Weber 1991). Compact T. aestivum is also identified at sites such as Anau South and Gonur Tepe, documenting that round, free-threshing wheat was already in use in southern Central Asia by 3000–2000 BC, and likely earlier (Moore et al. 1994, Miller 1999, Miller 2003). Farther north along the western fringe of the Pamir Mountains, additional evidence of free-threshing wheat is documented in phase III levels (ca. 2600–2000 BC) at the site of Sarazm in western Tajikistan (Spengler and Willcox 2013; Razzokov

Seeds for the Soul: Ideology and Diffusion of Domesticated Grains across Inner Asia

47

2008). Even more enticing, the morphology of the wheat found at Begash is also comparable to wheat grains genetically identified at Xiaohe as breadwheat (T. aestivum) and compact round grains found at the site of Donghuishan in western China, ca. 1800 cal BC (Flad et al. 2010). Unlike Begash, where early domesticates are only evident in ritual context, wheat was almost certainly being farmed in the 2nd millennium BC in Xinjiang and Gansu provinces of China. Sites such as Donghuishan, located in the Hexi corridor, provide evidence for both round bread wheat grains and associated rachises, indicating wheat production at the site (Flad et al. 2010). The wheat from Donghuishan is among the oldest directly dated evidence in Xinjiang, about 200 or 300 years later than the wheat recovered at Begash. Of course, wheat may have been cultivated slightly earlier in the Gansu region, where a few sites provide evidence of the grain by (at least) 2000 BC (Betts et al. 2013). Further research in western regions of Xinjiang along the Tian Shan foothills is necessary to illustrate more clearly the pathway of wheat introduction. Nevertheless, the chronology and geographic distribution of round, free-threshing wheat types across Inner Asia provocatively traces a path of diffusion northward along the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor during the mid-3rd millennium BC and extending eastward into the more arid foothills of Xinjiang to the Hexi corridor by the first centuries of the 2nd millennium BC. Applying similar logic to trace the trajectories of broomcorn millet’s introduction to Begash, the geography and chronology of cultivation is clearly earliest in Central China, with a long hiatus before millet first appears in other parts of Central Eurasia. Millet has been documented at a few 3rd millennium BC sites in Xinjiang, though direct dates are not consistently published. With the exception of Begash, broomcorn millet is not documented west or south along the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor or in southwest Asia until roughly 2000 BC, at Shortughai (Willcox 1991). As with Begash, cemetery sites in China illustrate that grains, such as wheat and millet,

48

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

were used as ceremonial commodities, offerings, or ritual foods during burial. Although burial ceremonies clearly varied across the regions and at different locales, a variety of Inner Asian sites demonstrate a common practice of interring wheat and millet grains as burial offerings or incorporating them in community feasting events. Burial rituals documented at the Gumugou cemetery, for example, provide abundant evidence for the earliest wheat offerings made in burials in western China, dating to the first centuries of the 2nd millennium BC (Wang 1983). At Gumugou, wheat was interred within small woven baskets. Mair also notes that other plants found in small bags, such as Ephedra sinica, were likely used for “medico-religious” purposes at Gumugou (Mair 2011:38). At Gumugou, wheat was almost surely being cultivated as an everyday food; however it still maintained a ritual use in burial, centuries after wheat interment was carried out at Begash. Radiocarbon dated to roughly 1800 cal BC, the burial ground at Xiaohe provides further evidence for the use of wheat in ritual contexts in the early 2nd millennium BC in Xinjiang. At Xiaohe wheat grains were also found in small baskets and sprinkled over mummified bodies within wooden coffins (Fig. 5.3, see color insert). Other food offerings were made as well, evidenced by desiccated bread, presumably made from wheat. At Xiaohe, there is also evidence that cattle and sheep were being used ritually as well. Both sites make clear that around the start of the 2nd millennium BC, wheat was still being used for ritual purposes across the region, while local agriculturalists began to include wheat in the farming repertoire of the western Chinese Bronze Age. By the mid-2nd millennium BC, a host of burial sites in western China illustrate that wheat was commonly used as an offering during burial ceremonies among agricultural and mixed pastoralist populations of the region (Flad et al. 2010). Comparing the abundant evidence for ritual wheat interment in western China at the start of the 2nd millennium BC to the ceremonial burning of wheat at Begash around 2300–2200

BC demands that we probe further into the nature of ideological links between populations living along the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor and those living in adjacent territories—east into China and southwest in Central Asia (Figs. 5.4 and 5.5, see color insert). Elsewhere I have argued that local alignments of economic, ideological, political, and socio-technological innovations linked Eurasian societies through dynamic circuits of “non-uniform” institutional profiles (Frachetti 2012). Items such as grains and their associated importance in practices like burial rituals, as well as notions of value and utility surrounding other important commodities like horses, were propagated beyond local contexts through a network of interactions between mobile groups, their neighbors, and more sedentary communities farther afield. We can imagine these material forms and the associated concepts of value and importance as “packets” or discrete cultural units—both physical and notional—which carry along meanings and information beyond the raw materials themselves. “Packets” such as domestic grains may at once have been passed along for their functional use or value as edible commodities, while at the same time indexing the ideational realities of a growing institutional practice of burial offering among a diversity of communities across Central Eurasia during the Bronze Age. Beyond simple trade items, other such “packets” might range from innovations in communication (e.g., games), novelties in materials and technology, or even new metrics for understanding the value and social significance of materials that have ripple effects on both local and non-local practices (e.g., forms of currency). In a recent paper, Outram and colleagues applied residue analysis of ceramic vessels to shed some light on how domesticated animals were used in burials, either as ritual offerings or as part of ceremonial consumption among Middle Bronze Age communities of central Kazakhstan (ca. 1800–1600 BC). Their findings show that— somewhat like grains at Begash—horses were preferentially consumed or offered during burial

ceremonies (Outram et al. 2010). Compared to only 3% of the overall animal fat residue recovered within ceramics from domestic contexts (settlements), equine fat constituted 23% of the animal fat residue among ceramic vessels from burials. This disparity between domestic and ritual contexts is also represented in the number of individual faunal specimens NISP from each context as well. Ruminant fat was also more representative in burial ceramics, suggesting that feasting on both horse and sheep/goat meat was a likely component of later Bronze Age burial rituals. Outram and colleagues argue that fat residues from Late Bronze Age ceramics illustrate how “horses played an enhanced role in funerary foodways and no doubt other significant events where feasting took place. Perhaps the fact that horses were a rarer component of diet, and maybe largely kept for riding, made their slaughter and consumption of greater significance, generally being reserved for special events” (Outram et al. 2010:126). This important recognition suggests that Bronze Age pastoralists used restricted and valuable domestic commodities, such as horses and sheep, to venerate the dead by expending limited (or rare) resources in burial rituals. Broadly, the tradition of animal burial offerings can be traced as early as 3500 cal BC among early pastoralists in the Altai (Frachetti 2012). Extrapolating this behavior to a broader ideological practice, I suggest that when new products—such as domesticated grains—were introduced into the pool of restricted and valuable commodities available to regional pastoralist groups, they initially adopted this new “packet” for use within their ideological practice of status veneration, thus initially incorporating exotic grains into burial ceremonies. As a result, at sites along the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor, grains may have first been transmitted as a “packet” associated with ritual or ceremonial power and only later did some communities integrate them into their productive farming economy. This process may also explain why some of the earliest evidence for wheat in western China is found in burial contexts. Of course, many of

Seeds for the Soul: Ideology and Diffusion of Domesticated Grains across Inner Asia

49

the Bronze Age communities of Xinjiang were already familiar with farming, making the integration of wheat into both ritual and economic practices an easy transition.

Conclusion In summary, the period from the mid-3rd millennium to the early 2nd millennium BC was a key time for transitions in ideology and domestic strategies across Central Eurasia. The early domesticated wheat and millet recovered at Begash point to a highly developed network of interactions among mobile pastoralists and more sedentary farmers along the foothills and uplands of the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor, and eastward into more arid territories of Xinjiang. In fact, a variety of products and commodities that certainly held economic value among these communities were also important indexes of interrelated ideological institutions that were taking shape across the region. Important to the transfer and diffusion of these institutional “packets” is the meaning and value that is translated among various participants in the network of exchanges. Thus, we can associate certain “packets,” such as domestic wheat, millet, and even horses, with ideological alignments between a diversity of populations with different economic strategies. For example, the earliest pastoralists at Begash were not likely eating wheat on a daily basis, they were not likely agriculturists, and they were not farmers. This would not change at Begash for at least 1,000 years after wheat was first introduced there. However, mobile pastoralists like those at Begash were key participants in a wider circuitry of institutional practices that employed rare or valuable commodities in burial ceremonies. The ritual significance of objects like wheat helped to diffuse it quickly along the Inner Asian Mountains while translating the importance of wheat to communities in China, possibly being transported in small containers or in little baskets like those found at Gumugou and Xiaohe. The pastoralists of the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor were not simple brokers, but

50

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

adapted their ceremonial practices of feasting and interment of restricted domesticates to include newly attained products, like grains, and imparted these ideological “packets” to their neighbors through diverse channels of social participation. Further research throughout Inner Asia is necessary to determine how bilateral the social, economic, and ideological alignments were between sites like Begash and those of Xinjiang. However, the emerging evidence from across the rugged territory of Central Eurasia and the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor causes us to revise our view of the classic “cradles” of civilization as the source for major economic transformations and to recognize that many of the formative social institutions that underpin better known societies in antiquity were fundamentally shaped and transferred by societies who have commonly been seen as peripheral. Furthermore, this discussion requires that we look beyond simplified geographic perspectives of eastern and western diffusion and examine prehistoric trajectories of interaction as more complicated, interregional, multidirectional, and networked pathways shaping interflows of institutional packets across the multiple landscapes of Central Eurasian civilization.

NOTE 1. Co-directors, Michael Frachetti and Alexei N. Mar’yashev.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Special thanks to the organizers of the “Secrets of the Silk Road” Symposium at University of Pennsylvania Museum. Funding for this research was provided by the National Science Foundation and Washington University in St. Louis. Botanical analysis of the seeds discussed from Begash was conducted by Dr. Robert Spengler at the Paleoethnobotany laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis, directed by Dr. Gayle Fritz.

Bibliography Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the

Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bartol’d, Vasily V. 1956. Four Studies on the History of Central Asia, vol. 1, trans. V. Minorsky and T. Minorsky. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Barton L., S.D. Newsome, F.-H. Chen, H. Wang, T.P. Guilderson, and R.L. Bettinger. 2009. Agricultural Origins and the Isotopic Identity of Domestication in Northern China. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106:5523–28. Beckwith, Christopher I. 2009. Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bendrey, Robin. 2011. Some Like It Hot: Environmental Determinism and the Pastoral Economies of the Later Prehistoric Eurasian Steppe. Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice 1:8. Betts A., Peter Weiming Jia, John Dodso. 2013. The Origins of Wheat in China and Potential Pathways for its Introduction: A Review. Quaternary International. Chernykh, Evgenii. 2004. Kargaly: The Largest and Most Ancient Metallurgical Complex on the Border of Europe and Asia. In Metallurgy in Ancient Eastern Eurasia from the Urals to the Yellow River, ed. Katheryn M. Linduff, pp. 223–38. Lewiston, NY: Mellen. Constantini, L. 1984. The Beginning of Agriculture in the Kachi Plain: The Evidence from Mehrgarh. In South Asian Archaeology 1981: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference of the Association of South Asian Archaeologists in Western Europe, ed. B. Allchin, pp. 29–33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Flad, Rowan, Li Shuicheng, Wu Xiaohong, and Zhao Zhijun. 2010. Early Wheat in China: Results from New Studies at Donghuishan in the Hexi Corridor. The Holocene 20.6:955–65. Frachetti, Michael D. 2008. Pastoralist Landscapes and Social Interaction in Bronze Age Eurasia. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2009. Differentiated Landscapes and Non-Uniform Complexity among Bronze Age Societies of the Eurasian Steppe. In Social Complexity in Prehistoric Eurasia: Monuments, Met-

als and Mobility, ed. Bryan Hanks and Kathryn Linduff, pp. 19–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2012. The Multi-Regional Emergence of Mobile Pastoralism and the Growth of Non-Uniform Institutional Complexity across Eurasia. Current Anthropology 53.1:2–38. Frachetti, Michael D., and Alexei N. Mar’yashev. 2007. Long-term Occupation and Seasonal Settlement of Eastern Eurasian Pastoralists at Begash, Kazakhstan. Journal of Field Archaeology 32.3:221–42. Frachetti, Michael D., and Norbert Benecke. 2009. “From Sheep to (Some) Horses: 4500 Years of Herd Structure at the Pastoralist Settlement of Begash (Southeastern Kazakhstan).” Antiquity 83 (322): 1023-1037. Frachetti, Michael D., R.S. Spengler, G.J. Fritz, and A.N. Mar’yashev. 2010a. Earliest Evidence of Broomcorn Millet and Wheat in the Central Eurasian Steppe Region. Antiquity 84.326:993–1010. Frachetti, M., N. Benecke, A.N. Mar’yashev, and P. Doumani. 2010b. Eurasian Pastoralists and Their Shifting Regional Interactions at the Steppe Margin: Settlement History at Mukri, Kazakhstan. World Archaeology 42.4:622–46. Golden, Peter B. 2011. Central Asia in World History. New York: Oxford University Press. Higham, C., T. Higham, R. Ciarla, K. Douka, A. Kijngam, and F. Rispoli. 2011. The Origins of the Bronze Age of Southeast Asia. Journal of World Prehistory 24.4:227–74. Hunt, H.V., M. Vander Linden, X. Liu, G. Motuzaite-Matuzeviciute, S. Colledge, and M.K. Jones. 2008. Millets across Eurasia: Chronology and Context of Early Records of the Genera Panicum and Setaria from Archaeological Sites in the Old World.” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 17:S5–S18. Kuz’mina, Elena E. 1986. Drevneishie skotovody ot Urala do Tian’-Shania. Frunze: Ilim. ———. 1994. Otkuda prishli indoarii? material’naia kul’tura plemen andronovskoi obshchnosti i proiskhozhdenie indoirantsev. Moscow: MGP Kalina. ———. 2007. The Origin of the Indo-Iranians.

Seeds for the Soul: Ideology and Diffusion of Domesticated Grains across Inner Asia

51

Leiden: Brill. Law, R.W. 2006. Moving Mountains: The Trade and Transport of Rocks and Minerals within the Indus Valley Region. In Space and Spatial Analysis in Archaeology, ed. E.C. Robertson, J.D. Seibert, D.C. Fernandez, and M.U. Zender, pp. 301–13. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Li, X., J. Dodson, X. Zhou, H. Zhang, and R. Masutomoto. 2007. Early Cultivated Wheat and Broadening of Agriculture in Neolithic China. The Holocene 17:555–60. Lu, H., J. Zhang, K. Liu, N. Wu, Y. Li, et al. 2009. Earliest Domestication of Common Millet (Panicum miliaceum) in East Asia Extended to 10,000 years Ago. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America 106:7367–72. Mair, Victor. 2011. The Archaeology of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. In Secrets of the Silk Road, ed. V. Mair, pp. 26–53. Santa Ana, CA: Bowers Museum. Mei, Jeijun 2003. Qijia and Seima-Turbino: The Question of Early Contacts between Northwest China and the Eurasian Steppe. Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 75:31–54. ———. 2009. Early Metallurgy and Socio-Cultural Complexity: Archaeological Discoveries in Northwest China. In Social Complexity in Prehistoric Eurasia: Monuments, Metals, and Mobility, ed. Bryan K. Hanks and Katheryn M. Linduff, pp. 215–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, Naomi F. 1999. Agricultural Development in Western Central Asia in the Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 8:13–19. ———. 2003. The Use of Plants at Anau North. In A Central Asian Village at the Dawn of Civilization. Excavations at Anau, Turkmenistan, ed. F. Hiebert and K. Kurbansakhatov, pp. 127–38. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum. Moore, Katherine, Naomi F. Miller, Frederik Hiebert, and Richard Meadow. 1994. Agriculture and Herding in the Early Oasis Settlements of the Oxus Civilization. Antiquity 68.259:418–27. Outram, A.K, N.A. Stear, R. Bendrey, S. Olsen, A.

52

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

Kasparov, V. Zaibert, N. Thorpe, and R.P. Evershed. 2009. The Earliest Horse Harnessing and Milking. Science 323.5919:1332–35. Outram, A.K., N.A. Stear, A. Kasparov, E. Usmanova, V. Varfolomeev, and R.P. Evershed. 2010. Horses for the Dead: Funerary Foodways in Bronze Age Kazakhstan. Antiquity 85:116–28 Parzinger, Hermann, and Nikolaus Boroffka, eds. 2003. Das Zinn der Bronzezeit in Mittelasien. I. Die siedlungsarchäologischen Forschungen im Umfeld der Zinnlagerstätten. Archäologie in Iran und Turan, Band 5. Mainz: von Zabern. Potts, D.T. 2008. An Umm an-Nar-type Compartmented Soft-Stone Vessel from Gonur Depe, Turkmenistan. Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 19.2:168–81. Razzokov, A. 2008. Sarazm. Dushanbe: Institut istorii, arekheologii I etnografiiim. A. Donnsha Akademii nauk Respubliki Tadzhikistan. Rosen, A.M., C. Chang, and F.P. Grigoriev. 2000. Paleoenvironments and Economy of Iron Age Saka-Wusun Agro-Pastoralists in Southeastern Kazakhstan. Antiquity 74:611–23. Spengler, Robert N., III, and George Willcox. 2013. Archaeobotanical Results from Sarazm, Tajikistan, an Early Bronze Age Village on the Edge: Agriculture and Exchange. Journal of Environmental Archaeology. Thornton, Christopher P. 2009. The Emergence of Complex Metallurgy on the Iranian Plateau: Escaping the Levantine Paradigm. Journal of World Prehistory 22:301–27. Trigger, Bruce G. 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turchin, Peter. 2009. A Theory for Formation of Large Empires. Journal of Global History 4:191–217. Wagner, Mayke, Xinhua Wu, Pavel Tarasov, Ailijiang Aisha, Christopher Bronk Ramsey, Michael Schultz, Tyede Schmidt-Schultz, and Julia Gresky. 2011. Radiocarbon-dated Archaeological Record of Early First Millennium B.C. Mounted Pastoralists in the Kunlun Mountains, China. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 108.38:15733–38. Wang Binghua. 1983. Excavations and Prelimi-

nary Research on the Remains from Gumugou on the Kongque River. Xinjiang shehui kexue (Social Science in Xinjiang) 1983:117–27 (in Chinese). Weber, S.A. 1991. Plants and Harappan Subsistence: An Example of Stability and Change from Rojdi. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Willcox, G. 1991. Carbonised Plant Remains from

Shortugai. In New Light on Early Farming, ed. J. Renfrew, pp. 139–54. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Zohary, D., and M. Hopf. 2000. Domestication of Plants in the Old World: The Origin and Spread of Cultivated Plants in West Asia, Europe and the Nile Valley. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Seeds for the Soul: Ideology and Diffusion of Domesticated Grains across Inner Asia

53

6

HORSEBACK RIDING AND BRONZE AGE PASTORALISM IN THE EURASIAN STEPPES David W. Anthony and Dorcas R. Brown

H

istorians and archaeologists agree that horseback riding changed the way that the world went to war. The role of horseback riding in determining and enabling pastoral economies and herding practices, which might have been its earliest important effect in the Eurasian steppes, is less often mentioned. In this chapter we will briefly consider the effect of horseback riding on warfare; then we discuss the current evidence relating to the time and place where horse domestication occurred, which might have been as early as 4500 BC; we review the role of the horse in the development of Bronze Age pastoralism in the Eurasian steppes, focusing on the geographic expansion of a mobile form of steppe pastoralism based on wagons and mounted herders about 3000 BC; and finally we suggest that the migrations and expansions of trade routes and international contacts that occurred around 2000 BC, leading to the occupation of the Tarim Basin, owed an important part of their energy to cultural and technological advances in the forest-steppe zone, rather than in Central Asia or China.

The Horse in War In its earliest phase, about 900–400 BC, organized mounted warfare used troops of

mounted archers, which were effective enough on the field of battle to shift the balance of power to those who had large herds of horses and well-trained cavalries. With the later addition of heavy armored cavalry, the Scythians, the Cimmerians, the Xiongnu (Hsiung-nu), the Huns, the Turks, and the Mongols successively defeated the greatest infantry powers in the ancient world, earning the pastoral herders of the Eurasian steppes a dark reputation as voracious pillagers who preyed parasitically on agricultural civilizations. The tension between nomads and agricultural states is credited by some as the driving force behind the expansion of political empires (Turchin 2009). But this kind of mounted warfare was a feature of a particular era, and a relatively recent one. The oldest mummies of Xinjiang, including the “Beauty of Loulan,” were buried about 1800 BC, a thousand years before the Scythians. Horses were being ridden by hunters in northern Kazakhstan 1,500 years before that, and by cattle and sheep herders in the western steppes perhaps 2,500 years before. The earliest horseback riders lived in a world that was immeasurably different from that occupied by the Huns or Scythians. If we are going to speculate on how the earliest riders might have used horses in war,

we should first differentiate between tribal raiding on horseback, which might have happened when the oldest Tarim mummies were buried, and organized cavalry, which appeared only in the Iron Age, after 900 BC. Cavalry is defined by two relatively recent innovations. One was mounted archery, which seems to have become more deadly with improvements to both bows and arrows during the Final Bronze and Early Iron Age transition, around 1200–900 BC. Socketed arrowheads, which began to appear occasionally in Late Bronze Age (LBA) Andronovo sites in Kazakhstan, and the recurve (or cupid) bow, which could have been invented in Shang China (Shi 1950, Gorelik 1993:69) or in the Middle East (Zutterman 2003), might have been the innovations that made mounted archery worth organizing. Bows reconstructed from their traces in Bronze Age graves in the western, or Pontic-Caspian, steppes were sometimes made of bone-and-wood composites but were not recurved to make them short enough for a rider to use easily. They were more than a meter and up to 1.5 m or almost 5 feet in length, which would have made them clumsy and given them a limited range of fire from horseback (Shishlina 1990, Malov 2002, Bratchenko 2003). Bronze Age arrowheads were chipped from flint or made from bone in widely varying sizes and weights, implying a non-standardized, individualized array of arrow lengths and weights. And the bases of most arrowheads were tanged to fit into a hollow or split shaft, which weakened the arrow or required a separate hollow foreshaft for the attachment of the point. Long bows, irregular arrow sizes, and less-than-optimal attachments between points and arrows together reduced the military effectiveness of early mounted archery. Before the Iron Age, perhaps for millennia, mounted raiders would have been able to harass tribal war-bands, disrupt harvests in farming villages, or steal cattle in rapid-retreat raids, but probably would not have challenged a large, disciplined infantry force with their bows. The invention of the short recurve compound bow perhaps around 1200 BC made it possible for riders to carry a powerful bow that

56

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

was short enough to swing over the horse’s rear. For the first time arrows could be fired behind the rider with penetrating power. Cast bronze socketed arrowheads of standard weights and sizes also became widely used in the Early Iron Age. A socketed arrowhead did not require a split-shaft mount, so arrows with socketed arrowheads did not split no matter how powerful the bow and did not need a separate foreshaft, so arrows could be simpler, shorter (easier to carry), and more streamlined. Re-usable molds were invented so that smiths could produce hundreds of socketed bronze arrowheads of standard weight and size (Derin and Muscarella 2001). Archers now had a much wider field of fire (to the rear, the front, and the left) and could carry dozens of standard-weight arrows. An army of mounted archers could fill the sky with anonymous arrows that struck with killing power. The second defining feature of cavalry, in addition to its improved offensive weapons, was its organization. Cavalry attacked and retreated under the leadership of a general, obeying his commands as a single anonymous body of standardized soldiers, like the arrows in an Iron Age quiver. The feigned retreat with a surprise backhand volley, known as the “Parthian” shot, followed by a wheeling attack, was a maneuver used with deadly effect by early mounted archers, and was made possible by their obedience to welltimed battlefield commands. This ideological model and organizational mode of warfare was appropriate for cities and their citizen-farmer-infantry phalanxes, but was uncharacteristic of tribal conflicts, where individual fighters fought for personal glory (Keely 1996). Indo-European Bronze Age heroic poetry from the Sanskrit Rig Veda to the Greek Iliad, including the Bronze Age predecessors of the Germanic beserkers and Celtic frenzied warriors like Cú Chulainn, had nothing but praise for furious combat by deity-inspired heroes seeking immortality in fame, the opposite of the obedient soldier (Kershaw 2000, Cebrián 2010). Tribal warriors presented unique, often flawed personalities, like the arrows in a Bronze Age quiver. Before the improved bows and arrows of the final Bronze Age could

be wielded by an effective Iron Age cavalry, tribal riders had to be ideologically transformed from glory-seeking heroes to anonymous soldiers who obeyed their commander. Ultimately this military organization, wherever it originated (an open question), changed social organization throughout the steppes (Di Cosmo 2004). It would be inappropriate to apply that later ideological model of disciplined, mounted cavalry to the mounted tribal raiding that probably was practiced in different ways in different places for 2,500 years before the Scythians, beginning perhaps as early as 4500–4000 BC in the western Eurasian steppes, west of the Ural Mountains. We can assume that people who rode horses for any reason probably occasionally stole them from each other. This certainly happened when horses were introduced to the North American and the South American grasslands—both regions independently endured a rash of horse-thieving raids that soured relations even between tribes that had been friendly as pedestrian neighbors (Anthony 1986, Ewers 1955). This was all that was necessary to create the first phase of mounted raiding. Mounted tribal raiding probably began soon after the earliest phase of horseback riding. But warfare might not have been the arena of behavior where horseback riding had its strongest initial effects. Horseback riding probably began among people who already watched over herds of cattle and sheep on foot (see below). Riding made herding easier, more efficient, and more productive. Putting a cattle-herder on horseback was like having an extra herder—it made a larger herd possible to manage, so herds were able to grow and produce more surplus animals. This encouraged an already existing system of competitive animal sacrifices and feasts to grow into a central institution of political power through relationships of debt, creating a loose, shifting heterarchy of patrons and clients across the western steppes, between the Ural Mountains and the Dnieper River, north of the Black and Caspian Seas, by 4500 BC. Mounted stock-raiding, in this context, would have been an excellent means of acquiring wealth, as it quickly became in both Americas. The first effect

of horseback riding probably was to encourage the evolution of a more productive, mobile system of herding; the expansion of a linked system of competitive feasting in which herded animals were sacrificed and shared; and the emergence of mounted cattle-raiding and horse-raiding in the western steppes.

Domesticated Horses at Botai Few subjects in archaeology have generated as much bitter disagreement among specialists as the place and time of the domestication of the horse. Nevertheless, new data indicate that at least one episode of horse domestication occurred about 3600–3500 BC in the northern Kazakh steppes in sites of the Botai culture (Outram et al. 2009, Olsen et al. 2006, Anthony 2007). This is the earliest widely accepted date and place for horse domestication (Fig. 6.1, see color insert). At Botai some horses were ridden with bits that created facets on their premolar teeth (Bendrey 2007, Anthony and Brown 2011), some were milked (Outram et al. 2009), their dung was collected and discarded in settlements (French and Kousoulakou 2002), they were butchered in settlements (Olsen 2006), their meat and milk constituted most of the Botai diet (Outram et al. 2010), and some of their leg bones had become less robust, changing in the direction of the morphology of known domesticated horses (Outram et al. 2009). These discoveries indicate that some of the horses kept at Botai sites were domesticated by 3600–3500 BC. Nevertheless, many of the horses killed at Botai probably were wild, because the Botai mortality profile suggests catastrophic kills of whole herds of horses, including mares with gestating fetuses, probably in hunting drives (Benecke and von den Dreisch 2003). The Botai people apparently herded and ate domesticated horses, but also continued to hunt and eat wild horses, while residing in large sedentary settlements of pit-houses. Botai people had no domesticated cattle or sheep; they were apparently steppe hunters who had adopted horseback riding, somewhat like North American Indian

Horseback Riding and Bronze Age Pastoralism in the Eurasian Steppes

57

buffalo-hunters, but hunting horses instead of buffalo. Horses and dogs were their only domesticated animals. Botai sites are dated between 3600–3100 BC in the northern Kazakh steppes east of the Ishim River and contain more than 90% horse bones (Fig. 6.2, see color insert). Sites of the related Tersek type, located west of the Ishim in the Turgai Depression, were less specialized on horses, containing 43–66% horse bones, with aurochs and saiga antelope playing significant roles as secondary game animals (Kalieva and Logvin 2011). Botai and Tersek were contemporary archaeological cultures that occupied the northern Kazakh steppes between 3600 and 3100 BC, very similar in their stone and bone tools and house types and somewhat less similar in their ceramics (Kalieva and Logvin 1997, Kovaleva and Chairkina 1991). Botai settlements were more specialized in horse exploitation, were bigger (more than 150 house-pits were mapped at Botai; 50 at the Tersek settlement of Kozhai 1), and there are less of them (5–7 known Botai sites, more than 30 known Tersek sites). It is possible that Botai’s almost exclusive specialization in horse-hunting and horse-raising east of the Ishim River fed an external demand for the larger-statured horses of the Ishim steppes during the geographic expansion in the use of domesticated horses between 3500 and 3000 BC. During this period horses became more common in Eastern Europe (Milisauskas, Kruk and Makowicz-Poliszot 2006, Bökönyi 1987), the Caucasus, and Anatolia (Bökönyi 1991). Around 3000 BC they rose to 10–20% of the bones in Bernberg sites in central Germany, and to above 20% of the bones at the Cham site of Galgenberg in Bavaria. The Galgenburg horses included a native small type and a larger type probably imported from the steppes (Benecke 1994:73–75). This general increase in the importance of horses from the Caucasus to the Danube valley, Poland, and Germany about 3500–3000 BC is accepted by many experts (Benecke 1994, Bökönyi 1979) as evidence that horses were domesticated by this time, and at Botai we have convincing evidence that steppe hunters were riding on horseback, tending corralled horses, and

58

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

eating horses for the majority of their food during the same period.

The Case for Domesticated Horses before Botai Because the Botai people were hunters and gatherers prior to their adoption of domesticated horses about 3600–3500 BC, it is likely that horses were domesticated earlier by societies more familiar with domesticated animals and the social adjustments they required. Horses probably were first domesticated in the western Eurasian steppes, west of the Ural River, and only later were adopted east of the Ural by the Botai-Tersek people in northern Kazakhstan. The Ural River had been the eastern border of cattle- and sheep-herding cultures for a thousand years before 3600 BC, and the simplest explanation for the sudden appearance of domesticated horses in Botai sites is that they were borrowed across this cultural and economic border by the Botai people. The evidence for horse domestication is much stronger in Botai sites than it is in older western sites because the critical methods applied by western specialists at Botai (milk residue analysis in pottery, dung analysis in soils, butchering analysis in settlements) have not yet been applied to the older sites in the western steppes. This is not merely an oversight; artifacts encountered in the western steppe sites are generally more dispersed and scattered in the soil, and animal bones are markedly fewer than at the later Botai-Tersek settlements, suggesting a more mobile, perhaps even seasonal series of residences during the western-steppe Eneolithic. This makes the western sites less productive and more complicated to excavate, so specialists working on the older western-steppe collections have more complex and smaller bone assemblages to work with than those from Botai. Dereivka, a settlement on the Dnieper River occupied during the western steppe Late Eneolithic between 4200–3800 BC, is a good illustration of the stratigraphic confusion that haunts the western-steppe sites that might contain the bones of the first domesticated horses. It has the

most-studied horse remains among these older Eneolithic settlements west of the Ural River (Bibikova 1967, Bökönyi 1978, Levine 1990), but its 3,938 mammalian bones, 62% of them from horses, turned out to be mixed between different periods, and analysts never realized the extent of the mixing. The present authors identified wear made by a bit on the premolars of a stallion buried at Dereivka in a head-and-hoof sacrifice with two dogs, also head-and-hide sacrifices (Anthony and Brown 1991). Bit wear suggested that this Eneolithic horse was bitted (and presumably ridden), an encouraging result, but direct radiocarbon dates on the stallion’s teeth showed later that the sacrificial deposit dated to the Iron Age (Anthony and Brown 2000). Dereivka unfortunately has the largest sample of Eneolithic horse bones in the western steppes. But Dereivka was preceded by at least 19 older Eneolithic settlements dated between the 6th and 5th millennia BC with at least 100 reported animal bones, including domesticated animal bones, collated by Dergachev (2007: Appendix 1; see also Kotova 2008). These earlier western-steppe horse-eaters were quite different from those of Botai in one crucial respect: in the western steppes, horse bones were mixed with the bones of domesticated cattle and sheep/goat, indicating that western steppe societies regularly kept small herds of domesticated animals, an economic innovation that spread from Greece into southeastern Europe about 6200 BC and from southeastern Europe into the Dnieper steppes about 5800– 5500 BC, and finally from the Dnieper-Azov steppes eastward to the Volga-Ural steppes perhaps as early as 5000 BC, but certainly by 4500 BC. In the 6th–5th millennia BC, cattle and sheep-goat nowhere constituted more than 25% of the animals consumed in the daily diet from the Dnieper to the Ural (Fig. 2, and Anthony 2007:198). Horses averaged about 40% of the bones at four sites in the Volga-Ural steppes, represented in the top row of Figure 2; and about 13% at 10 sites in the Dnieper-Donets steppes, farther west. Horses were regularly consumed in the western steppes between 5200–4000 BC. The custom of eating horses or deer more fre-

quently than beef or mutton continued into the early 4th millennium BC in Sredni Stog sites including Dereivka (4200–3800 BC) and at the materially similar Repin site on the Don (3800– 3300 BC), represented in the second row in Figure 2. These 19 settlements are often dismissed by western archaeologists as the occupation sites of pedestrian cattle and sheep herders who hunted wild horses. But the horses might have been domesticated. Horses and/or their carved images were included with domesticated cattle and sheep in funeral rituals at three sites in the western steppes: Khvalynsk, S’yezzhe, and Varfolomievka, all occupied during the 5th millennium BC, a millennium before Botai (Anthony and Brown 2011). This elevated symbolic role was new for steppe horses. Horses also were portrayed on the polished stone heads of maces, the status weapons of the 5th millennium BC, another indication of their symbolic importance (Dergachev 2007). Horseback riding would certainly have facilitated the surprisingly long-distance trade in Balkan copper and the sharing of specific styles of prestige artifacts between steppe sites on the middle Volga (S’yezzhe, Khvalynsk) and the lower Dnieper (Mariupol) about 4500 BC. Riding and raiding might also explain the extension of this steppe prestige system between about 4300–4100 BC into the lower Danube valley by a migration that brought steppe graves and horse sacrifices into the lower Danube plains at cemeteries such as Giurgiuleşti and Suvorovo, coincident with the abandonment of 400 tell settlements in neighboring agricultural areas of Bulgaria and Romania (Anthony 2009). Domesticated cattle and sheep seem to have been used in the Volga steppes more for the funeral feasts of newly emerged elites than for ordinary economic subsistence. In the funeral deposits at Khvalynsk, dated 4700–4200 BC, domesticated cattle and sheep predominated, and there were no wild animals—unless horses were wild (Fig. 6.2, top row). Sheep, exotic Near Eastern animals with no native representatives in the western steppes, were the most important creatures used in funeral sacrifices, followed

Horseback Riding and Bronze Age Pastoralism in the Eurasian Steppes

59

by domesticated cattle, and finally, horses—the reverse of their frequency in the secular daily diet. Animal sacrifices were associated with rich graves. About one in five people at Khvalynsk was buried with a piece of a domesticated animal. About one in forty was buried with the remains of multiple domesticated animals (cattle and sheep, horse and cattle, horse and sheep), and the rare graves with multiple species also contained elaborate costumes, imported copper ornaments, and stone maces (Anthony 2007:184). Domesticated animals might have been more significant as a ritual currency than as daily food. Even small herds of sheep and cattle must be watched constantly, and the substantial labor needed to manage them successfully apparently served a purpose that was primarily ideological and political. Their potential as ordinary food was not ignored, but it was secondary. The categorization of domesticated animals primarily as a new kind of ritual and feasting currency might not have been unique to the western steppes during this early era. Foods used in feasting are often different from those eaten in everyday life (Russell 2012:386–88). The Polish archaeologist Marciniak (2008) has argued, based on differences in deposition and treatment, that the cattle of the Neolithic Linear Pottery culture in Poland (5500–5000 BC) were eaten principally at periodic feasts, where they were a vital part of public rituals, while sheep and goats were butchered for everyday eating. Steppe domestic animals were adopted partly from eastern Linear Pottery farmers in Moldova, in the Dniester River valley, near the western border of the steppe zone. The custom of raising domesticated animals for use as the ritually approved, high-status offerings in feasts and sacrifices could have traveled across the western steppes with the idea of domestication, supporting an emerging system of social hierarchy based partly on the sponsorship of public feasts, one of the principal avenues to power among tribal societies (Hayden 2001). Feast-hosting at funerals, the threat of violence (zoomorphic stone maces), and long-distance trade in exotics (copper) that were used to elaborately decorate the body were the visible behaviors that

60

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

defined the new Eneolithic steppe elite. Horses also played a new ceremonial and symbolic role as sacrificial animals, and horse imagery began to appear in art on carved bone plaques and carved stone mace-heads. These behaviors, established in the western steppes by 4500 BC, reappeared in steppe politics for millennia thereafter. Domesticated horses might well have diffused from the western steppes to Botai during the middle 4th millennium BC, but it is remarkable that there is so little evidence for exchange between early Botai-Tersek sites and the contemporary western steppe cultures. Excavations at one Tersek settlement turned up a strange ceramic vessel that the excavators compared to a Dereivka pot (Kalieva and Logvin 1997:159). Early Botai, 3600–3300 BC, was contemporary with late Dereivka-Sredni Stog II ceramic types on the lower Don at Konstaninovka, with Repin types on the middle Don and middle Volga, and with late Khvalynsk types on the lower Volga. Sherds of these types are rarely found in Botai sites, and vice-versa. A few copper awls in Botai-Tersek sites are thought to have been imported from western steppe cultures where copper awls and decorative beads and rings were relatively common. But early Botai and Tersek remained tied stylistically to forest-zone foragers just to their northwest, in the Trans-Ural forest-steppe zone, from which they probably were derived (Kalieva and Logvin 1997:130). Contacts between Botai-Tersek and the western steppes perhaps were filtered indirectly through an interaction zone located somewhere in the southern Ural forest-steppe zone.

The Transition to Mobile Pastoralism in the Western Eurasian Steppes When wagon transport was adopted in the steppes by cattle and sheep herders who already practiced horseback riding, as we can safely assume they did after 3600–3500 BC, pastoral economies in the western steppes were radically reorganized. Wagon technology probably was introduced to the Eurasian steppes about 3300

BC. The oldest steppe wagons actually dated by radiocarbon were buried in the lower Dnieper and north Caucasian steppes about 3100–2900 BC, just at the end of the Botai-Tersek period (Anthony 2007:63–75). More than 200 kurgan graves containing whole wagons or more often just the wagon wheels at the grave corners, with the grave itself representing the wagon body, are published from the Early Bronze Age (EBA) Yamnaya Pit-grave and Middle Bronze Age (MBA) Catacomb-grave cultures of the western steppes, covering the millennium 3100–2100 BC. Perhaps the concept of the axle and wheel, and the cast copper tools (chisels) that made wheeling-making possible, diffused into the steppes after about 3500 BC through the north Caucasus Mountains and the Maikop culture, which received trade goods and ideas (including wagons?) from Uruk-period sites in northern Mesopotamia (Kohl 2007:72–86, Anthony 2007:287–95). The combination of wagons, for the transport of heavy bulk items such as water, food, tents, and clothing, with horseback riding, for the transport of scouts and herders, probably was responsible for the appearance of the Yamnaya horizon, or culture-historical community. Many, including the authors, have equated Yamnaya with the Proto-Indo-European language community (Anthony 2007, Mallory 1989, Merpert 1974). The wheel and wagon vocabulary in Proto-Indo-European requires that Proto-Indo-European existed as a coherent language community during a chronological window, 4000–3000 BC, that includes the early Yamnaya period; and borrowing between Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Kartvelian, and Proto-Uralic indicate a geographic location for Proto-Indo-European between the Caucasus and Urals, in the Yamnaya region during the Yamnaya period (Anthony 2007:81–82). Yamnaya is the first archaeological culture that has been identified over all of the western steppes from the Ural River to the Dnieper. Its material markers in graves, carved stone stelae, metal daggers and axes, ceramics, and dependence on mobile herding seem to have been absorbed by the many regional archaeolog-

ical variants of the Eneolithic, replacing the earlier material heterogeneity in the western steppes with a broad, if variable, horizon of EBA kurgan graves in pits (yamas) under burial mounds. A stable isotope study comparing human bone from Eneolithic and EBA Yamnaya graves in the middle Volga steppes showed that the diet of the Yamnaya people was isotopically distinct from the Eneolithic diet (Fig. 6.3, see color insert). Eneolithic people probably depended more on fish, while the EBA Yamnaya diet depended on pastoral products—milk and the meat of sheep and cattle, rather than fish and horses (Schulting and Richards, forthcoming). The Yamnaya diet and its isotopic pattern were retained in the middle Volga steppes throughout the Bronze Age thereafter, even by Late Bronze Age (LBA) populations in the Volga steppes, after a transition to sedentary settlements. The emergence of the EBA Yamnaya tradition seems to represent the critical transition from regarding cattle and sheep as a ritually charged prestige currency to making them the ordinary staples of a new diet that depended largely on beef, mutton, and dairy products. Once invented, this new economy, and its isotopic signature, was retained through the Bronze Age in the middle Volga steppes. The Yamnaya horizon reflects the widespread adoption from the Ural to the Dnieper steppes of a new, residentially mobile, pastoral economy that took advantage of two kinds of mobility—wagons for slow bulk transport (water, shelter, food, and family) and horseback riding for rapid light transport (scouting for pastures, herding, trading, and raiding). Together, they greatly increased the potential scale of herding economies. Herders operating out of a wagon could stay with their herds out in the deep steppes, far from the shelter and resources of the major river valleys, sheltering instead in and under mobile homes that carried tents, water, and food. The unused interior steppes between the major river valleys became pasture for the first time, enabling larger and therefore necessarily more mobile herds (mobility increases with herd size to provide adequate pasturage). Larger herds meant greater dispari-

Horseback Riding and Bronze Age Pastoralism in the Eurasian Steppes

61

ties in herd wealth, reflected in disparities in the wealth of Yamnaya graves. Mobile wagon camps are almost impossible to find archaeologically, so settlements became archaeologically invisible across the eastern Don-Volga-Ural steppes, where wagon camps seem to have been the only kind of settlement; and became rare in the western Dnieper-Don steppes, where wagon camps were tethered to occasional defended Yamnaya centers such as Mikhailovka II–III on the lower Dnieper. The Yamnaya horizon is also the visible archaeological expression of a social adjustment to high mobility—the invention of the political infrastructure to manage larger herds and the rights of their owners in a human landscape of mobile homes and dispersed communities. A linguistic echo of the social innovations of this period might be preserved in the similarity between English guest and host. The two social roles opposed in English guest and host were originally two reciprocal aspects of the same institution. They are derived from the same Proto-Indo-European root (*ghos-ti), designating the institution of hospitality, requiring reciprocal obligations of respect and protection, with cognates preserved in Italic, Germanic, and Slavic; and the same institution appeared under another name (xénos) in ancient Greece. The geographic dispersal of this cognate and the institution it signified through many of the western Indo-European branches suggests that it can be reconstructed for at least western Proto-Indo-European. The Proto-Indo-European guest-host relationship can be assigned to at least western Yamnaya. The institution signified by the cognate meanings of *ghosti- required that “hospitality” (from this root through Latin hospes, “foreigner, guest”) should be extended by (western) Yamnaya hosts to guests, in the knowledge that the receiver and giver of “hospitality” could later reverse roles. This mutual obligation to provide “hospitality” functioned as a bridge between Yamnaya social units (tribes, clans) that had formerly restricted these obligations to their kin, encouraging the spread of the Yamnaya archaeological horizon across the former cultural borders of the

62

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

Eneolithic in the western steppes. Guest-host hospitality relationships would have been very useful in a mobile herding economy, as a way of separating people who were moving through your territory with your protection from those who were unregulated and therefore unprotected. The guest-host institution would have been a positive adaptation to increased mobility, and it could have been among the identity-defining innovations that spread with the Yamnaya horizon. It might also have been one of the tools through which foreigners were encouraged to form alliances with societies that offered the protections of hospitality, contributing to the spread of the Indo-European languages in which such institutions were coded (Anthony 2007:303; Benveniste 1973:71–83 and 273–88). In this interpretation, Indo-European languages spread through the multiplication of reciprocal obligations between patrons (*wikpots) and clients (literally “followers”) that were publicly acknowledged in celebrations of hospitality centered on the feast (*dapnom in PIE) and the sacrifice (*spend, *weik-) of milk and cattle, particularly, which were also occasions for praise poetry (*kar-) and oratory that were the vehicle through which the fame (*kléwes-) of the patron became known (reconstructions from Mallory and Adams 2006:266–86). This set of social institutions spread on the back of a newly introduced, higher-mobility pastoral economy, rather than only through violent conquest. Although Yamnaya communities in the middle Ural River steppes around Orenburg were western neighbors of the late Botai-Tersek cultures after about 3300–3100 BC, there is little or no evidence of contact or interchange. The peculiar horse-centered Botai-Tersek economy disappeared about 3100–3000 BC. We are not certain what happened to the Botai-Tersek people in the following centuries. It is possible that some of them retreated into the northern forests or forest-steppe, where people who made similar pottery lived, and others adopted cattle and sheep herding and remained in the steppes, as at Sergeivka, dated about 2800–2600 BC, a settlement on the Ishim River with late Botai-

style pottery and the bones of domesticated cattle, sheep, and horses. But Sergeivka is the only published site of the early 3rd millennium BC in the northern steppe zone of Kazakhstan. The early 3rd millennium in the Kazakh steppes is almost an archaeological blank.

The Appearance of Pastoralism in the Eastern Steppes The Tarim Basin was occupied very lightly, if at all, during the 3rd millennium BC, but people with domesticated cattle and sheep were drawing near. Where they came from is debated. The first domesticated sheep, goats, and cattle spread across Iran and north into Central Asia about 6100 BC, arriving north of the Kopetdag Mountains with the Djeitun culture in southern Turkmenistan. Djeitun-like ceramics have been found in early Neolithic sites in northeastern Iran, at Yarim Tepe, Tureng Tepe, and Sang-i Chakmak, probably the source region from which farmers settled southern Turkmenistan (Harris 2010:62). The Djeitun culture was the origin of the agricultural village cultures that continued to occupy the cultivable and fertile fans at the base of the Iran-Afghan plateau where rivers such as the Murghab and Tedzhen emptied into the Central Asian deserts. The Kelteminar hunter-fisher-gatherers who lived in those deserts were concentrated around the southern and eastern margins of the Aral Sea and in the marshy valley of its southern tributary, the Amu Darya. They seem to have remained distant from the Neolithization process, content to subsist by fishing and hunting wild aurochs, wild boar, deer, gazelle, onager (wild horses did not live in Central Asia), and wild argali sheep, probably until about 2000 BC (Harris 2010:66–68, 220–22). Farmers who kept domesticated cattle, sheep, and goats advanced northward from Turkmenistan to the edge of the Kelteminar foraging territory on the Zeravshan River, a tributary of the Amu Darya, settling on the banks of the Zeravshan at Sarazm by about 3500 BC. Sarazm might have been

founded as an extreme northern outpost of the Uruk exchange network, a site where turquoise was collected from local deposits in the Aral Sea basin for the inter-regional trade in precious stones (carnelian, turquoise, and lapis lazuli) of the Middle and Late Uruk periods, 3600–3100 BC. The Zeravshan valley became a home to herds of sheep and goats, a few cattle, but no horses. Its people lived in the large town or small mudbrick city of Sarazm, which eventually covered about 35 ha, and perhaps at other settlements, eating bread made from wheat grown in irrigated fields (Isakov 1994, Isakov et al. 1987, Lyonnet 1996). The Zeravshan remained the northern frontier of Near Eastern agricultural civilizations for the next thousand years. What was happening north and east of Sarazm after 3500 BC is a debated question because eastern Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan have revealed almost no sites north of Sarazm dated before 2000 BC. Begash, found and excavated by Michael Frachetti in eastern Kazakhstan, 800 km northeast of Sarazm (Frachetti and Mar’yashev 2007), is the exception. It has one level (Begash Ia) dated to 2300–2100 BC with bones of domesticated sheep and cattle, but no horses, in its food refuse; and charred millet and wheat grains in a grave. Begash Ia had ceramics distinctively different from those of Sarazm, and contained no Sarazm imports. But Frachetti (2008, 2012) suggested that a specific kind of pastoral economy based on domesticated sheep and goats, with few cattle and no horses, diffused northward during the 4th millennium BC from Sarazm to Begash and continued to spread through the mountain piedmonts 1,200 km farther north to the western Altai Mountains, 1,800 km northeast of Sarazm, where this Iran-derived, sheep-centered form of mountain pastoralism created the Afanasievo culture, the first culture in the western Altai with domesticated cattle and sheep. The sudden appearance in the western Altai of Afanasievo kurgan graves containing domesticated animal sacrifices was dated by a handful of older radiocarbon dates to 3600 BC, but recently Russian scholars have argued that these very old dates were exaggerat-

Horseback Riding and Bronze Age Pastoralism in the Eurasian Steppes

63

ed by reservoir effects, and suggest moving the beginning of Afanasievo down to around 3000 BC (Shishlina 2012; Svyatko et al. 2009). Did Afanasievo result from the spread of a new pastoral economy from Sarazm through Begash Ia and up an Inner Asian Mountain Corridor to the western Altai? Probably not. There are no sites with the bones of domesticated cattle and sheep dated to the 4th millennium BC in the 1,800 km between Sarazm and Afanasievo. Begash Ia was not occupied in the 4th or even in the early 3rd millennia BC, when the Afanasievo culture was thriving in the western Altai, so Begash cannot be a transmission site to explain early Afanasievo; at best it might have overlapped with the end of late Afanasievo about 2300 BC. Between Sarazm and Afansievo in 3000 BC there was great typological as well as physical distance. Sarazm does not show material parallels to Afanasievo in ceramics. Comb-pricked pottery found at Sarazm was from the local Kelteminar foragers (Lyonnet 1996:116), not from distant Afanasievo. Burial poses were quite different between Afanasievo (supine extended or supine with raised knees) and Sarazm (contracted on the side), as were metallurgy and ornaments. A group of rich graves placed in a stone circle in early Sarazm was said to be similar to Afanasievo graves (Isakov 1994, Frachetti 2012), but the only similarity was the construction of a stone circle—the grave construction, body placement, grave gifts, and ornamental styles were different. While a linkage between Sarazm and Afanasievo is difficult to see in any category of material culture, Afanasievo exhibits numerous typological, ritual, and economic parallels with western steppe cultures of the late 4th–early 3rd millennia BC, including Yamnaya kurgan grave types, a typical Yamnaya burial pose, Yamnaya-Repin ceramic types and decoration, and Yamnaya metal axes and daggers. Afanasievo metallurgy included sleeved axes and daggers of specific Yamnaya types (Kubarev 1988, Chernykh, Kuz’minykh, and Orlovskata 2004: fig. 1.4). What about the pastoral economy of Afanasievo? Was it more like Yamnaya or Sarazm?

64

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

No Yamnaya settlements are known east of the Don River, in the Don-Volga-Ural steppes, although hundreds of Yamnaya kurgan cemeteries are reported for this region, so settlement garbage middens, the best source of information on the animals consumed in the human diet, are lacking entirely for eastern Yamnaya. We now have Schulting and Richards’ isotopic data from Yamnaya skeletons in the middle Volga steppes indicating a Yamnaya diet probably high in sheepgoat products (Schulting and Richards, forthcoming). Eastern Yamnaya herding practices can also be examined through V. Shilov’s study of 263 Yamnaya graves in the Don-Volga steppes, 40 of which were found to contain domesticated animal sacrifices. Among these 40 graves, sheep were included in 70%, cattle in 16%, horse in 8.1%, and dog in 5% of the graves (Shilov 1985). Yamnaya herds of the Don-Volga steppes seem to have been numerically dominated by sheep, according to grave sacrifices. The broad generalization that cattle were numerically dominant in western steppe pastoralism, which has recently been repeated by several authors (Frachetti 2012, Bendrey 2011, Kohl 2007), is based on Mikhailovka II–III, a stratified Yamnaya settlement on the lower Dnieper. It ignores Mikhailovka I, the pre-Yamnaya occupation at this location, dated about 3600–3300 BC, when sheep-goat represented 66% of the animal bones; and it also ignores the Usatovo settlements in the Dniester steppes, contemporary with early Yamnaya, where sheep-goat were 58–76% of the animal bones; and the sacrificial data compiled by Shilov from the eastern Yamnaya region (Fig. 2, third row). The sheep-heavy structure of Afanasievo herds was first and foremost an adaptation by observant herders to the high alpine pastures of the western Altai, not a signal of cultural identity. Sheep-heavy herding regions can be identified in eastern Yamnaya or Usatovo sites in the western steppes, which were contemporary with early Afanasievo; but cattle predominated at other sites in the western steppes. Afanasievo herders probably watched over their sheep from horseback, like Yamnaya herders, and unlike Begash Ia herders (no horse bones were found at Begash

Ia). Horse bones occur as sacrifices in nine Afanasievo cemeteries (Kuzmina 2008:205). The final indicator of the origin of Afanasievo comes from genetics. The later Bronze Age people of the western Altai had genetic traits in both their maternal (MtDNA) and paternal (Y chromosome) genes that indicate a western European source for the Andronovo population dated just after Afanasievo (Keyser et al. 2009). Unfortunately no Afanasievo bones yielded recoverable DNA, but Afanasievo is thought to have evolved directly into the tested Bronze Age population. Taking all of the evidence together, it is likely that the Afanasievo culture of the western Altai was derived from the Yamnaya communities of the western steppes via a long-distance west-to-east migration from the Ural steppes across Kazakhstan to the Altai around 3000 BC. The Ural-Altai steppe connection seems to have been maintained at least sporadically after 3000 BC, because typological innovations in the western steppes including MBA Catacomb-style pottery appeared in late Afanasievo graves in the western Altai. A stepping-stone site marking a route on this interaction trail is Karagash in the central Kazakh uplands, near Karaganda, 600 km west of the nearest Afanasievo sites in the western Altai and 900 km east of the nearest Yamnaya kurgans in the Ural steppes. The earth mound of Kurgan 2 covered a stone cromlech circle 23 m in diameter, with traces of paint on the stones (Evdokimov and Loman 1989, Anthony 2007:308–9). An intact grave contained sherds from a shell-tempered Afanasievo-style pot, a fragment of a wooden bowl with a copper-covered lip, a tanged copper dagger, a copper four-sided awl, and a stone pestle. The skeleton was of a male 40–50 years old laid on his back with his knees raised, oriented southwest, with pieces of black charcoal and red ochre on the grave floor. The metal artifacts, pestle, and burial pose were typical for the Yamnaya horizon, as were some ceramic sherds found in the kurgan fill; the stone cromlech, stone-lined cist, and pot were similar to Afanasievo types. Karagash was located in a protected valley within a granite

mountain standing above the steppe plains, a visible and remarkable natural landmark even today, and a place where east-west travelers might have wintered in their covered wagons with their herds in the 3rd millennium BC. Similar islands of granite and pine forest occur as isolated stands in the open steppes north of the upper Ishim River, like breadcrumbs scattered across Kazakhstan, where herders with domesticated cattle and sheep could have paused while passing between the Ural steppes and the western Altai Mountains. This movement probably brought the Indo-European ancestor of the Tocharian language to the western Altai Mountains (Mallory 2010). In 3000 BC regular contact did not yet occur in any visible way between the northern world of the Eurasian steppes, including Afanasievo, where horseback riding was common, and the southern agricultural and herding societies of Central Asia, including Sarazm, where horses were still unknown. Central Asian agricultural settlements did not venture very far north of Sarazm and the Zeravshan. A light population of hunter-fishers might have maintained their foraging way of life, as the Kelteminar foragers seem to have done in Central Asia, in the great geographical space in between. Within that vast terra incognita lies the Tarim Basin, and even there, where archaeological surveys have been conducted, the early 3rd millennium BC remains almost empty of people.

The Opening of the Eurasian Steppes Toward the end of the 3rd millennium this situation changed, an important event in the history of the ancient world, for it resulted in tying together regions that previously had communicated indirectly and occasionally, or not at all. Significant interactions began to occur between the northern Eurasian steppes (Sintashta-Petrovka cultures) and Central Asia (Bactria-Margiana cultures or BMAC), and perhaps between both regions and the frontiers of China, in the century or two before 2000 BC. Pastoral herders who also used millet and wheat in funeral sacrifices appeared about 2300–2100 BC in the formerly

Horseback Riding and Bronze Age Pastoralism in the Eurasian Steppes

65

empty space north of Sarazm, in eastern Kazakhstan at Begash Ia. Other herders moved south out of the western Altai toward the Tarim Basin about the same time, in the form of the Shamirshak (Turkic) or Qiemu’qiereke (Chinese) culture (Jia and Betts 2010, Mallory 2010, Mallory and Mair 2000). After 2000 BC these tentative paths of interaction became more archaeologically visible, perhaps because they carried a higher volume of traffic, particularly between the northern steppes and Central Asia. By 1800 BC steppe cultures of the Andronovo type had taken up residence in Central Asia, and interacted to a lesser degree with the Tarim Basin through shared grave and artifact styles, and metallurgy. Through these border regions steppe cultures began to interact with Iran, India, and China (Linduff 2004, Salvatori 2003, Jia and Betts 2010). An under-appreciated role was played in these developments by the maturing cultures of the northern forest and forest-steppe zones. Between 2500–2000 BC significant climatic cooling and aridity affected the northern hemisphere from Mesopotamia to the Pacific (Kremenetski 1997, Klimenko et al. 2001, Weiss 2000). Across the Eurasian steppes marshes dried up, temperatures fell, and forests retreated north, expanding the steppes. The people who lived in the forest and forest-steppe zones began to keep domesticated cattle and sheep, principally cattle, during this cold, arid phase of climate. Interactions between forest and steppe populations increased in apparent intensity, visible in the appearance of forest-zone cranial characteristics among steppe populations in the middle Volga steppes after about 2100 BC (Khokhlov, forthcoming). The Abashevo and Balanovo cultures in the western Ural forest-steppe zone were operating their own copper mines and making their own bronze by 2500 BC, competing for the first time with the copper mining and metallurgy of the pastoralists in the steppes. Seima-Turbino was a brilliantly innovative metallurgical school of bronze weapon-casting that emerged north of the steppe zone, in the forest-steppes of the western Altai plain, just at the end of this period, about 2100 BC. The Sintashta culture in

66

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

the southern Ural steppes shared new kinds of javelin and spear-head types with Seima-Turbino from the forest-steppe zone. These new weapon types were symptoms of a burst of innovation in warfare that led to the invention of the chariot in the steppes, perhaps initially used as a platform for javelins (Anthony 2009). Chariots were buried in at least 16 weapon-equipped graves of the Sintashta culture between 2100–1800 BC. In the forest-steppe, at the Abashevo cemetery of Pepkino, 28 men with axe, blade, and projectile injuries were buried in a mass grave, apparently killed in a single battle (Koryakova and Epimakhov 2007:64). One of the signature innovations of the Sintashta culture was the appearance of heavily fortified permanent settlements, with ditches, banks, and substantial palisade walls, in the steppes southeast of the Urals, beginning a shift from mobile to settled pastoralism that was adopted soon afterward across the northern steppe zone both to the east and the west. The late 3rd millennium BC was a time of intensified conflict and intensified interchange between the people of the northern steppes and the forest zone. Conflict and competition for shrinking marsh resources essential for wintering-over pastoral herds probably led to the sedentarization of the formerly mobile pastoralists of the steppes. The beginning of intense interaction between the Uralic- or Altaic-speaking populations of the southern forest zone and the Indo-European populations of the steppes is marked in some inherited vocabulary. The self-designating Indo-Iranian ethnonym Arya/Ārya appeared as a loanword in Finno-Ugric as *orya, denoting “slave” (Carpelan and Parpola 2001:112), quite the opposite of its original meaning (“noble”) in Indo-Iranian and suggesting conflict; while Indo-Iranian *asura, “lord,” was borrowed as Finno-Ugric *asera, “lord” or “prince,” suggesting political alliance or integration. This complicated interchange played an important and under-recognized role in the expansion of herding economies and metallurgy, innovations in warfare, and the creation of new avenues of international trade that appeared between 2500–2000 BC in the steppes.

Explanations for this period of integration and innovation tend to stress influences from the distant civilizations of Iran and Central Asia (Frachetti 2012, Kohl 2007), but the forest zone cultures were geographically contiguous and had more materially visible and closer interactions with the cultures of the Eurasian steppes between the middle Volga and the western Altai. Heightened conflict has been shown in other contexts to increase the range and intensity of long-distance trade for exotic prestige goods that are used as gifts to seal alliances (Vehik 2002). It was in this context that the Sintashta culture and its late eastern variant, Petrovka, initiated trade and exchange contacts with irrigated Central Asian BMAC communities, perhaps initially in order to obtain BMAC textiles or other prestige goods for their own political reasons. But this event quickly led to the diffusion of chariot warfare and horses from the steppes through Central Asia (Salvatori 2003) into Iran (through Malyan and Godin) and Mesopotamia, where about 2100 BC scribes of the Third Dynasty of Ur created a new cuneiform word for these new equids, which they termed the “ass of the mountains” (Owen 1991). Chariot warfare would soon be modified in the Near East to become an essential element in imperial armies. Indic-speaking chariot mercenaries from the steppes probably established the Mitanni dynasty around 1500 BC in northern Syria, followed later by Iranian-speaking pastoralists who filtered onto the Iranian plateau. Horses and chariots are not certainly documented in China in good stratified and dated contexts, and identified as horses rather than onagers (Equus hemionus) by zoologists, until after 1500 BC, and perhaps as late as 1300 BC (Yuan and Flad 2006, Linduff 2003). In the context of the back-and-forth coming and going between the southern forest zone and the northern steppes, a new archaeological culture known as Shamirshak (Turkic) or Qiemu’qiereke (Chinese) appeared south of the western Altai in the northern margins of the Dzungarian desert after 2500 BC, exhibiting mixed traits of Afanasievo, western Catacomb-Poltavka steppe cultures, and the northern Okunevo

culture (Jia and Betts 2010, Mallory 2010). Monuments of the Qiemu’qiereke type might constitute the material remains of a demographic expansion from the western Altai Afanasievo region across Dzungaria into the northern Tarim Basin by a population that perhaps spoke a language ancestral to the later Tocharian languages (Mallory 2011). This was the first pastoral population of the Tarim Basin. Horses were by this time a regular part of steppe life, even if they did not appear in the archaeological record in the Tarim Basin until later.

Bibliography Anthony, David W. 1986. The “Kurgan Culture,” Indo-European Origins, and the Domestication of the Horse: A Reconsideration. Current Anthropology 27:291–313. ———. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2009. The Sintashta Genesis: The Roles of Climate Change, Warfare, and Long-Distance Trade. In Social Complexity in Prehistoric Eurasia: Monuments, Metals and Mobility, ed. Bryan K. Hanks and Katheryn M. Linduff, pp. 47–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Anthony, David W., and Dorcas R. Brown. 1991. The Origins of Horseback Riding. Antiquity 65:22–38. ———. 2000. Eneolithic Horse Exploitation in the Eurasian Steppes: Diet, Ritual and Riding. Antiquity 74:75–86. ———. 2011. The Secondary Products Revolution, Horse-riding, and Mounted Warfare. Journal of World Prehistory 24.2:131–60. Anthony, David W., ed., with Jennifer Y. Chi. 2009. The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley, 5000–3500 BC. New York and Princeton: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World and Princeton University Press. Anthony, David W., Dorcas Brown, P. Kuznetsov, O. Mochalov, and A. Khkokhlov, eds. Forthcoming. The Samara Valley Project: A Bronze Age Landscape in the Russian Steppes, ed. D.W.

Horseback Riding and Bronze Age Pastoralism in the Eurasian Steppes

67

Anthony et al. UCLA Press: Cotsen Institute Monograph Series. Bendrey, R. 2007. New Methods for the Identification of Evidence for Bitting on Horse Remains from Archaeological Sites. Journal of Archaeological Science 34:1036–1050. Bendrey, Robin. 2011. Some Like It Hot: Environmental Determinism and the Pastoral Economies of the Later Prehistoric Eurasian Steppe. Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice 1:8. Benecke, N. 1994. Archäologische Studien zur Entwicklung der Haustierhaltung in Mitteleuropa und Südskandinavien von Anfängen bis zum Ausgehenden Mittelalter. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Benecke, N., and A. von den Dreisch. 2003. Horse Exploitation in the Kazakh Steppes during the Eneolithic and Bronze Age. In Prehistoric Steppe Adaptation and the Horse, ed. M. Levine, C. Renfrew, and K. Boyle, pp. 69-82. Cambridge: McDonald Institute. Benveniste, Emile. 1973 [1969]. Indo-European Language and Society, trans. Elizabeth Palmer. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press. Bibikova, V.I. 1967. K izucheniyu drevneishikh domashnikh loshadei vostochnoi Evropy. Biulleten Moskovskogo Obshchestva Ispytatelei Prirodi, Otdel Biologicheskii 72.3:106–17. Bökönyi, Sandor. 1978. The Earliest Waves of Horses in East Europe. Journal of Indo-European Studies 6.1/2:17–76. ———. 1987. Horses and Sheep in East Europe. In Proto-Indo-European: The Archaeology of a Linguistic Problem, ed. S. Skomal, pp. 136–44. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man. ———. 1991. Late Chalcolithic Horses in Anatolia. In Equids in the Ancient World, vol. 2, ed. Richard Meadow and Hans-Peter Uerpmann, pp. 123–31. Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert. Bökönyi, S. 1979. Copper Age Vertebrate Fauna from Kétegyháza. In The People of the Pit-Grave Kurgans in Eastern Hungary, ed. I. Ecsedy, pp.101–116. Budapest: Akademiai Kiado. Bratchenko, S.N. 2003. Radiocarbon Chronology of the Early Bronze Age of the Middle Don, Svatove, Luhansk Region. Baltic-Pontic Studies 12:185–208.

68

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

Carpelan, Christian and Asko Parpola. 2001. Emergence, Contacts and Dispersal of Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uralic and Proto-Aryan in Archaeological Perspective. In Early Contacts Between Uralic and Indo-European: Linguistic and Archaeological Considerations, eds. Christian Carpelan, Asko Parpola, and Petteri Koskikallio, pp. 55–150. Memoires de la Société Finno-Ugrienne 242. Helsinki: Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura. Cebrián, Reyes B. 2010. Some Greek Evidence for I-E Youth Contingents of Shape-Shifters. Journal of Indo-European Studies 38 (3&4):343– 357. Chernykh, E.V., S.V. Kuz’minykh, and L.B. Orlovskata. 2004. Ancient Metallurgy in Northeast Asia: From the Urals to the Saiano-Altai. In Metallurgy in Ancient Eastern Eurasia from the Urals to the Yellow River, ed. Katheryn M. Linduff, pp. 15–36. Chinese Studies 31. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Dergachev, V.A. 2007. O Skipetrakh, o Loshadyakh, o Voine. Saint Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriya. Derin, Z., and Oscar W. Muscarella. 2001. Iron and Bronze Arrows. In Ayanis I. Ten Years’ Excavations at Rusahinili Eiduru-kai 1989–1998, ed. A. Çilingiroğlu and M. Salvini, pp. 189–217. Roma: Documenta Asiana VI ISMEA. Di Cosmo, Nicola. 1994. Ancient Inner Asian Nomads: Their Economic Basis and Its Significance in Chinese History. Journal of Asian Studies 53.4:1092–126. ———. 2004. Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Evdokimov, V.V., and V.G. Loman. 1989. Raskopi Yamnogo kurgana v Karagandinskoi Oblasti. In Voprosy Arkheologii Tsestral’nogo i Severnogo Kazakhstana, ed. K.M. Baipakov, pp. 34–46. Karaganda: Karagandinskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet. Ewers, John C. 1955. The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Frachetti, Michael D. 2008. Pastoralist Landscapes and Social Interaction in Bronze Age Eurasia. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2012. Multi-regional Emergence of Mobile

Pastoralism and Non-uniform Institutional Complexity across Eurasia. Current Anthropology 53.1:2–38. Frachetti, M.D., and A.N. Mar’yashev. 2007. Longterm Occupation and Seasonal Settlement of Eastern Eurasian Pastoralists at Begash, Kazakhstan. Journal of Field Archaeology 32.3:221–42. French, C., and Kousoulakou, M. 2002. Geomorphological and Micro-Morphological Investigations of Paleosols, Valley Sediments and a Sunken-Floored Dwelling at Botai, Kazakhstan. In Prehistoric Steppe Adaptation and the Horse, ed. Marsha Levine, Colin Renfrew, and Katie Boyle, pp. 105–14. Cambridge: McDonald Institute. Gorelik, M.V. 1993. Oruzhie Drevnego Vostoka. Moskva: Nauka. Harris, David R. 2010. Origins of Agriculture in Central Asia. An Environmental-Archaeological Study. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Hayden, Brian. 2001. Fabulous Feasts: A Prolegomenon to the Importance of Feasting. In Feasts, ed. M. Dietler and Brian Hayden, pp. 23–64. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press. Isakov, A.I. 1994. Sarazm: An Agricultural Center of Ancient Sogdiana. Bulletin of the Asia Institute (n.s.) 8:1–12. Isakov, A.I., Philip L. Kohl, C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, and R. Maddin. 1987. Metallurgical Analysis from Sarazm, Tadjikistan SSR. Archaeometry 29.1:90–102. Jia, Peter Wei Ming, and Alison V.G. Betts. 2010. A Re-analysis of the Qiemu’erqieke (Shamirshak) Cemeteries, Xinjiang, China. Journal of Indo-European Studies 38.3/4:275–318. Kalieva, S. S., and V.N. Logvin. 1997. Skotovody Turgaya v Tret’em Tysyacheletii do Nashei Ery. Kustenai: Institu Arkheologii im. A. Margulana. ———. 2011. On the Origins of Nomadism in the Asian Steppes. Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia 39.3:85–93. Keeley, L.H. 1996. War Before Civilization. New York: Oxford University Press. Kershaw, Kris. 2000. The One-Eyed God: Odin and the Indo-Germanic Männerbünde. Washington DC: Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph 36.

Keyser, Christine, Caroline Bouakaze, Eric Crubézy, Valery G. Nikolaev, Daniel Montagnon, Tatiana Reis, and Bertrand Ludes. 2009. Ancient DNA Provides New Insights into the History of South Siberian Kurgan People. Human Genetics (Springer), published online May 2009. Khokhlov, Aleksandr A. n.d. Demographic and Cranial Characteristics of the Volga-Ural Population in the Eneolithic and Bronze Age. In The Samara Valley Project: A Bronze Age Landscape in the Russian Steppes, ed. D. W. Anthony, D. R. Brown, A. A. Khokhlov, P. F. Kuznetsov, and O. D. Mochalov. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute. Forthcoming. Kislenko, A., and N. Tatarintseva. 1999. The Eastern Ural Steppe at the End of the Stone Age. In Late Prehistoric Exploitation of the Eurasian Steppe, ed. M. Levine, Yu. Rassamakin, A. Kislenko, and N. Tatarintseva, pp. 183–216. Cambridge: McDonald Institute. Klimenko, V.V., V.A. Klimanov, A.A. Sirin, and A.M. Sleptsov. 2001. Climate Changes in Western European Russia in the Late Holocene. Doklady Earth Sciences 377.2:190–94. Kohl, Philip L. 2007. The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koryakova, Ludmila, and Andrie Epimakhov. 2007. The Urals and Western Siberia in the Bronze and Iron Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kotova, N. 2008. Early Eneolithic in the Pontic Steppes, trans. N.S. Makhortykh. British Archaeological Reports (International Series) 1735. Oxford. ­Kremenetski, C. 1997. The Late Holocene Environment and Climate Shift in Russia and Surrounding Lands. In Climate Change in the Third Millennium BC, ed. H. Dalfes, G. Kukla, and H. Weiss, pp. 351–70. Berlin: Springer Verlag/NATO ASI Series. Kubarev, V.D. 1988. Drevnie Rospisi Karakola. Novosibirsk: Nauka. Kuzmina, Elena E. 1994. Otkuda Prishli Indoarii? Moscow: M.G.P. ‘Kalina.’ ———. 2003. Origins of Pastoralism in the Eurasian Steppes. In Prehistoric Steppe Adaptation

Horseback Riding and Bronze Age Pastoralism in the Eurasian Steppes

69

and the Horse, ed. Marsha Levine, Colin Renfrew, and Katie Boyle, pp. 203–32. Cambridge: McDonald Institute. ———. 2008. The Prehistory of the Silk Road, ed. Victor H. Mair. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Levine, Marsha. 1990. Dereivka and the Problem of Horse Domestication. Antiquity 64:727–40. Linduff, Katheryn M. 2003. A Walk on the Wild Side: Late Shang Appropriation of Horses in China. In Prehistoric Steppe Adaptation and the Horse, ed. Marsha Levine, Colin Renfrew, and Katie Boyle, pp. 139–62. Cambridge: McDonald Institute. ———, ed. 2004. Metallurgy in Ancient Eastern Eurasia from the Urals to the Yellow River. Chinese Studies 31. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Lyonnet, B., ed. 1996. Sarazm (Tajikistan). Céramiques (Chalcolithiques et Bronze Ancien). Mémoire de la Mission Archéologique Française en Asie Centrale 7. Paris. Mallory, J.P. 1989. In Search of the Indo-Europeans. London: Thames and Hudson. ———. 2010. Bronze Age Languages of the Tarim Basin. Expedition 52(3):44–53. Mallory, J.P., and Douglas Q. Adams. 2006. The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mallory, J.P., and Victor H. Mair. 2000. The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West. London: Thames and Hudson. Malov, N.M. 2002. Spears—Signs of Archaic Leaders of the Pokrovsk Archaeological Cultures. In Complex Societies of Central Eurasia from the 3rd to the 1st Millennium BC, vols. I and II, ed. Karlene Jones-Bley and D.G. Zdanovich, pp. 314–36. Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph Series 45. Washington, DC. Marciniak, A. 2008. Communities, Households, and Animals: Convergent Developments in Central Anatolian and Central European Neolithic. Documenta Praehistorica 35:93–109. Merpert, N.Y. 1974. Drevneishie Skotovody Volzhsko-Uralskogo Mezhdurechya. Moscow: Nauka.

70

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

Milisauskas S., J. Kruk, and D. Makowicz-Poliszot. 2006. Neolithic Horses at Bronocice. Sprawozdania Archeologiczne (Archaeological Reports) 58:307–23. Murphy, Eileen. Forthcoming. A Bioarcheological Study of Prehistoric Populations from the Volga Region. In The Samara Valley Project: A Bronze Age Landscape in the Russian Steppes, ed. D.W. Anthony et al. American School of Prehistoric Research Monograph. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Olsen S., B. Bradley, D. Maki, and A. Outram. 2006. Community Organization among Copper Age Sedentary Horse Pastoralists of Kazakhstan. In Beyond the Steppe and the Sown, ed. D.L. Peterson, L.M. Popova, and A.T. Smith, pp. 89–111. Colloquia Pontica 13. Leiden: Brill. Outram, A.K., N.A. Stear, R. Bendrey, S. Olsen, A. Kasparov, V. Zaibert, et al. 2009. The Earliest Horse Harnessing and Milking. Science 323:1332–35. Outram A.K., N.A. Stear, A. Kasparov, E. Usmanova, V. Varfolomeev, and R.P. Evershed. 2010. Horses for the Dead: Funerary Foodways in Bronze Age Kazakhstan. Antiquity 85.327:116–28. Owen, D.I. 1991. The First Equestrian: An Ur III Glyptic Scene. Acta Sumerologica 13:259–73. Russell, Nerissa. 2012. Social Zooarchaeology: Humans and Animals in Prehistory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ryden, Hope. 1978. America’s Last Wild Horses, pp. 160–62. New York: Dutton. Salvatori, Sandro. 2003. Pots and Peoples: The “Pandora’s Jar” of Central Asian Archaeological Research; on Two Recent Books on Gonur Graveyard Excavations. Rivista di Archeologia 27:5–20. Schulting, R.J., and M.P. Richards. n.d. Stable Isotope Analysis of Neolithic to Late Bronze Age Populations in the Samara Valley. In The Samara Valley Project: A Bronze Age Landscape in the Russian Steppes, ed. D.W. Anthony et al. American School of Prehistoric Research Monograph. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Forthcoming. Shilov, V.P. 1985. Problemy proiskhozhdeniya kochevogo skotovodstva v vostochnoi Evrope. In Drevnosti Kalmykii, pp. 23–33. Elista: Kal-

mytskii Nauchno-Issledovatel’skii Institut Istorii, Filogii i Ekonomiki. Shishlina, N.I. 1990. O slozhnom luke Srubnoi kul’tury. In Problemy Arkheologii Evrazii, ed. S.V. Studzitskaya, pp. 23–37. Trudy Gosudarstvennogo Oedena Lenina Istoricheskogo Muzeya 74. Moscow. ———. 2012. Comment on “Multiregional Pastoralism” by M. Frachetti. Current Anthropology 53.1:28-29. Shi Zhangru. 1950. Complete Sets of Weapons from the Yin (Shang) Site at Xiao Tun. Annual Report of the History and Language Institute of the Academia Sinica 22:19–59. Turchin, Peter. 2009. A Theory of the Formation of Large Empires. Journal of Global History 4:191–217. Vehik, Susan. 2002. Conflict, Trade, and Political Development on the Southern Plains. Ameri-

can Antiquity 67.1:37–64. Weiss, Harvey. 2000. Beyond the Younger Dryas: Collapse as Adaptation to Abrupt Climate Change in Ancient West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean. In Environmental Disaster and the Archaeology of Human Response, ed. Garth Bawden and Richard M. Reycraft, pp. 75–98. Maxwell Museum of Anthropology Anthropological Papers no. 7. Albuquerque. Yuan, Jing, and Rowan K. Flad. 2006. Research on Early Horse Domestication in China. In Equids in Time and Space: Papers in Honor of Véra Eisenmann, ed. Marjan Mashkour, pp. 124–31. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Zutterman, Christophe. 2003. The Bow in the Ancient Near East: A Re-evaluation of Archery from the Late 2nd Millennium to the End of the Achaemenid Empire. Iranica Antiqua 38:119–65.

Horseback Riding and Bronze Age Pastoralism in the Eurasian Steppes

71

7

INDO-EUROPEAN DISPERSALS AND THE EURASIAN STEPPE J.P. Mallory

T

he Eurasian steppe not only provided a conduit between two distant cultural worlds, it also served as a major corridor for the dispersal of languages. Within the historical period the languages are generally encountered moving from east to west as they were carried by such peoples as the Sarmatians (Iranian), Huns, Turks, and Avars (Altaic) or Magyars (Uralic). This succession of languages, spread by mobile societies across the Eurasian steppe, has been described as a linguistic “spread zone” (Nichols 1997, 1998). But the presence of Indo-European languages in both Europe and in the Tarim Basin suggests that there was an earlier linguistic dispersal that moved in the opposite direction, from west to east (Mallory and Mair 2000). This saw the establishment of the first contacts between the West and the eastern borders of what would become the Silk Road. Tracking this dispersal has been a critical element of any solution to the problem of Indo-European origins. Among the various solutions to the Indo-European homeland problem there are at least three main contenders. In terms of chronology the earliest well publicized homeland theory is the Anatolian farming model that associates the dispersal of the Indo-European languages with the spread of agriculture from Anatolia in the 8th–7th millennia BC (Renfrew 1987). Geographically close but temporally later

is the theory of T. Gamkrelidze and V. Ivanov (1995) that seeks the Indo-Europeans at a later period in eastern Anatolia, a theory which has been given archaeological “legs” in the work of S. Grigor’ev (1999, 2002) and also underlies treatments of Indo-Iranian origins in the many works of V. Sarianidi (e.g., 1998). But among the various “solutions” to the homeland problem, the steppe hypothesis has probably been the most durable and is the most widely accepted among specialists in Indo-European studies. This theory proposes that the homeland of the Indo-Europeans lay broadly in the Eurasian steppe and, although some researchers have sought to place the earliest Indo-Europeans in the Asiatic steppe (Brandenstein 1936, Nichols 1997, 1998), most supporters of this theory seek the earliest Indo-Europeans in the steppe and forest-steppe of the Pontic-Caspian region. This theory emerged in the early 20th century in the works of Otto Schrader and was embraced or expanded by subsequent scholars such as V. Gordon Childe and G. Poisson (Mallory 2010). Marija Gimbutas (1991:351–401; 1994) has been the most noted champion of the steppe hypothesis and her theories have been examined by the author (Mallory 1989) and were recently updated in much greater detail, at least with respect to the Russian and Ukrainian evidence, by David Anthony (2007). It should be noted

that the steppe theory also has its critics, most notably perhaps Alexander Häusler (1996, 1998, 2003, etc.). There are a number of reasons for the popularity of the steppe hypothesis (Mallory 1997a): 1. The location (the Ukraine, south Russia) is geographically central to the distribution of the Indo-European languages that extends from Celtic (Ireland) in the west to Tocharian (Xinjiang, China) in the east. This is not simply a matter of geographical position but also logistics as a Pontic-Caspian homeland positions the Proto-Indo-Europeans along a natural corridor that leads into both central Europe and western Asia. 2. The area accords in general with the Indo-European culture as reconstructed from its vocabulary, i.e., names of plants, animals, and technology. 3. The proposed homeland lies in a region where there is no evidence of an earlier non-Indo-European substratum. 4. The steppe homeland lies in an area not too distant from the regions of other language families (Uralic, Semitic, and Kartvelian) that linguists believe were in some genetic or contact relationship with early Indo-European. As Uralic is probably the language family that linguists would position closest to Indo-European, the Pontic-Caspian region at least sets the Indo-European homeland proximate to most solutions to the Uralic homeland problem (Napol’skikh 1995; Blažek, forthcoming). 5. The Pontic-Caspian region is sufficiently large to have fostered the development of a major language family but is also sufficiently remote (geographically, environmentally, and culturally) from its neighbors that it cannot be easily subsumed within any other cultural trajectory. 6. The cultures of the proposed homeland, most notably the Yamnaya, show very early evidence of mobile economies and innovations in transport (cattle-drawn wagons, horse riding) that provide plausible vectors for the rapid spread of a new language. 7. The archaeological cultures associated with the proposed homeland date to a period immediately preceding and contemporary with

74

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

traditional dates for Proto-Indo-European as suggested by most though not all linguists, i.e., ca. 4500–2500 BC. 8. There is archaeological evidence that can be used to support expansions of steppe populations or significant elements of their ideology to both the east and west of the proposed homeland region at a time commensurate with the earliest spread of the Indo-European languages and in directions that can potentially explain the dispersal of all the Indo-European languages. Although a steppe hypothesis does have many points in its favor, it also is subject to criticism. Generally, there have been three types of objections: 1. The archaeological evidence for steppe dispersals beyond eastern Europe is too poor to support the notion of a homeland in the Pontic-Caspian, i.e., a steppe homeland cannot explain the dispersal of most of the Indo-European languages of Europe outside that of the Slavs and possibly Dacians and Thracians of the Balkans. 2. The continuity of the steppe cultures appears to lead directly to the Iranians or Indo-Iranians but not to the ancestors of the entire Indo-European language family (Telegin 2005), i.e., the Pontic-Caspian region was merely the staging area for one major branch of Indo-Europeans but not the whole language family. 3. The steppe cultures themselves derive from the initial spread of agricultural populations from Anatolia through the Balkans (Goodenough 1970, Renfrew 1987:201–2). In this way the steppe hypothesis is subsumed within the Anatolian hypothesis and is not regarded as the origin of the Indo-European languages but only of the Asiatic Indo-Europeans (Indo-Iranians, Tocharians; Renfrew 1999:280–81). In 1998 I suggested that the various problems involved with the steppe model might be treated in the context of a series of three fault lines: the Dnieper, the Ural, and Central Asian (Mallory 1998a). It is along these lines that we encounter major disputes of interpretation whose resolution affects any subsequent discus-

sion of the expansion of the Indo-European languages. If we extend our discussion to Europe we might add at least another two more fault lines or borders that must be transgressed if one is to accept the steppe hypothesis: the Tisza and the Anatolian. The first involves the question of how northern, southern, and western Europe received their Indo-European languages when the primary evidence for migrations from the steppe appears to cease at the Tisza river in Hungary. The second line involves Anatolian: the steppe hypothesis must explain how Indo-European (or Indo-Hittite) languages came to spread from the steppelands into Anatolia, presumably between ca. 4000 and 2000 BC. I suspect that we must now add one more fault line for Asia, the Dzungar Basin, to deal with the origin of the Tocharians. In all cases each of these fault lines have repeatedly been crossed in both archaeological and linguistic discourse by application of one of the most dangerous weapons in the arsenal of any cultural (pre)historian: the felt-tipped pen or any digital substitute. The preparation of maps of population/cultural/language dispersals almost invariably involves a concatenation of weakly supported links that corporately form an “arrow” of dispersion. The purpose of this chapter is to review briefly some of the main problems associated with the first of these fault lines that forms the center of the debate for both proponents and critics of the steppe hypothesis: the Dnieper River.

Dnieper The Dnieper line involves the critical issue of the extent to which the Pontic-Caspian region can be regarded as a linguistically autonomous entity with respect to the Balkans during the Neolithic and Eneolithic. Supporters of the Anatolian farming hypothesis argue that the Eneolithic cultures of the Pontic-Caspian steppe emerged out of the mixed farming economy of the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture whose own roots lay within the expansion of farming from Anatolia through the Balkans (Renfrew 1987:97, 201–3; 2001:6–7). From a linguistic perspec-

tive, this would suggest that the Indo-European languages were carried through the Balkans to the Dnieper by the earliest farmers in the region who then adopted a mobile form of pastoralism to exploit the steppelands and carry “steppe Indo-European” eastwards to Iran, India, and the Tarim Basin. Conversely, supporters of the steppe hypothesis argue that the Pontic-Caspian region was occupied by indigenous populations that had evolved locally from the earlier Mesolithic cultures north of the Black and Caspian seas. It acknowledges that there were contacts between the Balkans and the steppe but these were not of a kind that would have required a language shift from the Balkans across the entire steppe and forest-steppe to the Volga and beyond. From a linguistic perspective, this would suggest that the Indo-European languages emerged from the local Mesolithic languages of the Pontic-Caspian region and these languages were carried, initially at least, both to the west and east by mobile pastoralists. It should be emphasized that these are two very different theories of Indo-European origins. Philip Kohl (2007b:236) has suggested that if one accepts a model whereby Tripolye farmers instigated the spread of mobile pastoral societies to the east, this might “reconcile” the two positions. I am afraid it would not: rather, it would demonstrate the validity of the Anatolian model. It should also be made clear that both sides are agreed that once the European steppe assumed an Indo-European identity from whatever source, the language was then carried during the Eneolithic/Bronze Age eastwards into Asia where it spread both to the south through Central Asia to later emerge as the Indo-Iranian languages and probably further to the east where it explains the Tocharian languages of the Tarim Basin. Where the two sides are in debate then is the extent to which there actually was a major cultural and linguistic watershed along the Dnieper. As much of the discourse seems to turn a blind eye to what I perceive as some critical issues, I have recast the discussion in terms that I hope highlight the central problems of the two

Indo-European Dispersals and the Eurasian Steppe

75

models. This involves an investigation of several approaches by which a supporter of the Anatolian hypothesis might disprove the model of the steppe hypothesis: two economic/demographic models and the elite exchange model. I will discuss these in turn.

Demographic Model One The attraction of the Anatolian farming hypothesis has always been its association with a plausible vector for language shift: the movement of farmers associated with a form of economy which, compared to that of neighboring hunter-gatherers, was far more productive and

permitted them to assimilate both culturally and linguistically most of the non-Indo-European populations they encountered. Extended to the Dnieper, one might suggest that the Criş colonists who first carried the new economy into the periphery of the Pontic region not only provided a source for the adoption of agriculture and stockbreeding by local populations who formed the Bug-Dniester culture (ca. 6400–5300 BCE) but were also responsible for its further spread across the Pontic-Caspian steppe (Fig. 7.1). Therefore, from the perspective of the Anatolian model one could argue that the same “wave of advance” that carried the farming cultures westward across Europe also carried the new econo-

FIG. 7.1. The European steppelands at the beginning of the Neolithic. (Image by J.P. Mallory)

76

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

my into the north Pontic-Caspian region. This would render the so-called indigenous cultures of the Pontic-Caspian into acculturated societies similar to the Bug-Dniester; similar explanations are employed by supporters of the Anatolian model to explain the spread of farming and language to the northwest periphery of Europe. We are currently in the midst of major reassessments of the economic foundation of the Neolithic in the Pontic-Caspian region that do not result in a particularly clear picture of the processes involved. Nevertheless, a number of observations can be made that are pertinent to any interpretation. 1. Background population. There is good evidence for widespread settlement across the river drainages of the Ukraine throughout the Upper Palaeolithic and on through the Mesolithic (Telegin 1982, Dolukhanov 2009a). This includes substantial cemeteries along the Dnieper such as Vasilyevka III with at least 45 burials, Vasilyevka I with 24 burials, and Voloshkoe with 19. These attest sizeable populations dependent on both the hunting of land mammals and the consumption of rich sources of fish (Lillie, Budd, and Potekhina 2011). The persistence of this economy in the same locations during the Neolithic and even Eneolithic suggests that we are dealing with substantial indigenous populations prior to the earliest appearance of agriculture in the region. Moreover, at least in areas of abundant riverine resources, there is some evidence for increased sedentism and “cultural segregation” (Dolukhanov 2009a:31–32). If one wishes to argue for a Balkan origin for the earliest food-producing economies of the region, it cannot have moved into an “empty” area but must involve either the replacement of existing cultures or their acculturation. 2. Ceramics. The use of the earliest ceramics should probably be disengaged from direct associations with the Neolithic economy in the Pontic-Caspian region or, at least, any attempt to employ it as a marker for the eastward expansion of farming. The current evidence indicates that ceramics appeared earliest in the east (the Elshanka culture) and then moved west across

the steppelands rather than from Balkan farming cultures to Pontic hunter-gatherers in the process of acculturation (Kotova 2003:3.7; Anthony 2007:149; Vybornov et al. 2009:71–73). Incidentally, Dolukhanov (2009b:231) has suggested that the east-west spread of ceramics might be associated with the spread of an Altaic language, a proposal lacking any linguistic support. 3. Lithics. Kotova’s study of the Neolithicization of the Ukraine (2003:3.2, 3.3, 3.5) makes it clear that Mesolithic toolkits persisted into the later Neolithic cultures that possessed both ceramics and evidence for domestic livestock. The earliest appearance of domestic livestock is associated with populations whose own technological roots were anchored within the earlier Mesolithic population rather than the toolkits of Balkan farmers. 4. Cereals. Kotova (2003:4.2) has argued for the presence of domestic cereals (wheat, barley) among many of the Neolithic cultures along and east of the Dnieper at dates beginning in the 6th millennium BC. This evidence is largely confined to seed impressions and a full summary of the domesticated cereal evidence has been recently published (Motuzaite-Matuzeviciute, Hunt, and Jones 2009), including the possibility that there were two corridors into the Dnieper region for cereals, both the Balkans and the Caucasus (the latter specifically for barley and spelt wheat). But more recent (and unpublished) research suggests that all the earlier identifications of domestic cereal impressions on Neolithic ceramics are unsafe (Malcolm Lillie, 2010, pers. com.). Consequently, the consensus is still that there is minimal to no evidence for the cultivation of domestic cereals between the Dnieper and the Ural until well into the Bronze Age (Kohl 2007b:156–57; see also absence of cereals in the Caspian region in Sishlina 2008:235), although there is evidence for the processing of seeds, probably of wild plants (Anthony 2007, Pashkevich and Gerasimenko 2009:45). The absence of cereals is one of the critical problems that has not been fully addressed (see below). 5. Domestic animals. The spread of domestic livestock across the steppelands has also prov-

Indo-European Dispersals and the Eurasian Steppe

77

en to be an area of major dispute. If one follows Kotova (2003:5.1) most of the Pontic Neolithic yielded sites with evidence for some domestic livestock. Some of the sites, however, are extremely problematic with respect to their dating and stratigraphy (e.g., Kammenaya mogila with cattle, ovicaprids, horses, and dogs all allegedly dated to ca. 7500 BC!); these same sites have all been challenged by Anthony (2007:481–82). Without clear evidence of the basis of identification (as domestic or wild) one can regard the evidence for cattle, horses, and pig as all uncertain. Sheep/goats, on the other hand, are generally regarded as domestic imports into this region and they have been found on a series of Early Neolithic sites. Kotova (2003:5.3, 5.6) notes their earlier occurrence in the Caucasus and their initial appearance in the Azov area is consistent with their importation from the Caucasus (see also Shnirelman 1992). They are also found at sites such as Rakushechny Yar (ca. 5200–4800 BC) on the lower Don and Khvalynsk (ca. 4700– 4600 BC) on the Volga; sheep appear somewhat later in the north Caspian (Shishlina 2008:222– 27). The easternmost potential Balkan source for domestic sheep at this time would not have been the Bug-Dniester culture but the later Tripolye culture (Period A, ca. 4900–4200 BC), whose sites had not yet appeared any farther east than the river Bug. Consequently, it is difficult to imagine that they had a major impact on the earliest domestic economies far to their east. The conclusion of this brief review is that it renders it unlikely that the Pontic-Caspian steppe and forest-steppe were initially colonized by farming populations from the Balkans. There is no transformation in terms of either technology or subsistence that requires us to accept any substantial movement of populations east of the Dnieper. In short, there was no Anatolian-derived “wave of advance” across the Pontic-Caspian.

Demographic Model Two Ward Goodenough (1970) suggested that it was logical to seek the origins of the pastoral economy of the steppelands in the settlements

78

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

of the neighboring farmers who eventually took their livestock out into the steppe. This was in accord with a traditional model that presumes that the necessary precursor to mobile or nomadic stockbreeding is an economy based on mixed agriculture, i.e., mobile stockbreeding is a specialist activity that can only emerge from a more stable agricultural basis. This model of pastoralist origins was then employed by Colin Renfrew to anchor the spread of mobile pastoralists and Indo-European languages across the steppe with the Tripolye culture. In this way, the Anatolian model could subsume the steppeland model and the Indo-European languages would be traced back to their Anatolian homeland (Renfrew 1987:97, 202–3). Both authors appeared to be laboring under the assumption that the communities of the steppelands only adopted domestic livestock about the beginning of the Yamnaya culture, ca. 3400 BC which we have just seen is erroneous as there is evidence for domestic livestock across the Pontic-Caspian steppe more than a millennium before the emergence of a presumably more mobile economy. With better control of the archaeological data, Philip Kohl (2007b:200) has reprised this model and suggested that the mobile cattle-based economy of the Bronze Age steppe region may have derived from the gigantic Tripolye settlements that collapsed at the end of the Tripolye C1 period. These sites, housing populations estimated in the tens of thousands, were abandoned and Kohl suggests that they may have adopted a more mobile economy and moved eastward out into the steppelands. This would imply an actual population movement and, obviously, if we take things to their linguistic conclusion, such a sizeable demic diffusion could have swamped the indigenous steppe and forest-steppe populations and seen the expansion of a Balkan-derived (Indo-European) language eastwards. An evaluation of this hypothesis at least has the advantage of a somewhat more controlled chronological framework. The Tripolye megasites collapsed ca. 3300 BC (Anthony 2007:264) and they were localized to the region northeast of the Southern Bug (Fig. 7.2). The steppe cul-

FIG. 7.2. The European steppelands in the Eneolithic. (Image by J.P. Mallory)

ture or “cultural-historical” entity that existed from ca. 3300 BC onwards was that of the Yamnaya that came to span the whole region from the Danube on the west to the Ural on the east. In the works of both Goodenough and Renfrew, the Yamnaya (or Gimbutas’ “Kurgan”) culture is explicitly cited as the earliest pastoral culture in question, and whether its economy was actually some variant of mobile pastoralism or not (Rassamakin 1999:151–52), it is the “target” cultural entity for this model. Kohl’s interesting suggestion (solution to the problem of what happened to the mega-site population) has not been presented in much detail. With apologies if I get this wrong, it seems to me that he too must

be referencing the Yamnaya culture as the first major mobile pastoral entity on the Pontic-Caspian steppes and its formation would appear to date to the time of the Tripolye “collapse.” 1. Population. Once again we should remind ourselves that we are not discussing the movement of putative Tripolye pastoralists into a previously unoccupied or minimally occupied territory. All the major river valleys of the steppe region, from the Dnieper to the Volga, were clearly occupied in the millennia previous to the formation of the Yamnaya culture. Cemeteries had increased in size over earlier periods, both in the west (e.g., Dereivka with 173 burials, Nikol’skoe with 137, Vovnigy II with 130, and Mariupol with 124)

Indo-European Dispersals and the Eurasian Steppe

79

and in the east in the Volga drainage (Khvalynsk with ca. 200 burials). As Khvalynsk clearly possessed domestic livestock (sheep, cattle, and possibly horses), and antedates the collapse of the Tripolye megasites on the order of 1,000 years, and lies well over 1,000 km to the east of the nearest Tripolye sites, we must grant it a very long period of local population growth before the arrival of any putative Tripolye pastoralists. Late Khvalynsk ends on the lower Volga in the period ca. 3600–3400 BC (Anthony 2007:484) just before the earliest appearance of the Yamnaya culture in this region. On the other hand, the Yamnaya culture does seem to offer evidence for a population explosion (Shishlina 2008:235) and it is the demic foundation of this population explosion that concerns us here. 2. Economy. It is clear from the discussion of Economic Model 1 that we cannot credit the earliest spread of domestic animals to the Pontic-Caspian steppelands to the dislocation of Tripolye populations who abandoned agriculture and moved out onto the steppe in the period ca. 3400 BC; the evidence for domesticates long before this extending from the Dnieper to the Volga refutes this. But one might suggest that we have a major shift in the structure of the herd at this time that facilitated the adoption of a more mobile economy. Kohl (2007:236) emphasizes that the “fourth millennium Tripol’ye cultivators became cattle herders and spread eastwards across the Eurasian steppes.” He has emphasized that the Tripolye pastoralists focused on cattle herding rather than mixed herds. I know of no “test” of this hypothesis but it does seem impossible to characterize the Yamnaya culture as being primarily much less exclusively dedicated to cattle-raising. The settlement site of Mikhailovka, for example, yielded in terms of Minimum Numbers of Individuals 1,627 cattle, but also 1,202 sheep/goats and even 82 pigs (Lagodovskaya, Shaposhnikova, and Makarevich 1962:207). Mikhailovka, of course, is an unusual site for the Yamnaya culture but the evidence of animal remains in Yamnaya burials tells a similar story. In his study of Yamnaya burials in the Volga region, Valentin Shilov (1975:66;

80

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

1985:9) indicates that of the 40 burials accompanied by domestic livestock on the Volga, 26 included the remains of ovicaprids while only 6 yielded cattle. This compares with the much earlier animal remains found accompanying the Khvalynsk cemetery where ritual deposits and grave offerings yielded the remains of more than 50 ovicaprids to 23 cattle (Anthony 2007:184). Obviously, one cannot read the proportions of domestic animals encountered in ritual contexts as proxies for the actual composition of the herds but they do suggest a range of livestock rather than exclusive concentration on a single species. As Anthony (2007:323–24) has recently summarized, Yamnaya herd composition varied according to region with a greater predominance of cattle in the west and ovicaprids in the east. This is fully supported by Shishlina’s more recent review (2008:236–37) of the economic evidence where we find both sheep and cattle on eastern sites but, numerically at least, sheep tend to dominate. In short, the patterns of Yamnaya stockbreeding vary across the steppe and do not, at least so far as I can see, mirror in any way a specifically Tripolyean economic strategy. 3. Material culture. If significant numbers of the Tripolye population “took to the road” ca. 3300 BC we should expect to see a significant change in the trajectory of material culture in the Pontic-Caspian at about the same time. I am aware of only one serious claim for an actual migration that involved Tripolye populations crossing the southern Dnieper during the Late Tripolye period. This is the interpretation of the Zhivotilovo-Volchanskoe-type sites which extend from the Dniester as far east as the Lower Don and Kalmius (Rassamakin 1999:92–97). The evidence derives from burials, synchronized with the very Late Tripolye period, and believed to derive from the Kasperovo-Gordinesti groups of the Tripolye culture. The evidence is largely of kurgan burials with exotic ceramics that were “inspired by Tripolye models.” Rassamakin (1999:97) argues that as the graves were found in small groups, cut into earlier kurgans, and their ceramics were crudely made, this indicated “the migrational character of the sites.” Although I

am in no position to dispute this conclusion, I might note that similar phenomenon found in western Europe might well be interpreted as evidence for local “emulation” rather than necessarily migration. But still accepting this as evidence of a limited Tripolye migration, these sites do not appear to interact with the major cultural entities suggested for the area east of the Dnieper such as the Repin culture or the Late Khvalynsk of the Middle Volga. It might be emphasized that Rassamakin (1999:125) appears to support the contention that the Repin culture expanded from the Middle Don, not only south and east toward the Volga but also west to the Dnieper. Moreover, in his discussion of the various regional foundations of the Yamnaya culture, Rassamakin (1999:127) specifically excludes influences from the Zhivotilovo-Volchanskoe culture. The earliest Yamnaya pottery in the east is traditionally and persuasively derived from ceramics of the preceding Khvalynsk and Repin cultures of the same region (Anthony 2007:275) and there does not seem to be the ghost of a Tripolye antecedent in this region. For this reason, it is difficult to see any real evidence of a Tripolye population spreading across the steppelands from west to east after the collapse of the Tripolye towns nor for their forming the foundation of the Yamnaya culture. 4. Usatovo. Probably the most telling counter to deriving the Yamnaya culture from the Tripolye is the fact that we do have evidence of the Tripolye culture expanding into steppe territory after the collapse of the mega-sites. Whether one follows traditional interpretations of Usatovo as an essentially Tripolye culture (which absorbed cultural elements from both the steppe and the Caucasus (Zbenovich 1974) or as Tripolyean clients to steppe elites (Anthony 2007:349), all are agreed that Usatovo reflects a movement from the inland Dniester southwards into the steppe region. The sites of Usatovo and Mayaki provide large faunal samples which in terms of MNI yield 319 cattle to 674 ovicaprids and even 19 domestic pigs (Zbenovich 1974:112). Anthony (2007:349) has suggested that these steppe sites may indeed be the product of the southward movement of Tripolye refugees. Whether

this is the case or not, it does show us what the late Tripolye culture did look like when it moved into the steppe and this is certainly not what we find underlying the rest of the Yamnaya culture. A demographic or economic model that attempts to explain the Eneolithic cultures of the Pontic-Caspian steppe as the result of the migration of late Tripolyeans would seem to be extremely unpersuasive.

The Social Model There remains one further model that might allow the Anatolian hypothesis to subsume the steppe hypothesis. It would be based on the idea that the cultural influences emanating from the Balkans and expressed most clearly in a prestige exchange system were sufficient to effect a language shift across the entire steppe. This model accepts that the Pontic-Casian populations of the Mesolithic and Neolithic (in the Russian sense) may have spoken non-Indo-European languages but that they adopted an Indo-European language from the neighboring Balkan or Tripolyean farmers. This shift was prompted by the spread of a social vector (ideology, religion, social organization, etc.) from the west across the steppe and forest-steppe that enticed the local population to identify with the new phenomenon. Part of this identification involved the adoption of a new language, at first within the context of bilingualism, but ultimately it resulted in the abandonment of their native language for Indo-European. This vector has often been employed by those who support the steppe hypothesis or a variant of it, e.g., Mallory 2002, Anthony 2007, and Kristiansen 2010. Yuri Rassamakin (1999) has provided detailed accounts of what he perceives to have been the impact of the Tripolye and adjacent Balkan-derived cultures on the steppe populations. A key element in his argument concerns his reconfiguration of a number of previously defined steppe and forest-steppe cultures into a Skelya culture (Rassamakin 1999:77–83) that flourished ca. 4550–4000 BC. He rejects earlier models that suggested an east to west migra-

Indo-European Dispersals and the Eurasian Steppe

81

FIG. 7.3. The European steppelands in the Eneolithic. Black dots indicate the general location of horse-head scepters. (Image by J.P. Mallory)

tion of tribes into the Dnieper region and farther west and argues instead for the formation of a large cultural entity that spanned the region from immediately west of the Dnieper to the Lower Don. This constituted the core region from which its members moved both to the west to interact and trade with the Tripolye culture and eastwards where they influenced the development of contemporary cultures on the Lower and Middle Volga. The culture is defined by both native elements such as ceramics and by its use of exotic items in prestige burials. Although many of his interpretations have been challenged by others, e.g., Telegin (2002), Dergachev (2000),

82

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

Kotova (2008), I will set aside most of these criticisms and for the sake of argument accept Rassamakin’s models as that of a hostile witness (at least to the steppe hypothesis as often presented) and see what impact their acceptance might have on the problem of language shift. We should emphasize that the Skelya culture does not emerge within the territory of the Tripolye farmers but rather in the area of the Dnieper-Don, i.e., its “genetic” antecedents are clearly rooted in the earlier Mesolithic-Neolithic cultures (Fig. 7.3). This is not only the opinion of Rassamakin (1999:102) but also of Kotova (2008:107) whose Sredny Stog culture

is essentially the equivalent of Rassamakin’s Skelya culture. According to Rassamakin, the wide expansion of the Skelya culture is due to it serving as a medium for the exchange of prestigious goods, especially copper, but also (in the other direction) flint, as well as symbolic goods such as the so-called horse-head scepters. To this we must also emphasize the widespread appearance of imported Tripolye ceramics which have often been employed to cross-date sites of the steppe region. Generally, the context for the exotic finds are burials, which has suggested that the Skelya culture was driven by an elite who were engaged in a long-distance exchange system that bridged the settled agriculturalists of the west, the area north of the Caucasus, and the Volga region (Rassamakin 1999:100–108). According to Rassamakin, the source of the prestigious goods carried across the steppe by the Skelya culture was the lower Danube where copper and gold are abundantly displayed, i.e., the Skelya “traders” facilitated the movement of copper and gold objects from the territories of Varna, Gumelnitsa, Karanovo VI, etc,. across the steppe as, far as the Middle Volga (Khvalynsk), where we find objects obviously imported but the array of types considerably truncated. Moreover, we find that the expansion of copper objects eastwards also led to the creation of local centers of copperworking within Skelya territory (Kotova 2008:128–29; Rassamakin 1999:104). The important issue here is that Rassamakin’s model anchors the contacts between the steppe and the Danubians rather than requiring any form of intimate association with Tripolye other than the obvious fact that the steppe traders had to skirt the southern border of Tripolye. Tripolye ceramics do occur on Skelya (and later) sites in the steppe region and have been frequently employed as chronological markers for steppe burials. As to their “meaning” on steppe sites, they are generally interpreted as potential markers of prestige. But as John Chapman (2002) reminds us, the interrelationship between the Tripolye and steppe societies with respect to such exotic items was asymmetrical. The exotic ceramics and other Tripolye items that do occur

in steppe burials are found in domestic contexts on Tripolye sites and vice versa. The one exception to the obvious exchange items is the frequent appearance of Skelya pottery (Cucuteni-C ware) on Tripolye settlements that has been variously explained as evidence for Skelya traders resident on Tripolye sites (Rassamakin 1999:112) or Skelya wives who had married into Tripolye communities (Kotova 2008:114–15). As Kotova emphasizes that Tripolye B1 sites contain copies of steppe pottery rather than actual imports, the entire question of the nature of Cucuteni-C ware remains a major issue. The model of women isolated from their “own people” producing their native ceramics in a different environment is certainly old in archaeology (Abercromby employed it to explain away the isolated find of a beaker in Ireland), but ethnographic evidence suggests that foreign wives might be expected to adopt the material culture of their husband’s community in an attempt to be accepted (DeBoer 1990). Without a more detailed analysis of the spatial context of the “steppe pottery” it is difficult to move beyond wholesale speculation. The important factor in all of these objects that constitute prestige exchange is that they do not appear to constitute an ideological package, certainly not one comparable to other instances where archaeologists have argued for the dispersal of a series of related objects and behavior as evidence of the spread of a new social order or ideology, e.g., the Yamnaya “package” (Harrison and Heyd 2007:196–203), Corded Ware, Bell-Beakers, etc. Even if we were to argue from the most iconic of the exotica, the so-called horse-head scepters, and accept a western derivation for these objects (rejecting, for example, Dergachev’s [2007] arguments that they originate in the Khvalynsk culture), it is notable that the distribution of these symbols is primarily on the eastern and western periphery of the Skelya culture and is largely absent from the core (Rassamakin 1999:136–37, fig. 3). If one were to advance the idea that the complex of symbolism (horse, leadership, language) was initiated on the western borders of the Skelya culture and

Indo-European Dispersals and the Eurasian Steppe

83

was then adopted by populations right across the steppe, the lack of such remains in the core territory of the “elite” would be a fairly damaging negation. In sum, whether by demic diffusion of farmers and the farming economy at the beginning of the Neolithic or during the collapse of Tripolye or by some form of social package, all arguments that the Balkan Neolithic cultures effected a language shift of the entire Pontic-Caspian steppe would appear to be unpersuasive. The Pontic-Caspian cultures are far too deeply anchored in their own regional past and the effects of Balkan societies attributed to the eastern half of the steppe region have all the flavor of a spukhafte Fernwirkung which might be acceptable in quantum mechanics but does not convince as archaeology. On the other hand, following Rassamakin, one could make a case for how the Pontic-Caspian was integrated into a single linguistic area. The nature of settlement in the Pontic-Caspian from the Upper Palaeolithic onwards notably clustered along the many large river valleys which should have stimulated linguistic divergence rather than homogeneity over time (Mallory 2008:13). The creation of a Skelya culture incorporating the territories from west of the Dnieper to the Middle Volga, and explained either as the sole result of an elite operating an exchange system or by migration (Kotova 2008:122), could provide the basis for what Joanna Nichols has described as a “spread zone,” an area often associated with grassland environments where one finds rapid expansion of a single language (or language family) that dominates the entire region. The incorporation of the steppe and forest-steppe into a single linguistic area has often been attributed to the Yamnaya horizon but could just as easily have begun with the Skelya/Sredny Stog. It might be noted that several scholars have suggested that the later steppe cultures, e.g., Yamnaya, may have developed under the influence of the Maikop culture of the northern Caucasus (Kohl 2007:93–95) and that the tumulus burial itself might have derived from earlier barrows in eastern Anatolia. Caucasian influences on

84

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

both the steppe cultures and the development of Proto-Indo-European can be incorporated within the steppe hypothesis of local genesis but it is difficult to imagine how it can be reconciled with an Indo-European source in the Balkans at the same time.

The Agricultural Vocabulary Once we acknowledge that the Pontic-Caspian Eneolithic was Indo-European, no matter how this was originally affected, all sides confront a problem that has become increasingly difficult to deal with. On the one hand, we have a traditional view that the economy of the ancestors of the historical Indo-Iranians was largely pastoral stockkeeping rather than agriculture (Bellwood 2006) and that peoples such as the Indo-Aryans, for example, gained much of their agricultural vocabulary from non-Indo-European sources (Witzel 2006). Witzel also notes a gradient of loss, Iranian holding on to somewhat more inherited words for agriculture than Indo-Aryan. This might suggest that the linguistic evidence is in accord with the archaeological in that the Pontic-Caspian points to hunting a variety of wild animals, a strong emphasis on fishing, the basic assemblage of domestic animals but very little evidence for domestic cereals, although there does seem to be good evidence for the exploitation of wild plants. I have tackled the question of the linguistic evidence for Indo-European agriculture on two previous occasions (Mallory 1997b, 1998b), but on both occasions was apparently misinformed by the amount of archaeological evidence for domestic cereals in the Eneolithic of the Pontic-Caspian. The crux of the issue is that the evidence for words relating to domestic plants and their exploitation in the “eastern” languages is perhaps not so restricted as often presumed, and it is this that now conflicts with the archaeological evidence. Terms associated in general with agriculture can be found in both the European and Asian languages. Without specifying the precise nature of the cereal, we have at least six words for grains (*ses(i)ó-, *yéwos, *ĝ ˳rhanóm, *dhohxnéh2-, *d ˳rhx-

weh2-, *h2ed-). The word *ga/ondh- “wheat?”, although cited in some handbooks because of its attestation in Hittite, Indo-Iranian, and Tocharian, is most likely an Asiatic loanword (Witzel 2006:97–99). There is also a word for “weed” or “rye” (*h2éreh2-) and an esculent root (*ālu-). There are also several words for the anatomy of a cereal or products of its processing, e.g., awn (*h2ekstí-) and chaff (*pelo/eh2-). The activities associated with plowing (*h2erh3ye/o-, *ghel-), harrowing (*h3ekéteh2-), and the hoe (*mat-) are preserved as well as all the major processes from sowing (*seh1-) to threshing (*wers-) and grinding (*melh2-, *peis-, *h2el-) as well as the word for sickle (*s ˳rpo/eh2-). While the exploitation of plants in the Asian IE languages seems secure, the specific nature of those plants is not. One of the most widespread words for a cereal is *yéwos and although it does designate “wheat” in Greek, it means “barley” in Armenian and Indic and either “barley” or simply “grain” in Anatolian and Iranian. Another word, *d ˳rhxweh2- means “wheat” in Germanic but “rye” in Celtic, just “grain” in Tocharian, and it is a “grass” in Indic. “Barley” is the better bet for *yéwos and it is the only meaning we have for *h2élbhit, which is found in Greek, Armenian, and Iranian, so at least here we can probably determine at least the genus. Although we have considerable difficulty ascribing a precise proto-sememe to many of the plant names, their semantic field is generally confined to the domestic cereals and there is irrefutable linguistic evidence that both the Indo-Iranians and Tocharians retained at least some of the words associated with agriculture that are also found among the European languages. This is why there is a disturbing mismatch between the botanical evidence recovered from Pontic-Caspian sites and Indo-European Asian vocabularies. We have so far seen that there is no certain evidence for the consumption of domesticated cereals in the steppe populations of the Eneolithic and Early Bronze Age and where there is some evidence for utilizing plants in the diet, e.g., among Yamnaya burials of the Caspian steppe (Shishlina 2008:232–33), all plant/pol-

len remains identified belonged to wild plants such as chenopodium, artemisia, and ephedra. A second problem derives from the fact that the Asiatic languages retain words associated with the domestic pig, both *sùs (Avestan hū, Tokharian B suwo) and *porkos (Avestan pәrәsa-), and yet this is an animal which is rare in Yamnaya sites anywhere east of the Dnieper and Caucasus (where they do occur in number) and are so far totally absent from the major steppe cultures of the eastern steppe such as the Andronovo (Kuzmina 2007) and Afanasievo as well as the “Inner Mountain Corridor” site of Begash (Frachetti and Benecke 2009). While pigs occur in Bronze Age faunas in the pre-Urals (Epimakhov 2009:84), remains of domestic pigs seem to only transgress the Urals during the Later Bronze Age from ca. 1700 BC onwards, and it is possible that it was at this time that the already satemized form *parsas was borrowed into Finno-Ugric (Mallory 1989:217). In short, we face the extremely challenging problem of explaining how both the Indo-Iranians and Tocharians of the Asiatic steppe came to retain the name for an animal that does not seem to have followed them across the steppelands of Central Asia.

Conclusions The initiation of connections between Europe and western China was at least in part associated with the spread of Indo-European languages from the west to the east across the Eurasian steppe. Most agree that the ancestral staging area for these dispersals (Indo-Iranian, Tokharian) emerged in the steppe and forest-steppe east of the Dnieper River which formed a major fault line between farming cultures of southeast Europe and what would become more mobile pastoralists of the Pontic-Caspian steppe. How this fault line was formed has been a critical area of dispute between conflicting models of Indo-European origins. A review of demographic, economic, and social models suggests that it is highly unlikely that the Dnieper was “breeched” by a west-east movement of Balkan farmers; rather, it would appear that the Eneolithic and

Indo-European Dispersals and the Eurasian Steppe

85

Early Bronze Age societies of the Pontic-Caspian were largely anchored in their own territory, both in terms of culture and language (Indo-European), and it is from this region that Indo-European languages spread both to the west and to the east. On the other hand, there now appears to be an increasing disparity between the archaeological evidence from the Pontic-Caspian that indicates the virtual absence of domestic plants before the Bronze Age and the linguistic evidence that suggests that the Indo-Iranians and Tocharians who emerged from this region carried with them some of the inherited Indo-European vocabulary for domestic plants.

Bibliography Anthony, D.W. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bellwood, P. 2006. Early Farmers: Issues of Spread and Migration with Respect to the Indian Subcontinent. In Proceedings of the Pre-Symposium of RIHN and 7th ESCA Harvard-Kyoto Roundtable, ed. Osada Toshiki, pp. 58–72. Kyoto: Research Institute for Humanity and Nature. Blazek, V. Forthcoming. Uralic Migrations: The Linguistic Evidence. In Encyclopedia of Human Migrations, ed. P. Bellwood. Brandenstein, W. 1936. Die erste “indogermanische” Wanderung. Vienna: Gerold. Chapman, J. 2002. Domesticating the Exotic: The Context of Cucuteni-Tripolye Exchange with Steppe and Forest-Steppe Communities. In Ancient Interactions: East and West in Eurasia, ed. K. Boyle, C. Renfrew and M. Levine, pp. 75–91. Cambridge: McDonald Institute. DeBoer, W. 1990. Interaction, Imitation, and Communication as Expressed in Style. In The Uses of Style in Archaeology, ed. M. Conkey and C. Hastorf, pp. 82–104. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Dergachev, V.A. 2000. The Migration Theory of Marija Gimbutas. Journal of Indo-European Studies 28:257–339. ———. 2007. O Skipetrakh, o Loshadjakh, o Voyne. Saint Petersburg: Nestor-Istorija. Dolukhanov, P.M. 2009a. The Mesolithic of East

86

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

European Plain. In The East European Plain on the Eve of Agriculture, ed. P. Dolukhanov, G.R. Sarson, and A.M. Shukurov, pp. 23–34. BAR International Series 1964. Oxford. ———. 2009b. Archaeology and Languages in Northern Eurasia: New Evidence and Hypotheses. In The East European Plain on the Eve of Agriculture, ed. P. Dolukhanov, G.R. Sarson, and A.M. Shukurov, pp. 229–234. BAR International Series 1964. Oxford. Epimakhov, A.V. 2009. Settlements and Cemeteries of the Bronze Age of the Urals. In Social Complexity in Prehistoric Eurasia, ed. B. Hanks and K. Linduff, pp. 74–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frachetti, M., and N. Benecke. 2009. From Sheep to (some) Horses: 4500 Years of Herd Structure at the Pastoralist Settlement of Begash (South-eastern Kazakhstan). Antiquity 83: 1023–37. Gamkrelidze, T., and V. Ivanov. 1995. Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Gimbutas, M. 1991. The Civilization of the Goddess. San Francisco: Harper. ———. 1994. Das Ende Alteuropas. Budapest: Archaeolingua Series Minor, Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft. Goodenough, W. 1970. The Evolution of Pastoralism and Indo-European Origins. In Indo-European and Indo-Europeans, ed. G. Cardona, H.M. Hoenigswald, and A.M. Senn, pp. 253– 65. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Grigor’ev, S.A. 1999. Drevnie indoevropejtsy. Opyt istoricheskoj rekonstruktsii. Cheljabinsk. Grigoriev, S. 2002. Ancient Indo-Europeans. Chelyabinsk: Institute of History and Archaeology, Chelyabinsk Scientific Centre. Harrison, R., and V. Heyd. 2007. The Transformation of Europe in the Third Millennium BC: The Example of “Le Petit-Chasseur I + III” (Sion, Valias, Switzerland). Praehistorische Zeitschrift 82:129–214. Häusler, A. 1996. Invasionen aus den nordpontischen Steppen nach Mitteleuropa im Neolithikum und in der Bronzezeit: Realität oder

Phantasieprodukt? Arc. Inf. 19:75–88. ———. 1998. Zum Ursprung der Indogermanen. Ethnog.-Arch. Zeitschrift 39:1–46. ———. 2003. Urkultur der Indogermanen und Bestattungsriten. In Languages in Prehistoric Europe, ed. A. Bammesberger and Theo Vennemann, pp. 49–84. Heidelberg: Winter. Kohl, P. 2007a. The Maikop Singularity. In Social Complexity in Prehistoric Eurasia, ed. B. Hanks and K. Linduff, pp. 91–103. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2007b. The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kotova, N.S. 2003. Neolithization in Ukraine. BAR International Series 1109. Oxford. ———. 2008. Early Eneolithic in the Pontic Steppes. BAR International Series 1735. Oxford. Kristiansen, K. 2010. La diffusion préhistorique des langues indo-européennes: un modèle archéologique. Dossiers d’Archéologie 338:36– 43. Kuzmina, E.E. 2007. The Origin of the Indo-Iranians. Leiden: Brill. Lagodovskaya, O.N., O.G. Shaposhnikova, and M.L. Makarevich. 1962. Mikhailivske poselennya. Kiev: Akademiya Nauk Ukraïnskoï RSR. Lillie, M., C. Budd, and I. Potekhina. 2011. Stable Isotope Analysis of Prehistoric Populations from the Cemeteries of the Middle and Lower Dnieper Basin, Ukraine. Journal of Archaeological Science 38:57–68. Mallory, J.P. 1989. In Search of the Indo-Europeans. London: Thames and Hudson. ———. 1997a. The Homelands of the Indo-Europeans. Archaeology and Language I, ed. R. Blench and M. Spriggs, pp. 93–121. London: Routledge. ———. 1997b. Aspects of Indo-European Agriculture. In Studies in Honor of Jaan Puhvel, Part One: Ancient Languages and Philology, ed. D. Disterheft, M. Huld, and J. Greppin, pp. 221– 40. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man. ———. 1998a. A European Perspective on Indo-Europeans in Asia. In The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia, ed. V. Mair, pp. 175–201. Washington, DC: Institute

for the Study of Man. ———. 1998b. Agriculture and the Indo-European Dispersals. In Proceedings of the XIII International Congress of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences, Forlì, Italy, 8–14 September 1996, ed. R. Cremonesi, C. Tozzi, A. Vigliardi, and C. Peretto, vol. 3, pp. 185–90. Forli: Abaco. ———. 2002. Indo-Europeans and the Steppelands: The Model of Language Shift. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, ed. K. Jones-Bley, M.E. Huld, A.D. Volpe, and M.Robbins Dexter, pp. 1–27. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man. ———. 2008. Migrations in Prehistoric Eurasia: Problems in the Correlation of Archaeology and Language. Aramazd 3:7–38. ———. 2010. L’hypothèse des steppes. Dossiers d’Archéologie 338:28–35. Mallory, J.P., and V. Mair. 2000. The Tarim Mummies: The Mystery of the First Westerners in Ancient China. London: Thames and Hudson. Motuzaite-Matuzeviciute, G., H. Hunt, and M. Jones. 2009. Multiple Sources for Neolithic European Agriculture: Geographical Origins of Early Domesticates in Moldova and Ukraine. In The East European Plain on the Eve of Agriculture, ed. P. Dolukhanov, G.R. Sarson, and A.M. Shukurov, pp. 53–64. BAR International Series 1964. Oxford. Napol’skikh, V. 1995. Uralic Original Home: History of Studies, a Preliminary Review. Izhevsk. Nichols, J. 1997. The Epicentre of the Indo-European Linguistic Spread. In Archaeology and Language I, ed. R. Blench and M. Spriggs, pp. 122–48. London: Routledge. ———. 1998. The Eurasian Spread Zone and the Indo-European Dispersal. In Archaeology and Language I, ed. R. Blench and M. Spriggs, pp. 220–66. London: Routledge. Pashkevich, G.A., and N.P. Gerasimenko. 2009. The Holocene Vegetation, Climate and Early Human Subsistence in the Ukraine. In The East European Plain on the Eve of Agriculture, ed. P. Dolukhanov, G.R. Sarson, and A.M. Shukurov, pp. 45–51. BAR International Series 1964. Oxford. Rassamakin, Yuri. 1999. The Eneolithic of the Black

Indo-European Dispersals and the Eurasian Steppe

87

Sea Steppe: Dynamics of Cultural and Economic Development 4500–2300 BC. In Late Prehistoric Exploitation of the Eurasian Steppe, ed. M.A. Levine, Y.Y. Rassamakin, A.M. Kislenko, and N.S. Tatarintseva, pp. 59–182. Cambridge: McDonald Institute. Renfrew, C. 1987. Archaeology and Language. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 1999. Time Depth, Convergence Theory, and the Innovation in Proto-Indo-European: “Old Europe” as a PIE Linguistic Area. Journal of Indo-European Studies 27:257–93. ———. 2001. Pastoralism and Interaction, Some Introductory Questions. In Ancient Interactions: East and West in Eurasia, ed. K. Boyle, C. Renfrew, and M. Levine, pp. 1–12. Cambridge: McDonald Institute. Sarianidi, V. 1998. Margiana and Protozoroastrism. Athens: Kapon. Shilov, V. 1975. Ocherki po istorii drevnikh plemen nizhnego Povolzh’ya. Leningrad: Nauka. ———. 1985. Problemy proiskhozhdeniya kochevogo skoyovodstva v vostochnoi Evrope. In Drevnosti Kalmykii, ed. K.N. Maksimov, pp. 23–33. Elista: Kal’mytskogo NII IFE. Shishlina, N. 2008. Reconstruction of the Bronze Age of the Caspian Steppes. BAR International Series 1876. Oxford. Shnirelman, V. 1992. The Emergence of a Food-

88

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

producing Economy in the Steppe and Forest-Steppe Zones of Eastern Europe. Journal of Indo-European Studies 20:123–43. Telegin, D. Ya. 1982. Mezolitychni Pam’yatky Ukraïny. Kiev: Naukova Dumka. ———. 2002. A Discussion on Some of the Problems Arising from the Study of Neolithic and Eneolithic Cultures in the Azov Black Sea Region. In Ancient Interactions: East and West in Eurasia, ed. K. Boyle, C. Renfrew, and M. Levine, pp. 25–47. Cambridge: McDonald Institute. Telegin, D. Ya. 2005. The Yamna Culture and the Indo-European Homeland Problem. Journal of Indo-European Studies 33:339–58. Vybornov, A., P. Dolukhanov, A. Aleksandrovsky, N. Kovalyukh, V. Skripkin, T. Sapelko, G. Zitseva, and A. Shukurov. 2009. The Middle Volga Neolithic. In The East European Plain on the Eve of Agriculture, ed. P. Dolukhanov, G.R. Sarson, and A.M. Shukurov, pp. 23–34. BAR International Series 1964. Oxford. Witzel, M. 2006. South Asian Agricultural Terms in Old Indo-Aryan. In Proceedings of the Pre-Symposium of RIHN and 7th ESCA Harvard-Kyoto Roundtable, ed. Osada Toshiki, pp. 96–120. Kyoto: Research Institute for Humanity and Nature. Zbenovich, V. G. 1974. Pozdetripol’skie plemena severhogo Prichernor’ya. Kiev: Naukova Dumka.

8

CONCLUDING COMMENTS Reconfiguring the Silk Road or When Does the Silk Road Emerge and How Does It Qualitatively Change over Time? Philip L. Kohl

I

want to begin my brief concluding comments on the Silk Road with two quotes. Recently, Daniel Waugh very nicely summarized the conventional scholarly perspective on the “The Silk Roads (n.b. the plural, as in Seidenstrassen) in History” that appeared in a recent issue of Expedition (2010): “The history of the Silk Roads is a narrative about movement, resettlement, and interactions across ill-defined borders…it is also the story of artistic exchange and the spread and mixing of religions, all set against the background of the rise and fall of polities which encompassed a wide range of cultures and peoples, about whose identities we still know too little.” The second quote is one of my favorite aphorisms (or doggerel verse) of a renowned physical anthropologist of the first half of the 20th century: “When two or more groups of humans come together, they may or may not bleed, but they will always breed.” One can perhaps add to this observation that they will also look at each other, see how they are dressed, and observe other items of their material culture, and they may, somehow, even try to communicate with one another, possibly via some shared lingua

franca, the exact nature of which is not clear. One of the endless attractions of the Silk Road(s) that connected to some degree west and east Asia is the mixture of cultural traits and technologies manifest, for example, in the marvelously intricate textiles found on the Xinjiang mummies. Peter Brown wisely reminds us to avoid two “potent mirages” in our fascination with the Silk Roads: (a) to view them as a “conservatory of exotic mutations of Western forms of art and religion,” and (b) to treat them as a kind of early form of globalization to be understood principally in economic terms as a “corridor of trade.” Rather, interaction along the Silk Road created a “magical Middle Ground in which rulers and aristocrats met in an environment carefully constructed to be a world out of this world.” When did such careful construction and, above all, cultural mixing begin? Is it appropriate to refer to a prehistoric Silk Road or is that concept in some sense anachronistic? Were the Silk Roads essentially the same in the Bronze Age as in the Iron Age and later times or did they qualitatively differ? This critical question must be directly answered to determine how

to reconfigure the later historically documented Silk Roads that also, of course, changed over time. Elizabeth Barber documents the technique of weft twining on the Xinjiang textiles that is first attested in Central Europe during the Upper Palaeolithic. Was this technique transmitted across Eurasia in very early times or was it independently developed in widely separate contexts? Do not misunderstand me. I do not believe we can talk meaningfully about a Palaeolithic Silk Road. Michael Frachetti’s chapter, however, documents connections in the form of the spread of domestic plants, such as millet and wheat, between east and west Asia that extend back possibly into Early Holocene times. A similar case of such borrowings or spreads can be made for metals and metal-working technologies, wheeled vehicles, and horses during Bronze Age times, as discussed by David Anthony. But how systematic and integrated were these early connections? What did they amount to—besides the borrowings/sharings of certain technologies (such as foodstuffs: millets? rice? wheat/barley, sheep/goats, etc.)? Were such early borrowings spreading dominantly west to east, as much evidence would suggest, or were they, as in later times, multi-directional? To paraphrase Andrew Sherratt, the Silk Road for the west was the Horse Road for China, and in his chapter, Peter Brown also refers to a Glass Road with certain items moving principally west to east. Finally, when reference is made to the Silk Roads do we always mean the exchange of materials, technologies, and ideas that linked west to east Asia along terrestrial routes? If so, this may be a misleading convention, since maritime routes centered on the Indian Ocean ultimately linked south China and Southeast Asia, on the one hand, as well as the east and west coasts of the Indian subcontinent and Iran, and west Asia, on the other. These maritime routes are as old as the caravan routes and also involved the exchange of preciosities, including silk and, of course, spices, as well as ideologies, such as different forms of Buddhism and Islam (for extensive documentation of these maritime connections across the Indian Ocean cf. Beaujard’s

90

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

monumental study of 2012). At the beginning of his chapter Michael Frachetti intimates that Eurasia has been overlooked as “a ‘cradle’ of civilization in its own right,” suggesting that this neglect is due to its extreme environmental setting and to the highly diversified societies that developed there. Surely, the Eurasian steppes were not just ignored as a formative Bronze Age civilization; rather, they simply were not such a cradle until at least the very end of the Bronze and beginning of the Iron Age, when elaborately constructed, richly endowed “royal” tombs first appear. With the notable exceptions of the Maikop culture of the northwestern Caucasus and possibly of the rich Sintashta burials in the southern Urals and related remains, such as the Seima-Turbino “phenomenon” that are found still farther to the north and east, the countless Neolithic through Bronze Age burials that have been excavated on the steppes principally by Russian/Soviet archaeologists since the late 19th century exhibit relatively little evidence for the differential accumulation of wealth and emergence of complex, socially heterogeneous, state-structured societies. The differences between the Bronze Age mortuary remains from Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China, and the contemporaneous burials from the Eurasian steppes are striking and not just the product of less research on the steppes. To adopt world systems terminology, the late prehistoric societies that emerged on the steppes were largely peripheral to the core areas that housed the early Old World civilizations of west and east Asia. That distinction admitted, however, does not mean that the recent discoveries documenting the movements of artifacts and ecofacts, such as the recovery of late 3rd millennium BC macro-botanical cereal remains at Begash, are unimportant. Rather the opposite: they unequivocally demonstrate that materials were diffusing across Eurasia in late prehistoric times. The means by which such materials moved are not yet clear, though Frachetti is correct to focus on the surprising ritual/mortuary context of these remains at Begash. One can trumpet these discoveries

without overly romanticizing them. As Frachetti emphasizes, the work at Begash nicely complements other recent investigations on the steppes, such as the discovery and excavation of the horse riding, eating, and herding Botai culture sites of western Kazakhstan. Cumulatively, these recent investigations reveal that the Eurasian steppes exhibit considerable diversity in late prehistoric times; some societies were riding and eating horses, and others, particularly farther west, were engaged in some form of intensive collecting or incipient agriculture, the exact nature or even existence of which is still unclear. The absence of direct evidence for the practice of agriculture on the Bronze Age steppes is both unexpected and, as Mallory recognizes, problematic for his Indo-European dispersal model from the Pontic-Caspian proto-Indo-European homeland. In short, this new, largely negative evidence undercuts the model of rapid migrations of linguistically related pastoral societies, such as the Andronovo and Yamnaya cultures, to the west and east. The cereals that were initially domesticated and raised farther south may not initially have been sufficiently adapted to the harsh, increasingly severe west to east continental climate on the steppes to grow productively during the short summer months. Despite these unresolved issues, the current archaeologically documented picture of regional diversity on the Bronze Age steppes seems secure. When the real Silk Roads emerge in Classical times, a network of complex multi-lane highways along which materials moved in multiple directions was already in place. The Silk Roads were never a one-way street. Long-distance trade—one mechanism along with gift exchange, booty, tribute, and other methods for the movement of materials along the Silk Roads—typically means something is being exchanged for something else. This movement of materials need not be perfectly “balanced,” but quite typically consists of goods moving in different directions, something being exchanged for something else. As J.G. Manning states in Chapter 1, “[the silk routes were] a complex and very dense exchange system of networks of roads, tracks, and canals,

the core of which were the central Asian steppe lands that joined together in an enormous land mass, and brought together pastoralists and settled populations, and traders as well as soldiers.” When do these earlier complex interrelations first emerge? When does such contact become more structured and regular or systemic, and can we document them during the Bronze Age on the basis of archaeological evidence alone? When do such structured relations first occur—during the Middle Bronze Age with the spread of metal-working technologies and mobile herding economies across the Eurasian steppes, or only later during Late Bronze Age and Iron Age times? At the other end, what qualitative changes occurred after Late Antiquity? Peter Brown hints that there was a substantial qualitative change in the nature of cultural interconnections with the advent of Islam; if so, one needs to document more fully how the coming of Islam reconfigured the very nature of the later historically attested Silk Roads. On the other hand, J.P. Mallory believes that these initial late prehistoric contacts were associated with the dispersal of Indo-European groups that spread from their Pontic-Caspian homeland both to the west and to the east. David Anthony shares this perspective but emphasizes the role of the domestication of the horse, the riding of horses, and ultimately the development of chariots in the intensification of these processes linking east and west Asia. In his view these mobile mounted pastoralists predate considerably the emergence of the classical Silk Road. Victor Mair’s fascinating and detailed comparison of recently excavated and re-excavated cemeteries— such as Small River Cemetery 5 and the Northern Cemetery—and settlements emphasizes their similarities despite the vast distances separating them. For Mair, they are part of a single cultural historical community and he, like Mallory and Anthony, attributes them as ancestral to the later Indo-European speaking Tocharians, emphasizing that these “recent excavations have also yielded rich resources for the study of the ethnic identity and cultural affiliations of the deceased.” This claim is bold but not terribly credible; mate-

Concluding Comments

91

rial cultural remains or artifacts by themselves are typically underdetermined or ambiguous to the reconstruction of ethnic identities and cultural affiliations, the condition that best describes the material remains excavated to date in Xinjiang. Finally, there are questions concerning the state of our knowledge or understanding. The authors told us much about what is known today about contact between east and west. But how complete is our understanding? How much have we learned in just the last quarter century? There have been and still are many important archaeological discoveries to be made. Examples of such recent discoveries abound: the mummies of Xinjiang, the site of Sarazm in the Zeravshan valley, the Kargaly metallurgical complex outside Orenburg, etc. I remember when I first visited the site of Sarazm in spring 1979, I was immediately struck by the presence of painted ceramic vessels that were unmistakably related to the Chalcolithic Geoksyur settlements located farther to the southwest in southern Turkmenistan. This single discovery of Sarazm meant that the Kara Kum desert was not the impenetrable barrier that earlier scholars had postulated. Sarazm is located in an Uzbek village in Tajikistan nearly straddling the current border between the newly independent states of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. For decades Soviet archaeologists had traveled along the main road linking Samarkand in the west with Pendjikent in the east without observing the extensive, albeit shallow, remains of Sarazm. The site was initially discovered by a local Uzbek villager who brought a handful of ceramics that he had collected at Sarazm to the local Tajik archaeologists in Pendjikent; today one cannot model Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age developments in Central Asia without considering the materials from this critically important site. What do we not know? Can we somehow assess it or compensate for it? This question is nearly impossible to answer; but somehow the effort must be made. Take as another example the intensely cultivated Ferghana valley north of the Zeravshan valley; historically this was an important region, the source of magnificent

92

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

horses that the Chinese coveted. What do we know about its later prehistory? In fact very little. There is something called the Chust “culture,” but it is not terribly well-defined or dated. At least presently, this “culture” has not revealed materials comparable to those from Sarazm. Are they truly not there or have they simply not yet been found? What makes the recent recovery at Begash of wheat and millet seeds in a burial context so fascinating is precisely the fact that they seem to document a novel way of life on the steppes that shows some form of contact with an agricultural world located farther south. But how representative are these remains from Begash? At the moment, we do not know because they are unique. My guess is that the east-west, west-east movements of foodstuffs along the southern pre-Silk roads connecting the Ferghana and Zeravshan valleys with the Tarim basin settlements in Xinjiang were more substantial than the occasional contacts along the Inner Asian Corridor that Frachetti postulates. Were the foodstuffs at Begash limited to their use in burials? Where are the horses at Begash in Early Bronze Age times? What role did horses play in the everyday life of the Begash herders? Ultimately, how should we interpret largely negative evidence? The complex of cemeteries and settlements at Velikent, which was occupied from ca. 3500–1900 BC, sits on the Caspian coastal plain of southeastern Daghestan along the main unimpeded north-south corridor between the Eurasian steppes to the north and the southern Caucasus and northern Mesopotamia to the south. Recent excavations have revealed abundant evidence for growing west Asian cereals and keeping west Asian domestic livestock, except for horses. There are onagers, but no remains of Equus caballus. Where are they? Are they truly not there or are they waiting to be found in future more extensive excavations? Mair and Mallory suggest that the Pontic-Caspian steppes were densely populated in Chalcolithic times by peoples who provided the principal source for the emergence of the Yamnaya culture historical community in Early Bronze Age times. Conversely, the earliest Bronze Age remains

from Xinjiang are quite limited, suggesting that this area was relatively sparsely populated before those Tocharians arrived from the west. Again, what is the state of our knowledge? To an outsider like myself, archaeological investigations in Xinjiang are still in their infancy with great discoveries yet to be made. Finally, how much are our reconstructions dependent on non-archaeological evidence or models, such as the linguistic divergence of all Indo-European languages from a Proto-Indo-European ancestral stock originating on the Pontic-Caspian steppes? Not surprisingly, David Anthony’s and James Mallory’s chapters raise the question of the dispersal of Proto-Indo-Europeans from their ancestral homeland on the Pontic-Caspian steppes across Eurasia from Ireland in the west to Xinjiang in the east. Both scholars have tried to solve the so-called Indo-European problem by determining the boundaries of this homeland and tracing the subsequent spread of Indo-Europeans as documented principally by reference to the Yamnaya or Pit-Grave archaeological culture historical community. Although I am not sure how this determination is important for reconfiguring the later Silk Roads, there seems to me to be a slight, but significant, softening or shift in their previous interpretations. Their reconstructions now appear more guarded or nuanced; linguistic identifications are no longer “almost certainly” correct, but “probably” or “possibly” or “tentatively” proposed. The Yamnaya culture is not conjured up as a spukhafte Fernwirkung, an ethereal distant effect to explain later developments throughout the steppes. Rather, Mallory now concedes or at least considers that the steppe and forest-steppe peoples may have abandoned their own language and adopted Indo-European. Nevertheless, he maintains that “the Eneolithic and Early Bronze Age societies of the Pontic-Caspian were largely anchored in their own territory, both in terms of culture and language (Indo-European), and it is from this region that Indo-European languages spread both to the west and to the east.” David Anthony, on the other hand, focuses on the changing uses of horses over time from

eating, herding, and riding them to harnessing them to wheeled wagons and chariots, making them the favored weapon of mass destruction by the 2nd half of the 2nd millennium BC. Anthony now accepts a long development of using horses on the steppes prior to their ultimate use as weapons of war. Technological (spokewheeled chariots, recurved composite bows, cast socketed arrowheads, and later, not mentioned but most importantly, stirrups) and social organizational changes (mounted warriors obeying a general’s commands) were necessary before the mounted pastoralists from the vast Eurasian steppes became the scourge of later times, commencing in the Iron Age. The Early Bronze Age states of Sumer, Old Kingdom Egypt, and the Indus Valley simply did not automatically recognize the military potential of riding horses; their northern neighbors had already manipulated horses for millennia earlier, and continued to be the source of innovations in their use. There are many peoples in Central Eurasia who speak many different languages (as evident in the chapters by Mair, Anthony, and Mallory), but do we know them all? As Mallory admits in his Expedition article on “Bronze Age Languages of the Tarim Basin” (2010): “Of course, totally different languages (rather than just Khotanese Saka or Tocharian) may have been spoken by these populations, especially if they were derived from native Neolithic groups, whose languages did not survive into the historical record.” This caveat reminded me of Denis Sinor’s cautionary observation (1998:730) from the 1998 publication of the first Penn conference that “the mummies are ‘mum’ when it comes to determining the language they might have spoken...one can neither prove nor disprove the Indo-European, let alone the Tocharian connection. For all we know, when still among the quick, these mummies might have been using a non-Indo-European language spoken by Europoids…” The northern Caucasus region of Russia is arguably the most ethnically diverse area of the former Soviet Union, with peoples speaking various Turkic, Indo-European, and, for lack of a better word, Caucasian languages. How and

Concluding Comments

93

when did they get to the northern Caucasus? Are some of them relic populations of formerly much more widespread and significant peoples who previously inhabited Central Eurasia? How many peoples have simply vanished from the historical record? When we find “Caucasoid” (in quotes) mummies in Xinjiang, are we not jumping a bit blithely over time and space to identify them unproblematically as ancestral to the Indo-European speaking Tocharians? The peoples from the northern Caucasus also are classified as “Caucasoid” and few of them speak Indo-European languages. As we all know from introductory anthropology, “race” (itself a very problematic concept), language, and culture, however positively they correlate with one another—and one must admit that they certainly do correlate positively though not perfectly (after all, one tends to exchange genes with someone with whom one can converse)—nevertheless remain independent variables. A related problem concerns the ethnic specificity of a given archaeological or linguistic trait. David Anthony’s fascinating discussion of the host-guest relationship in early Indo-European languages is not limited to Indo-Europeans; to turn once more to the Caucasus, an area where hospitality to guests is renowned, the most celebrated forms of hospitality are attributed—or conceded by most peoples of the Caucasus—to the non-Indo-European Georgians. These concluding thoughts have posed many more questions than provided answers. Perhaps this is a healthy situation. The Bronze Age archaeology of the Eurasian steppes may still be in its infancy, but it is already raising new, previously unrecognized problems to solve. How important are domestic cattle in the diet of the

94

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

Bronze Age herders relative to sheep/goats and, of course, horses? What forms of agriculture (if any) or intensive collecting of floral resources were practiced on the Bronze Age steppes? Why is the evidence for agriculture seemingly so tenuous? Is this largely a false problem, reflecting only the retrieval practices of earlier generations of archaeologists? Or were the subsistence economies of the increasingly mobile Bronze Age herders qualitatively different from later historical times? Finally, I would argue on present evidence that the real Silk Roads began in the Iron Age at the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 1st millennium BC. In other words, there were no Bronze Age Silk Roads and, thus, the world of the Bronze Age steppes cannot be reconfigured on the basis of its later inhabitants.

Bibliography Beaujard. P. 2012. Les Mondes de l’Océan Indien. Tome 1, De la formation de l’État au premier système-monde afro-eurasien (4e millénaire av. J.-C.-6e siècle apr. J.-C.). Paris: Armand Colin. Mallory, J.P. 2010. Bronze Age Languages of the Tarim Basin. Expedition 52.3:44–53. Sinor, Denis. 1998. The Myth of Languages and the Language of Myth. In The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia, 2 vols., ed. V.H. Mair, pp. 729–45. Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph Series, 26. Washington, DC, and Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Man in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications. Waugh, Daniel C. 2010. The Silk Roads in History. Expedition 52.3:9–22.

INDEX Abashevo 66 Abdurssul, Idris xi, 26, 30 Abyssinia 20 Achaemenid 5, 7, 13, 71 Achaemenid Empire 7, 71 Aegean 5, 7, 12–14, 41 aeolian sand 30 Afanasievo xv, 29, A-1, 63–65, 67, 85 Afghanistan xii, xiii, 8, 13, 15, 18, 46 Africa 7–8, 13, 17, 28 Afro-Eurasia 6, 11 agriculture 26, 42, 45–46, 73, 76–78, 80, 84–85, 91, 94 agropastoralists 26, 28, 30 Aï Khanum 8 Alar 30 Albania 18 Alexander the Great 5, 8–9, 13 Alexandria 9–13 Alexandria Eschate 9 Altaic 66, 73, 77 Altaic language 77 Altai Mountains 18, A-14, 44, 63, 65 Altyn Tagh 26 AMS/14C dating 47 Amu Darya 45, 63 Anatolia xii, xiii, 7, 12, 42, 58, 68, 73–75, 84 Anatolian farming model 73 Anatolian homeland 78 Anau South 47 Andronovo xv, 29, A-1, 56, 65–66, 85, 91 animal domestication 42 animal husbandry 26 animal sacrifices 57, 63–64

Antiochus III 9 Apollodorus xii, 9 apsaras 15 Arabia 7 Arabian Gulf 10 Aral Sea 63 Aramaic 7, 13–14 archaeological cultures 2, 58, 74 archers 55–56 argali sheep 63 Ariana xii, 9 Armenian 85 artemisia 85 art styles 42 Arya 66 Aryans xii, 84 Ashoka 8 Asia Minor 7 ass of the mountains 67 Assur 7 Assyrian 5, 7, 12 Athens 9, 88 Augustus 18, 20 aurochs 58, 63 Avars 2, 73 awls 60 axes 61, 64 Axum 20 Ayala Mazar 23 Azov 59, 78, 88

Babylonia 7, A-1 Bactria 8–9, 13–14, 37, 65

Bactria-Margiana 65 Baghdad 20 Balanovo 66 Balkans xiii, 74–75, 77–78, 81, 84 Balto-Slavic 2 banks 63, 66 barley 42, 45, 77, 85, 90 Barrera, Pablo 27, 30 Bash Adar 36 baskets 27–28, 31, A-4, A-12, 35, 48, 50 Bavaria 58 beads 2, 38, 60 Beauty of Loulan 55 Beauty of Xiaohe (Small River) 25, A-6 Begash xii, A-13, 42–51, 63–64, 66, 69, 85–86, 90–92 Beifang Mudi 23, 25–26 Bell-Beakers 83 belts 18, 37 Berenike 9, 14 Bergman, Folke 23–24 Bernberg 58 beserkers 56 bilingualism 81 Black Sea xii, xiii, 8, 42, 87–88 blankets A-5. See also shabraks blue bonnet 36 BMAC 65, 67 boar 63 boats 25, 27 bone plaques 60 boots A-4, A-7 borrowings 90 Botai xv, 57–62, 69, 91 Botai-Tersek 58, 60–62 Bowers Museum 32–33, 39, 52 breadwheat 48 brocade A-8, 38 bronze 2, 34, 42–43, 56, 66 Bronze Age xiii, xiv, xv, 1–3, 6–7, 11–12, 21, 23, 25–26, 28–34, A-16, 38, 41–45, 47–52, 55–56, 61, 65, 67–70, 75, 77–78, 85–94 broomcorn millet A-11, 42–48 Buddhism 15–16, 19, 90 buffalo 58 Bug-Dniester 76–78 burials xi, xii, 3, 23, 25–28, 39, 43, 46–50, 61,

96

Index

64–65, 77, 79, 80, 82–83, 84, 85, 90, 92 cremation burial 46 butchering 58 Byzantium xi, 16, 19–20 C14 28, 30. See also AMS/14C dating caftan 38 calibrated radiocarbon 31, 47 camels 3 canals 6–7, 91 Canepa 16, 18–19, 21 caps A-3 caravan routes 90 carnelian 63 Catacomb-grave 61 Catacomb-Poltavka 67 Çatal Höyük 35 cattle xii, 23, 28–29, A-15, 45, 48, 55–66, 74, 78, 80–81, 94 cattle-raising 80. See also herding Caucasian 18, 21, 26, 61, 84, 93 Caucasoid 94 Caucasus 45, 58, 61, 77–78, 81, 83–85, 90, 92–94 cavalry 55–57 Celtic 56, 74, 85 Central Asia xiii, xiv, 1–2, 5–8, 11–13, 31–32, 43, 46–47, 49, 51–52, 55, 63, 65–67, 69, 75, 85, 87, 92, 94 Central Eurasia 21, 41–46, 48–51, 70, 93–94 ceramics 49, 58, 61, 63–64, 77, 80–83, 92 cereals xiii, 45, 77, 84–85, 90, 91–92. See also barley, glume wheats, millet, and wheat Ceylon 20 Chalcolithic 52, 68, 92 Cham 58 Chang’an 3 charcoal 46–47, 65 chariots 2, 42–43, 66–67, 91, 93 chariot warfare 67 chenopodium 85 Childe 73 China xi, xiii, 5–6, 9–11, 13, 15–21, 28, 31–32, 41–46, 48–52, 55–56, 65–71, 74, 85, 87, 90 Chinese 1–2, 4, 10, 12–13, 16–21, 23–25, 35, 37–38, 48, 53, 66–68, 70, 92 Chinese cloth 10 chisels 61

Christ 20 Christian 6, 12, 17, 19–20, 68 Chulainn 56 Chust 92 Cimmerians 2, 55 cisterns 9 clay 7 clients 18, 57, 62, 81 climate 66, 91 climatic cooling 66 clothing xii, 27, A-4, A-6, A-8, A-9, 33, 61. See also caftan, caps, felt hats, robes, trousers, woolen capes clover 2 coffins 25, 27, A-12 coinage 8, 11 colonies 15 comb 28 commoditization 17 composite bows 93 conflict 66–67 Confucian 18 Constantinople 18–20 copper 7, 34, 42, 59–61, 65–66, 83 cast copper 61 copperworking 83 Corded Ware 83 Cosmas Indicopleustes 17, 20, 22 costumes 60 cows 26. See also cattle cranial characteristics 66 Criş 76 cromlech 65 Ctesiphon 20 Cucuteni-C 83 Cucuteni-Tripolye 75, 86 cultural affiliations 25, 91, 92 cultural segregation 77 cuneiform 67 Dacians 74 daggers 61, 64 Daghestan 92 damask 38 Dandan Oilik 26 Dandan-Öyliq 35 Danube 18, 58–59, 67, 79, 83

deer 59, 63 Delphic 8 Delta 7, 9, 12 Demetrius 9 Denmark 34 Dereivka 58–60, 70, 79 diet 45, 47, 49, 57, 59–61, 64, 85, 94 Diodotus 8 Dionysos 15 diplomacy 17, 19–20 dispersal xii, 4, 62, 73–74, 83, 91, 93 ditches 26, 66 Djeitun culture 63 Dnieper-Azov 59 Dnieper-Donets 59 Dnieper River 57–58, 75, 85 Dniester River 60 dogs 18, 26, A-15, 58–59, 78 domestic animals 60, 80, 84 domesticated grains 3, A-11, 42–43, 46–47, 49 domestication xii, xiii, 3, 42–43, 55, 57–58, 60, 91 Don 59–60, 62, 64, 68, 78, 80–82 Donghuishan 48, 51 double-weave 38 Dresden 19 dung 57–58 Dunhuang 15 dyes 30, 33, 34, 36 Dzhungar Mountains A-13 Dzhungarian Gates 44 Dzungarian (Dzhungarian) 28–29, 67 Dzungarian Basin 29 Early Iron Age xiv, xv, 2, 32, 56, 87, 94 earrings 34 Eastern Central Asia xiv, 1–2, 32, 87, 94 Eastern Desert 7–9, 11, 13 Eastern Europe 58, 88 economic model 81 Egypt 5, 7, 9–14, 35, 37, 41–42, 90, 93 Old Kingdom 93 Ptolemaic 8–12 Egyptian 5, 7, 12 einkorn 45 Elam 7 elephant 8, 10 elephant hunting 8, 10

Index

97

Elephantine 7 elite 60, 76, 83–84 Elshanka 77 embroidery A-10, 37, 38 emmer 45 empires 5–7, 9, 19–20, 42, 55 Eneolithic xv, A-16, 58–62, 67–69, 75, 77, 79, 81–82, 84–85, 87–88, 93 ephedra 25, 28, 31, 34, 85 Ethiopia 20 Ethiopic 20 ethnic identity 25, 91 Eudoxus 10 Euphrates 7 Eurasia xv, 1–3, 6, 11, 16–17, 20–21, 33, 39, 41–43, 45–46, 48–52, 67–70, 86–88, 90, 93–94 Eurasian Bronze Age 42 Eurasian history 6 Eurasian steppe xii, xiii, 3, A-14, 41–43, 73, 85 Eurasian trade 1, 5 Europe 19, 35, 42, 51, 53, 58–59, 67–68, 73–77, 81, 85–88, 90 Europoids 93 Euthydemus 9 exchange xiv, 1–2, 5–8, 11, 42, 44, 60, 63, 67, 76, 81, 83–84, 89–91, 94 exotic 1, 3, 16, 18–19, 49, 59, 67, 80, 82–83, 89 Failaka 8 Famen pagoda 17 Far East 5, 41, 46 fat residue 49 fault lines 74, 75 faunal assemblages 45 feast 62 feasting 48–50, 57, 60 felt hat 25, 27–28, A-6, A-7 Ferghana 44, 92 Ferghana valley 44, 92 Finno-Ugric 66, 85 fire pit 46–47 fish A-16, 61, 77 fishing 29, 63, 84 flint 56, 83 floors 46 flotation 46 foods 48

98

Index

foodstuffs 28, 43, 90, 92 forest-steppe 3, 55, 60, 62, 66, 73, 75, 78, 81, 84–85, 93 forest-zone 60, 66 fortified permanent settlements 66 frenzied warriors 56 funeral sacrifices 59, 65 furs 2 Galgenberg 58 Gamkrelidze, T. 73, 86 Gandhara 15 Gaochang 19 garnets 18 gatherers 58, 63, 76–77 Gaza 7 gazelle 63 gender 25 genetic 28–29, 65, 74, 82 Geoksyur 92 Germanic 56, 62, 69, 85 gift exchange 91 Gimbutas, Marija 73, 79 glass 17 globalization 17, 19–20, 89 glume wheats 45 goats A-9 Gobelin 37 gold 2, 7, 18, 38, 83 Gonur Tepe 47 Goodenough, Ward 74, 78–79 GPS 24, 26 grains 3, 25, 28, 42–43, 46–50, 63, 84 grain storage 26 grapes 2, A-9 grasslands 57 Great Game 20 Great Harbor 9 Greco-Bactrian kingdom 8, 9 Greco-Indian empires 9 Greco-Roman art 38 Greece xi, 14–16, 42, 59, 62 Greek xii, 8–10, 13, 15, 37, 56, 68, 85 Greeks 2, 9, 13–14 griffin 2 Grigor’ev, S. 73, 86 guest-host 62

Gumelnitsa 83 Guo Wu 28, 30–31 gussets 36 gymnasium 8 Hagia Sophia 19 Hami fragment 30 Han Chinese 16, 18 Hansen, Valerie 11, 16 Harappan 7, 47, 53 hats A-3, A-5, A-6, A-7 Häusler, Alexander 74 hearths 47 Hellenistic 5, 8–11, 13, 15 herding 45, 55, 57–58, 61–62, 64–66, 80, 91, 93 Herodotus xii, 7 heroic poetry 56 Hexi corridor 46, 48 highland pasture 44 Himalayas 15 Hittite 2, 75, 85 horse-head scepters 82–83 horsehide 36 horse remains 45, 59 horse riding xiii, 29, A-7, 36, 74, 91 horses xii, 2–3, 26, 29, A-15, 36, 41, 43, 45, 49, 50, 55, 57–61, 63, 65, 67, 78, 80, 90–94 domestication 3, 43, 55, 57–58 sacrifice 36 hospitality 62, 94 house types 58 Hsiung-nu 55 human bone 46, 61 Hungary 68, 75 Huns 55, 73 hunter-fisher-gatherers 63 hunter-gatherers 76–77 hunting 8, 10, 29, 57–58, 63, 77, 84 Hypanis 9 IAMC. See Inner Asian Mountain Corridor Iliad 56 Ili valley 44 Imaüs 9 implements 24, 29 India 5–16, 21, 66, 75 Indian dwarf wheat 47

Indian Ocean 5, 8–9, 12–14, 17, 90 Indic 67, 85 Indo-Aryans 84, 88 Indo-European xii, xiii, xiv, 2–3, 31–32, 56, 61–62, 65–70, 73–76, 78, 81, 84–88, 91, 93–94 Indo-European homeland 73–74, 91 Indo-European languages 3, 62, 73–75, 78, 81, 85–86, 93–94 Indo-Europeans xii, xiii, xiv, 2–3, 31–32, 56, 61–62, 65–70, 73–76, 78, 81, 84–88, 91–94 Indo-Hittite 75 Indo-Iranians 51, 74, 84–87 Indus River 6, 8, 10 Indus valley 7 Inner Asia xi, xii, 3, 16–18, 41–45, 47–48, 50 Inner Asian Mountain Corridor (IAMC) 43, 46, 48–50, 64 interaction zone 60 interchange 19, 62, 66 Ionian 7 Iran 16, 18–21, 32, 42, 52, 63, 66–67, 75, 90 Iranian plateau 45, 67 Ireland 31, 74, 83, 93 Iron Age xiv, xv, 2, 25, 32, 39, 45, 52, 56–57, 59, 87, 89–91, 93–94 Islam 12–13, 20, 90–91 isotopic pattern 61 Israel 35 Italic 62 Ivanov, V. 73 ivory 10 jade 2, 6, 27 Japan 16 javelins 66 Jiaohe 19 Judaism 19 Kalmius 80 Kammenaya mogila 78 Kandahar 9 Kanesh (Kültepe) 7 Karaganda 65, 68 Karagash A-14, 65 Karakorum 15 Kara Kum 92 Karanovo 83

Index

99

Kargaly 51, 92 Kartvelian 61, 74 Kasperovo-Gordinesti 80 Katholikos Viroy 18 Kazakhstan xi, xii, 42–43, 49, 51–52, 55–56, 58, 63, 65–66, 69–70, 86, 91 Kebra Nagast 20–21 Kelteminar 63–65 Keriyä River 25–26, 29–30 Khazars 18–19 Khotan 6 Khotanese Saka 93 Khusro I Anoshirwan 20 Khvalynsk A-16, 59–60, 78, 80–81, 83 King Solomon 20 Kisra 20 Kohl, Philip xiii, xvi, 4, 61, 64, 67, 75, 77–80, 84, 87, 89 Kopetdag Mountains 63 Kotova 59, 69, 77–78, 82–84, 87 Kroraina 23 Kurds 36 kurgans A-7, 61–65, 80 Kuz’mina, Elena 42, 45, 51 languages xii, xiii, 2–3, 62, 67, 73–75, 78, 81, 84–86, 93–94 lapis lazuli 42, 63 Late Bronze Age xv, 12, 38, 44, 49, 56, 61, 70, 91 leadership 56, 83 leather bag 25 leather boots 25 Le Coq, Albert von 15–16 legumes 45 Liao Zhaoyu 30 Linear Pottery 60 lingua franca 89 linguistic dispersal 73 Loess Plateau 46 long-distance trade 6–7, 10–11, 59–60, 67 longue durée 6, 11 looms 34–35, 37 looting 24 Lop Nor 26 Loulan 23, 26, 34, 55 Lü Enguo xii, 30 Lutheran 19

100

Index

luxury goods 17, 41 maces 28, 59–60 macrobotanical analysis 46 Magyars 73 Maikop 61, 84, 87, 90 Maltese terriers 18, 20 Manchu 1 Manichaeism 19 maritime routes 6, 90 Mariupol 59, 79 Mauryan 8–9 Mayaki 81 meat 49, 57, 61 medicines 2 Mediterranean xii, 1, 5–13, 15, 38, 71 Mediterraneanization 8, 13 Mehrgarh 47, 51 Memphis 8 Menander 9, 18, 21 Merv Oasis 39 Mesolithic xv, 75, 77, 81–82, 86 Mesopotamia 6–7, 33, 35, 41–42, 61, 66–67, 90, 92 metallurgy 2, 42–43, 64, 66 metals 7, 90. See also bronze, copper, gold, silver, tin metal-working 90–91 Middle Bronze Age xv, 7, 42, 49, 61, 91 Middle East 20, 35, 56 migrations 55, 75, 91 Mikhailovka 62, 64, 80 mile stones 9 military organization 57 milk 33, 57–58, 61–62 millet xi, xii, 26, 42–43, 45–48, 50, 63, 65, 90, 92 broomcorn millet 42–48 millstones 26 mining 9, 42, 66 mirror-bag 37 Mitanni 67 mobile herding 61–62, 91 mobile pastoralists 41–43, 45, 50, 66, 75, 78, 85 mobile societies 73 mobile stockbreeding 78 Moldova 60, 87 Mongolia 42

Mongols 55 Monophysite Negus 20 Moravia 35 mosaics 8 mountain geography 43 mountain societies 41 mounted archery 56 mounted herders 55 mounted warriors 93 MtDNA 29, 65 Muhammad 20, 21 mummies 4, 24–25, 30, A-3, A-5, A-6, A-7, A-8, A-12, 34, 55–56, 89, 92–94 Murghab 63 Muziris papyrus 10 Nahal Hemar 35 nard 10 Nearchus 8 Near East 5–8, 11, 13–14, 33, 44, 67, 71 Near Eastern 5–8, 11, 13–14, 33, 44, 67, 71 necropolis 24–27 Negus 20 Neolithic xv, 35, 45–46, 52, 60, 63, 70, 75–78, 81–82, 84, 87–88, 90, 93 Nestorian Christianity 19 Nichols, Joanna 73, 84 Nikol’skoe 79 Nile 10, 14, 53 Niyä 26, A-7, A-8, 38 Niyä River 26 nomadic stockbreeding 78 nomads 16, 18, 55 North Africa 7 Northern Cemetery xi, xiii, 3, 23, 25–31, A-3, A-4, 91 ochre 65 Okunevo 67 Old Assyrian 7, 12 Oman 7 onagers 67, 92 oratory 62 Ördek’s Necropolis 23, 32 Ordu Balik 20 ore 42 Orenburg 62, 92

ornaments 24, 28, 60, 64 overland trade 6, 11 ovicaprids 2, 23, 29, 78, 80–81 oxen 25, 27 Oxus 8, 52 packets 49, 50 Pakistan xiii Palaeolithic 35, 39, 77, 84, 90 paleobotanists 30 paleoethnobotanical studies 45 paleozoologists 30 palisade walls 66 Pamir Mountains 47 pastoralism 3, 29, 42, 55, 63–64, 66, 75, 79 pastoralists xii, 6, A-14, 41–45, 49–50, 66–67, 75, 78–80, 85, 91, 93 pastures 44, 61, 64 Patalena 9 patrons 57, 62 Pax Mongolica 3 Pazyryk A-7, 36, 38–39 peaches 2 pearl-roundel 38 Pelousion 9, 12 Pendjikent 92 Penn Museum xvi, 2, 4 Pepkino 66 pepper 10 Periplus of Erythraean Sea 10 Persia 16, 19–20, 37, 42 Persian knot 36 pestle 65 Petrovka 65, 67 phallus 25, 28 Phoenicia 7 Phryni 9 phylogeography xiii pigs A-15, 80–81, 85 pile-knot 36 Piraeus 9 Pit-Grave 68, 93 pit-houses 57 pits 46–47, 58, 61 plain weave 34, 36 Poisson, G. 73 Poland 58, 60

Index

101

Polo, Marco xi Pontic-Caspian region 73–75, 77 poplar 25, 29 posts vii, 27, A-3 pottery 26, 58, 62–65, 81, 83 praise poetry 62 prehistoric societies 90 prostheses 28 Proto-Indo-European xiii, 61–62, 68, 70, 74, 84, 88, 93 Proto-Kartvelian 61 Proto-Uralic 61, 68 Prussian 16 Ptolemy II 10 putti A-9, 38 Qaghan Istemi (Sizabul) 18 qaghans 16, 17 Qaradöng 25–26 Qäwrighul 25, 28, A-5, 34 Qaysar 20 Qiemu’qiereke (Chinese) 66–67 Qočo (Gaochang) 19 querns 29 Quruk Tagh 28, 33 Qurum Tagh 26 race 94 rachises 47–48 raiding 56–57, 59, 61 Rakushechny Yar 78 Rassamakin, Yuri 79–84 Red Sea 7–11, 20 regional diversity 91 regional exchange 44 Renfrew, Colin xi, xvi, 73–75, 78–79 Repin 59–60, 64, 81 rice 42, 46, 90 Rig Veda 56 roads 6–7, 9, 11, 31, 91, 92 robes A-9, A-10 rock-art 43 Roman 2, 14 Roman empire 9–11 Romania 59 Romans 2, 14 Roman trade 5–6, 9–11

102

Index

Rome xi, 3, 5–6, 8, 10–12, 15–16, 18, 21 Rum 20 Russia 69, 74, 93 sacrifice 36, 59, 62 saddle 36, 38 saddle-blanket 36 saiga antelope 58 Saint Augustine of Hippo 19 Samarkand 21, 92 Sampula 36, 38 Sang-i Chakmak 63 Sanskrit 56 Sanxing Dui 28 Saraostus 9 Sarazm 47, 52, 63–66, 69–70, 92 Sarianidi, V. 73, 88 Sarmatians 2, 73 Sasanian 16, 19, 21 Saxony 19 Schrader, Otto 73 scouting 61 Scylax 8 Scythia 2 seaborne trade 10 sea routes 5–6 seasonal encampment 43 sedentary farmers 50 sedentism 77 Seidenstrassen 1, 16, 89 Seima-Turbino 52, 66, 90 Seleukid 6, 8 selvedge 34 Semirech’ye 43, 45 Semitic 74 Seres 9 Sergeivka 62–63 settled pastoralism 66 settlements 8–9, 11, 25, 43, 49, 57–59, 61–66, 78, 83, 91–92 seven 28 sexual symbolism 25, 27 shabraks (saddle blankets) A-7, 36 Shamirshak (Turkic) 66–67 Shang Dynasty xv, 2 shards 29, 46 sheep xii, 23, 26, A-15, 33, 45, 48–49, 55, 57– 66,

78, 80, 90, 94 sheep/goat A-15, A-16, 45, 49, 59 Sherratt, Andrew 4, 11, 90 ship building 10 shipping 3, 8–10 ships 7, 9, 11 Shortughai 46–48 Sidonian 7 Sigerdis 9 silk xii, 2–3, 6, 10, 16–19, 31–32, A-8, 33, 37–38, 90–91 silver 2, 7, 18, 37 Sinitic 1–2 Sintashta 65–67, 90 Skaff, Jonathan 16, 18, 20 Skelya A-1, 81–84 Slavs 74 Small River 3, 23–31, 91 Small River Cemetery 3, 23–24, 29–31, 91 social identity 42 social institutions 42, 50, 62 socketed arrowheads 56, 93 Sogdia 16, 20 soil sampling 46 Sophytos 9 South Asia xiii, 8, 13 Southeast Asia 1, 51, 90 southwest Asia 41, 45–46, 48 spices 17, 90 spreads 28, 90 spread zone 73, 84 Sredni Stog 59–60 stable isotope 61 staging area 74, 85 state formation 6, 11, 16 steppe hypothesis 4, 73–76, 81–82, 84 steppes xii, xiii, 8, 11, 16–19, 29, A-14, 41, 44, 55–67, 79–80, 87, 90–94 stirrups 93 stockbreeding 76, 78, 80 stock-raiding 57 stone tools 29 Strabo xi, xii, 9–10, 13 string skirts 27 Subeishi xii substitute corpses 27 Sumer 93

Suvorovo 59 Sven Hedin 31, 34 S’yezzhe 59 symbolic role 59–60 Syria xii, 6, 13, 37, 67 tabby weave 34, 38 Tajikistan 47, 52, 63, 70, 92 Taklamakan Desert 15 Tang period 17 Tängri Tagh/Tian Shan 28 tapestry 36–38 Taq-i Khusro 20 Tarim Basin xiv, 2–3, 23, 26, 28–30, 32–33, 36, 38, 55, 63, 65–67, 70, 73, 75, 93–94 Tarim River 26, 28, 30 Tarim University 30–31 tassels 25 taxes 17 tea 2 technologies 41, 89–91 Tedzhen 63 tents 17–19, 61 Tersek 58, 60–62 textiles xi, xii, 3, 10, 24, 26, 30–31, A-3, A-5–A-10, A-12, 33, 67, 89, 90 theater 8 Third Dynasty 67 Thracians 74 Three Kings 20 Tibet 16 Tigris 7 tin 7, 42–43 tin-bronze 42–43 Tisza 75 Tisza river 75 Tocharian xii, xiii, xiv, 2, 29, 32, 65, 67, 74–75, 85, 93 Tong Yabghu 18 toolkits 77 tools 29, 58, 61–62 tooth crowns 46 tracks 6, 91 trade 1, 3, 5–11, 14, 16–17, 20, 41–44, 49, 55, 59–61, 63, 66–67, 82, 89, 91 trans-Ili (Zaili) Mountains 44 trash pits 47

Index

103

Tremblay, Xavier 19, 21 tribal raiding 56–57 Tripolye A-1, 75, 78–84, 86 trousers A-10, 36, 38 Turan 7, 52 Tureng Tepe 63 Turfan xiii, 15, 18–19 Turgai Depression 58 Turkey 35 Turkish knot 36 Turkmenistan 52, 63, 92 turquoise 63

wheat xi, xii, xiii, 2, 23, 25–26, 28, 31, 42–43, 45–50, 63, 65, 77, 85, 90, 92 wheel 61 wheeled vehicles 90 wild animals 45, 59, 84 wild horses 57, 59, 63 wild plants 77, 84–85 wine 2, 7 wooden sculptures 27 wool 7, 33, 38 woolen capes/cloaks 27, A-5 Wu Di 1

Ukraine 74, 77, 87 Upper Palaeolithic 39, 77, 84, 90 Ur 67, 70 Uralic 61, 66, 68, 73–74, 86–87 Ural Mountains 57 Ural River 58–59, 61–62 Uruk 61, 63 Urumqi xiii, xiv, 9, 27 Usatovo 64, 81 Uyghur Qaghan 20 Uyghurs 2 Uzbekistan 44, 63, 92

Xiaohe xi, xiv, 23–24, 32, A-5, A-12, 34–35, 48, 50 Xiaohe Mudi 23–24 Xinjiang xi, xii, xiii, xv, xvi, 1, 15, 24, 26, 28, 30, 33, 38, 41, 46, 48, 50, 55, 74, 89–90, 92–94 Xinru Liu 16 Xiongnu 1, 5, 55 Xiyu (“Western Regions”) 2 Xuanzang 18

Vaissière, Étienne de la 16–18 Varfolomievka 59 Varna 83 Vasilyevka 77 Velikent 92 Volga-Ural 59, 62, 64, 69 Voloshkoe 77 von Richthofen, Ferdinand Freiherr 1, 16 Vovnigy 79 wagons 55, 61, 65, 74, 93 wall hanging 37 Wang Binghua xiv, xvi, 30, 52 warfare 3, 20, 55–57, 66–67 warp threads 34 Waugh, Daniel 89 weft 33–38, 90 Western Asia xiv, 11, 38 western China 41–44, 46, 48–49, 85

104

Index

Yamnaya xv, A-1, A-16, 61–62, 64–65, 74, 78–81, 83–85, 91–93 Yarim Tepe 63 Y chromosome 29, 65 Yellow River 46, 51, 68, 70 Yemen 20 Yingpan 26, 38 Yingpan Man A-9, A-10, 38 Yssyk Köl 18 Yuansha 25–26 Yuansha Gucheng 25 Yuezhi/Rouzhi/Ruzhi 1 Yumulak Kum 25 Zaghunluq 35–36 Zemarchus 18 Zeravshan 63, 65, 92 Zeravshan valley 63, 92 Zhang Qian xi, 1–2 Zhivotilovo-Volchanskoe 80–81 Zhou Dynasty xv, 2 Zuo Zongtang 1