Authors: Christopher I. Beckwith
Tags: #History, #General, #Asia, #Europe, #Eastern, #Central Asia
Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (9 page)
Where did all the silk come from? There is a widespread misconception that Central Eurasians pillaged and plundered the poor innocent Chinese or Persians or Greeks in order to get the silk. (For an extensive discussion of this idea, see the epilogue.) At least from Han Dynasty times on, however, if not earlier, the Chinese had to import horses, which could not be raised in sufficient numbers and quality for their needs. In early medieval T’ang Dynasty times, once again they desperately wanted and needed horses in great numbers in order to build and maintain a huge empire. Chinese historical texts contain enough material on the trade in horses and silk between the Turks and Chinese to reveal that the recorded, official transactions were large, involving more than twenty thousand horses on the one hand and more than a million bolts of raw silk on the other. Although the Chinese historians rarely give an actual equation of such numbers, still there are a few instances, mostly not in the official histories, where prices were recorded anyway, so it is known that the normal price of an imported horse in China fluctuated between about twenty-five and thirty-eight bolts of raw silk.
91
The trade constituted a significant part of the Chinese economy in the early medieval period
92
and continued to be important until the Manchu conquest, when the entire Eastern Steppe and other horse-producing areas (such as the Kokonor region) came under the control of the Ch’ing Empire. In short, it is known that the vast majority of the silk possessed by the Central Eurasians in the two millennia from early Hsiung-nu times
93
through the Mongols down to the Manchu conquest was obtained through trade and taxation, not war or extortion.
94
We normally think of nomadic states as stimulating long-distance exchange through the creation of a pax that provides security and transportation facilities; but in fact the process of state formation among the nomads in and of itself stimulates trade through an increased demand for precious metals, gems, and, most particularly, fine cloths. Politics, especially imperial politics, was impossible without such commodities.
95
After Central Eurasian peoples converted to world religions in the Middle Ages, the practice of ritual suicide or execution of the core comitatus gradually ended, but the comitatus tradition otherwise continued within Central Eurasia
96
and still required the bestowal of silks and other treasure on its members.
The Islamicized Comitatus
The comitatus was among the Central Asian cultural elements introduced into the Near East from the very beginning of the Arab Empire’s expansion there. ‘Ubayd Allâh ibn Ziyâd, the first Arab to lead a military expedition into Central Asia, returned to Basra with a comitatus of two thousand Bukharan archers.
97
His second successor, Sa’îd ibn ‘Uthmân, brought back fifty warriors, nobles’ sons, from Samarkand, but when he settled them in Medina, he took away their beautiful clothes and treated them as slaves. They murdered him and then, true to their comitatus oath, committed suicide.
98
The most famous Arab governor-general of Central Asia, Qutayba ibn Muslim al-Bâhilî, had a large comitatus of Central Asian archers. This “group from among the sons of the kings of Sogdiana who refused to abandon him” fought to the death for him when he rebelled in 715.
99
The Arab model came from Central Asia, where the importance of the comitatus was well known and recognized by both Arab and Chinese historians. The Chinese sources say of the Central Asians, “They enlist the brave and strong as
châkars. Châkars
are like what are called ‘warriors’ in Chinese.”
100
Of the comitatus in Samarkand Hsüan Tsang remarks, “They have very many
châkars.
The men who are
châkars
are courageous and fierce by nature. They look upon death as returning home. In battle no enemy can withstand them.”
101
One of the most prominent local Central Asian leaders of the early eighth century was Al-Iskand, the king of Kiss (now Shahr-i Sabz) and Nasaf, who had lost his throne during the Arab invasion. With his comitatus, he campaigned against the Arabs across Central Asia for at least a decade and was known to the Chinese as “King of the
Châkars.”
102
In 741 the Arab governor Nasr ibn Sayyâr pardoned Al-Iskand and his comitatus and allowed them to return to their homes. The following year, Naṣr acquired 1,000
châkars,
armed them, and provided them with horses.
103
Central Asian influence on the Arab Islamic world became more direct with the settlement of the great Abbasid army of Central Asians, or ‘Khurasanis’, around Baghdad after completion of the new capital, the City of Peace, begun in 762. Under the influence of Khālid ibn Barmak, the Central Asian circular royal palace-city plan of the Parthians and Sasanids was used as the model. It was the plan followed both for the former Sasanid capital of Ctesiphon, about thirty kilometers southeast of Baghdad, and for the Nawbahâr, a Buddhist monastery (Khālid’s family home) that had originally been built as a Sasanid royal palace in the Central Asian city of Balkh.
104
The influence was reinforced half a century later when the civil war between the sons of Hârûn al-Rashîd was won by al-Ma’mûn, whose capital, the Central Asian city of Marw, became the capital of the caliphate for a decade. When he finally returned to Baghdad, followed by a large, Central Asianized court, he brought with him a comitatus. Although several Arab governors of Central Asia had previously acquired such a guard corps, al-Ma’mûn was the first caliph to do so. The Central Asian
châkars
—referred to in Arabicized form as
shâkiriyya
and later referred to as
mamlûks
or
ghulâms
—constituted a new imperial guard corps that was loyal to the ruler personally. Because the Arab soldiers who were the predecessors of the
shâkiriyya
were considered untrustworthy and unprofessional, they were dismissed. The continuation of this policy by al-Ma’mûn’s successor al-Mu’taṣim (r. 833–842) is not surprising; the latter was the son of Hârûn al-Rashîd by his Sogdian wife Mârida and had begun acquiring a Central Asian comitatus long before becoming caliph.
105
The Amîr al-Hakam ibn Hishâm (r. 796–822), the contemporary of al-Ma’mûn in the Umayyad Caliphate’s continuation in Spain, acquired a comitatus of foreigners known as
al-Ḥaras
‘the Guard’. They were put under the command of the Visigothic chief of the Christians of Cordoba,
Comes
(’Count’) Rabî’, son of Theodulf, so the guard was literally a comitatus. The Visigoths had maintained the traditional early Germanic comitatus in which the guard corps warriors swore an oath to defend the lord to the death.
106
The Central Eurasian comitatus system, Islamicized as the
mamlûk
or
ghulâm
system, became a fundamental feature of traditional Islamic polities, and remained so in some places down to modern times.
107
The Comitatus and Trade
The rewards paid to a comitatus member were substantial. They included gold, silver, precious stones, silks, gilded armor and weapons, horses, and other valuable things, as vividly described in many sources. Comitatus members were buried with a great store of weaponry, plus horses (and chariots in the earliest times, when they were still used as military weapons). Much wealth was also buried with the deceased lord. Burials were generally covered with a huge earthen tumulus, though this varies from subregion to subregion and people to people. Within traditional Central Eurasia, such burials are attested among the Scythians and their immediate predecessors, the Iranian and pre-Turkic peoples of the Altai-Tien Shan region, the Huns, the Merovingian Franks, the Turks, the Tibetans, the Koguryo, and the Mongols. Outside Central Eurasia proper, such burials are found in Shang China and premedieval Japan as well as among the Anglo-Saxons and other Germanic peoples of northwestern Europe. The burials are signs that the Central Eurasian Culture Complex was at one time alive and functioning in these places.
Though some of this wealth was obtained by warfare
108
or tribute,
109
methods used by powerful states throughout Eurasia for the same purpose, the great bulk of it was accumulated by trade, which was the most powerful driving force behind the internal economy of Central Eurasia, as noted by foreign commentators from Antiquity through the Middle Ages. This commerce ranged from local trade in agricultural products and the products of animal husbandry to long-distance trade in silks, spices, and other goods.
In Central Eurasia, “rural people” included both agriculturalists living in the fertile irrigated areas near the cities and nomads living out in the grasslands; the agriculturalists produced and consumed mainly grains and other vegetable products, whereas the nomads produced and consumed mainly meat, milk, wool, and other animal products.
110
The relationship was economically equivalent to that in the agricultural-urban society of China, in which the people—both in the cities and their surrounding agricultural areas and in the more distant purely agricultural areas—were in most cases ethnolinguistically more or less identical. The difference was that in Central Eurasia the
distal
rural people—the nomads—were usually distinct ethnolinguistically from the urban people of the city-states and their
proximal
rural people, with both of whom the nomads traded and over whom they usually exercised a loose kind of suzerainty maintained by taxation.
To the nomads, therefore, Chinese cities in or near their territory were—or should have been—just as open to trade with them as the Central Asian cities were. Throughout recorded Chinese history, the local Chinese in frontier areas were more than willing to trade with the nomads, but when the frontiers came under active Chinese central governmental control, restrictions often were placed on the trade, it was taxed heavily, or it was simply forbidden outright. The predictable result, time and again, was nomadic raids or outright warfare, the primary purpose of which (as repeated over and over in the sources) was to make the frontier trading cities—which were built in former pastureland that had been seized from the nomads—once again accessible.
111
From one end of Central Eurasia to the other, the nomads’ peace terms with peripheral states regularly included trading rights of one kind or another.
In short, the Silk Road was not an isolated, intrusive element in Central Eurasian culture, it was a fundamental, constituent element of the economy. Moreover, it seems not to be possible to separate out the international trade component from the local trade component, or local from long-distance cultural interchange. All of it together—the nomadic pastoral economy, the agricultural “oasis” economy, and the Central Asian urban economy—constituted the Silk Road. Its origins, and the formation of the Central Eurasian Culture Complex, go back to the Indo-European migrations four millennia ago.
1
In this selection from the Kalmyk national epic (Anonymous 1990: 10) I have omitted the unusually long, stylistically odd second line, which seems to be an intrusive editorial addition perhaps intended to mollify strict Buddhist readers.
2
On Hittite myths and similarities with foundation myths of other peoples, see endnote
4
. The Hittites also had an institutionalized guard corps that seems to have been a comitatus, q.v. below.
3
No Junghar origin myth seems to be preserved in historical sources, though various of the Oirat constituent peoples are said to have origin myths. However, the beginning of the epic of
Janghar,
the national hero of the Junghars and their Oirat relatives, among whom the best known today are the Kalmyks, is a version of the First Story; see the quotation at the chapter head.
4
The date of the Chou conquest of Shang is controversial; the dates 1046 or 1045
BC
now dominate scholarly discussion.
5
The Chiang
NMan
jiâng
are generally believed to be related to the Ch’iang
NMan
qiâng,
the main enemies of the Shang Dynasty, who were skilled in the use of chariots. See
appendix B
. I generally cite modern Mandarin words first in the traditional Wade-Giles system, sans tone marks, then in the pinyin system. The first of the above words would be transcribed fully as
chiang
1
in Wade-Giles. Some pinyin printing styles write
jiâng
as
ji
ā
ng,
but in this book, as in many others, the circumflex is generally used as the equivalent of the macron except in direct quotations and Old Chinese forms (where the macron indicates length).
6
On founders as agricultural fertility gods, see endnote
5
.
7
The story presented here is a conflation of two texts, the version preserved in the
Shih ching,
Ode 245 “Sheng Min” (Legge 1935: 465–472) and the version in the
Lun Heng
(Yamada 1976: 146).
8
On the Scythian gods according to Herodotus, see endnote
6
.
9
See
appendix B
on the names of the Scythians, Sakas, and other Northern Iranians.
10
It is specifically said to have been a woodpecker; see below.
11
This summary largely follows Plutarch’s (Perrin 1998: 94 et seq.) long version, which does not actually differ, in its fundamental elements, from his principle alternate version and the version in Livy (Foster 1988: 16 et seq.). The Celeres, the mounted bodyguard of Romulus mentioned in Livy (Foster 1988: 56–57), was certainly a comitatus, at least in origin. One intriguing detail in Plutarch’s first, shorter, version is the name of the evil king, TαρΧέ Tarchetius, which is strikingly similar to the name Tαργιτoζ Targitaus, the legendary royal father of the first Scythian ruler in one of Herodotus’s versions of the Scythian origin myth; this would seem unlikely to be coincidental.
12
On T’ou-man
NMan
tóumàn
< MChi təu (Tak. 346–347; Pul. 311 *dəw) -*man (Pul. 207), see endnote
10
.
13
On his Hsiung-nu title, see endnote 7.
14
On the Old Chinese pronunciation of Mandarin Hsiung-nu
(xi
ô
ngnú),
see endnotes 51 and 52.
15
On the name Mo-tun, see endnote
8
. Although the heroic founder ruler in the story is Mo-tun, not *Tumen (the actual founder), all the essential elements of the First Story are present except for the divine birth and exposure.
16
The name of this people, written in Chinese
(also written
), which is read in modern Mandarin Yüeh-chih, was in Old Chinese pronounced *Tok
w
ar-(*Tog
w
ar-)kē. See
appendix B
. This version follows the
Han shu (HS
94a: 3749). see endnote
9
.
17
On the
Shih chi
version of the story, see endnote 9.
18
On the name *Tumen and proposed etymologies for it, see endnote 10.
19
HS
94a: 3749. On Mo-tun’s comitatus and Hsiung-nu burial customs, see endnote
11
.
20
See
appendix B
on the name *Aśvin and the reading of the title of their king. The gloss of the Ch’i-lien Mountains’ non-Chinese name is in the
Shih chi
(Watson 1961, II: 268). The Wu-sun origin myth is discussed by Golden (2006).
21
This is the version in the
Han shu (HS
61: 2691–2692), which is surely correct. In the
Shih chi
(Watson 1961, II: 271; cf. Di Cosmo 2002a: 176) and the
Lun heng
(Yamada 1976: 147), the Hsiung-nu are the attackers, and the Hsiung-nu king is the one who considers the marvelous infant K’un-mu to be a supernatural being (
NMan
shén)
and therefore adopts him. The
Shih chi
version does not make any sense in the context of the whole story. Cf. Benjamin (2003).
22
This story is very close to that of Romulus and Remus. For discussion of the birds involved, see endnote
12
.
23
Benjamin (2003).
24
Based on the report of Chang Ch’ien to the Han emperor Wu-ti in his biography
(HS
61: 2691–2692). The Wu-sun origin myth is discussed by Golden (2006).
25
On the transcriptions of the name *Saklai and the lack of critical editions of Chinese texts, see endnote 13.
26
On later versions of the story, see endnote
14
.
27
On the Koguryo etymology (perhaps a folk etymology) of the name, see endnote
15
.
28
None of the attested versions have alligators here, but the White Rabbit of Inaba story in the
Kojiki,
which is a version of the river-crossing motif, has for the helpful animals
wani,
which are described in early Japanese sources as alligators or crocodiles, and the parallel in the ancient
Bamboo Annals
has alligators and turtles (Beckwith 2007a: 30–31). Although alligators do not live in Korea or Japan,
Alligator sinensis
is native to North China and was once widespread there (q.v. endnote 16). It seems clear that the Puyo-Koguryoic version of the story changed the unknown river creatures, alligators, to known ones, fish. The alligators would seem to date to the earlier Common Japanese-Koguryoic period, when the unified ancestral people lived at least as far south as the Yellow River basin and knew about alligators.
29
Beckwith (2007a: 29–30). The earliest recorded version is in the
Lun heng,
by Wang Ch’ung, a first-century
AD
text, followed by the the
Wei lüeh,
a lost work quoted in the annotations to the
San kuo chih,
a third-century
AD
text. The earliest version written by the Koguryo themselves is found in the King Kwanggaet’o memorial inscription of 414.
30
The text does not explain why Ardaxšêr would escape if he reached the sea before Ardawân. This detail would appear to reflect the element of water—usually a water deity or water crossing—that appears at one point or another in most versions of the First Story. On the water crossing in the Turkic and Mongolic versions see de Rachewiltz (2004: 231–233).
31
Horne (1917, VII: 225–253), Arkenberg (1998), Grenet (2003), Čunakovskij (1987).
32
See also the detailed discussion of the Turkic origin myth(s) by Golden (2006); cf. Sinor (1982). There are several different myths. In one of them the first Türk is nursed by a wolf, exactly as in the Roman myth of Romulus and Remus, in which a wolf nurses the twins in the wilderness. (The wolf was sacred to the god of war, Mars, who was the twins’ father.) In one of the Turkic versions the wolf subsequently escapes—across the Western Sea—to a cave in the mountains, where she gives birth to a generation of “proto-Turks,” thus making the Türk the descendants of a she-wolf (CS 50: 909). Cf. de Rachewiltz (2004: 231–233), who discusses the relationship between the Turkic and Mongol versions of the story. The Türk banner was topped with a golden wolf’s head, and the warriors of the Türk comitatus were called
böri
‘wolves’. In both Greek and Chinese sources the Türk are said to be descended from the Sakas; cf. endnote 52. I follow the customary use of the spelling Türk to refer specifically to the early, more or less unified Turkic people, especially under the “dynastic” Türk of the first two Türk empires. The spelling Turk is used as a generic term for Turkic peoples, languages, and so on, including all Turks after the Türk empires.
