Central Asia, crossroads and meeting place of cultures, has also known periods when it was closed off from the outside world. The History of Civilizations of Central Asia shows that despite ideological barriers, historical and cultural links between inhabitants weave a regional identity.

C. Edmund Bosworth

British historian, Emeritus Professor of Arabic Studies University of Manchester, 

co-director with M.C.Asimov of Volume Ⅳ of the History of Civilizationsof Central Asia.

Samarkand, Bukhara, Herat... cities of dreams. GenghisKhan, Tamerlane, Akbar... characters who marked history. Avicenna Khayyam, Ulugh Beg... thinkers who transformed worldviews. These names were inscribed down through the ages on a territory that corresponds not to a specific region of the ancient world but to a permanent crossroads of exchanges between peoples: Central Asia. Since antiquity, Scythians, Hsiung-nu and Khitai roamed this area, from the Caspian Sea to the Chinese border, setting the foundations for the great civilizations of Asia and Europe. The History of Civilizations of Central Asia covers this immense expanse, which, until the 16th century was essentially given over to steppe pastoralism, with agriculture only possible in a few favoured places, like oases. Accordingly, it has given birth to little that has been original to human life and culture.

However, its position as the heartland of the Asian continent has given it a unique position as a corridor for the movement of peoples, religions and ideas, and for cultural and artistic currents. The more favoured, settled regions to the south and east of the core region have, over the past four or five millennia, given birth to several religions and civilizations of the Near East, Iran, India and China. Influences from all these have been significant for the evolution of Central Asia.

A land bridge

The region of the steppes acted as a land bridge between the great civilizations of south-western, southern and eastern Asia, which intervening mountain ranges and deserts have, throughout recorded history, largely separated from each other. Obvious examples here include the so-called “Silk Route” running across Central Asia from East Asia to Iran, the Near East and the Greco-Byzantine worlds of the later pre-Christian and early Christian times, which not only conveyed luxury textiles from China to the Levant and ultimately to Europe but also, in the reverse direction, brought Sasanian silver ware from Iran into Central Asia and as far as Siberia and what is now Russia, and Roman gold to Central Asia and north-western India.

Greco-Roman influences were likewise a major factor in the development of an art like that of Gandhara in eastern Afghanistan and north-western India. In Islamic times, other Chinese luxury goods like ceramics made the long and haza rdous land journey across Central Asia to centres of consumption like Nishapur, Ray, Isfahan, Baghdad and other great cities of the caliphate and its successor states, thus supplementing sea traffic through the Indian Ocean.

In the realm of ideas, various of the great religions of the Old World spread across Central Asia to other parts of the continents, such as Zoroastrianism from Iran into Transoxania (corresponding roughly to modern Uzbekistan) and Khwarazm (between today's Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan). Buddhism went forth from lndia to conquer China and Mongolia. Meanwhile traders from Western Asia, the Iranian Sogdian merchants, brought Nestoria nChristianity and Manichaeism across Central Asia to eastern Turkistan and northern China. In Islamictimes, the new faith of Muhammad was carried from the Iranian lands into the steppes and beyond, often involving a process of syncretism with existing beliefs and practices there,such as those of shamanism.

Closing and opening

The History of Civilizations of Central Asia has thus been designed to show that Central Asia deserves consideration, in its own right, as a distinct entity of human history, and also because ithas functioned as a crossroads and meeting place for the civilizations of East andWest during past millennia.

Passing to our own time,it also provides the historical background for the vastly increased openness of the region during the last two decades or so after the tightly closed period of Soviet domination and Cold War rivalries. The open terrain of much of the region had, in earlier times, always made it accessible to outside influences and movements of peoples. But, at the turn of the 20th century, despite lengthy lines of communication and the consequent slowness of travelling, enthusiastic explorers, archaeologists and art experts from avariety of nations revealed to the world in general the remarkable cultural, literary and artistic treasures of the peoples of Central Asia.

"At the turn of the 20th century, explorers, archaeologists and art experts revealed to the world the remarkable cultural, literary and artistic treasures of the peoples of Central Asia"

But then ideological fanaticisms and political turmoil made Central Asia a region largely closed to the outside world for many decades. One consequence of this was that no academic body or institution, let alone a single scholar or small group of scholars, felt able to undertake the compilation of a general history of the region, from its prehistoric beginnings to its present place in world history, until UNESCO brought together a wide range of authorities in the 1980s and the present history was thus launched, mobilizingsome 180 authors. 

Recently we have witnessed the emergence of the four Central Asian republics which are Turkic in ethnos and speech (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) and the one which is their Iranian equivalent (Tajikistan). Independent since the early 1990s, these states are now able to exploit their own mine ral and other resources and to play decisive ralesin world commerce and industry; on the other hand they are now discovering continuities of culture with lands on their periphery, such as the Turkish and Azerbaijan republics, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, links which were previously strongly discouraged or even rendered impossible.

It is hoped that this UNESCO History will demonstrate that what was once considered as an amorphous, little-known region of the European-Asian landmass has in fact acquired an identity over recent centuries and is now fully able to play a part in world affairs.

*: The multi-volume History of Civilizations of Central Asia,published by UNESCO between 1992 and 2005, is the first attempt to present a comprehensive picture of the cultures that flourished and vanished at the heart of the Eurasian continent from the dawn of civilizationto the present day.

(This article was originally published in The UNESCO Courier N°8-2009)

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