From Kesar the Kābulšāh and Cenral Asia (original) (raw)
The iconic minaret of Djām stands in a remote mountain valley in central Afghanistan, the finest surviving monument of the enigmatic Ghūrid dynasty. The seasonally nomadic Ghūrids rose to prominence ca 545 / 1150-1 when they devastated the capitals of the neighbouring Ghaznawid dynasty. Over the next sixty-five years, the Ghūrids expanded their polity into Khurāsān and the northern Indian sub-continent, before succumbing to the Khwārazm-Shāh and then the Mongols. Their summer capital of Fīrūzkūh, which is thought to be modern Djām, was abandoned and never re-occupied. The re-discovery of the minaret half a century ago prompted renewed interest in the Ghūrids, and this has intensified since Djām became Afghanistan’s first World Heritage site in 2002. The few studies that have been published, however, have largely been historical or architectural; relatively little archaeological data has been collected from Ghūrid sites and Djām has suffered extensive looting in recent years. Two seasons of archaeological fieldwork at Djām, the detailed analysis of satellite images and the innovative use of Google Earth as a cultural heritage management tool have resulted in a wealth of new information about known Ghūrid sites, and the identification of hundreds of previously undocumented archaeological sites across Afghanistan. Drawing inspiration from the Annales School and Adam T. Smith’s concept of an ‘archipelagic landscape’, I have used these data to re-assess the Ghūrids and generate a more nuanced understanding of this significant medieval polity. In addition to complementing the événements which form the focus of the urban-based historical sources, the new archaeological data have enabled me to reconsider the urban characteristics of the Ghūrids’ summer capital and explore the issues of Ghūrid identity, ideology and the sustainability of their polity. The use of Google Earth, in particular, represents an advance in archaeological methodology applicable to semi-arid landscapes throughout the region.
Limits of Empire in Ancient Afghanistan: Rule and Resistance in the Hindu Kush, 600 BCE-600 CE
In the first millennia BCE and CE, successive empires sought to incorporate the archipelago of territories in and around the Hindu Kush and to install their structures of rule. The Achaemenians, Seleucids, and Sasanians endeavored -- and sometimes pretended -- to rule regions of Afghanistan from their courts located in the Near Eastern core, upward of 2500 km distant. The Kushans, for their part, made Bactra and Begram the bases of an empire that extended far beyond into India and Central Asia. Apart from distance, these empires confronted a political geography in the Hindu Kush that was -- like the Caucasus -- uniquely unfavorable to imperial governance, as well as populations with disparate cultures, social structures, and political traditions. Afghanistan thus provides a test of the capacities of ancient imperial regimes to overcome distance, verticality, and difference to integrate territories into their trans-regional and trans-cultural orders. As even a passing familiarity with the history of the region suggests, efforts at empire failed at least as often as they succeeded in a geographical and cultural landscape highly conducive what James Scott calls the “art[s] of not being governed.” The conference aims to focus on the limits of empire in Afghanistan, as a means of better comprehending the workings of the regimes that laid claim to its territories and the responses of its populations. The conference convenes archaeologists, art historians, historians, philologists, and numismatists to debate current research in the context of ongoing theoretical debates concerning the formation, endurance, and limits of imperial systems within a highland political ecology.
As is known, tamgas (signs) at all tames served as symbols of a particular clan (tribe) ownership for some valuable things, livestock and lands, involvement of a person or a group of relatives in a certain action: in the course of performing ceremonies, in making various agreements included utterance of oaths, in religious ceremonies, and others [Яценко 2001: 22-23]. However, the tamgas engraved on coins represented symbols of ruling dynasties and the states they had founded and were associated both with the territory in which they ruled, as well as with their origin (ethnicity). In this regard of particular interest are tamgas available on the Early Medieval coins of Chach (Tashkent region) and Tokharistan (Southern Uzbekistan – Southern Tadjikistan – Northern Afghanistan).
There can be little doubt that geographical literature is of great importance when considering the development of geographical concepts in the premodern Eurasian world. However, the definition of geographical literature varies according to the traditions in which those works were written. Roughly speaking, in medieval China, the main sources of geographical knowledge were the geographical sections of each dynastic history, such as the Suishu 隋書, Jiu Tangshu 舊唐書, and Xin Tangshu 新唐書. 1 On the other hand, the early Islamic geographical literature was composed in the form of independent works. Though these differing forms of composition may have affected their contents, both of them seem to share the common feature of containing the history of the places which they cover in one form or another. However, what we need to be aware of is the difficulty in using the historical information derived from geographical literature, as it often lacks attention to the precise chronology of an event. In this paper, I will show an example of what kind of historical process we can extract from geographical descriptions and also consider what kinds of notions lie behind them, by connecting eastern and western sources along the axis of time covering period from the seventh to the tenth century in eastern Afghanistan. As a matter of fact, this period and area provide one of the limited cases where we can directly compare and contrast eastern and western geographical writings in pre-Mongol periods. 1 The travelogs and reports of Chinese officers, Buddhist monks, and others were undoubtedly the source of geographical knowledge on the foreign lands. As the compilers of the official dynastic histories were skilled at correcting information exhaustively, if such travelogs were seen to be valuable, they were usually incorporated into those official histories, as is demonstrated below.
The Ferghana Valley at the Crossroads of World History: The Rise of Khoqand, 1709–1822
The Khanate of Khoqand emerged, flourished and collapsed during the era of Chinese and Russian imperial expansion into Central Asia. While eighteenth-century Central Asia has long been considered to have been an unimportant backwater 'on the margins of world history', this essay juxtaposes focused research in local primary sources with a world historical perspective in an effort to illuminate some of the ways in which the region remained interactively engaged with its neighbours and, through them, with historical processes unfolding across the globe. The essay argues that these interactions were substantial, and that they contributed to Khoqand's emergence as a significant regional power and centre of Islamic cultural activity in pre-colonial Central Asia.