Revolts in the western and eastern Türk regions further weakened the Tang presence. The early eighth-century Türkic runic inscriptions on large steles, part of the burial complexes of the rulers, located in the Türk core territory on the Orkhon River in Mongolia recount the epic drama of the revival of the Türk Empire. In the inscriptions, the deceased directly addresses the people. The inscription erected around 726 and dedicated to Tonyuquq, the Chinese-educated chief adviser of the early qaghans of the second Türk Empire, depicts the sorry state of the Türks, a leaderless, subject people: “Tengri [“heaven,” the supreme Türk celestial deity] must have spoken thus: ‘I gave you a khan, you left the khan and again became subjects.’ Because you became subjects, Tengri must have said ‘die!’ The Türk people perished, were destroyed, became nothing.”18
Tonyuquq then tells how a small band of 700 men hiding out in the hills, some on horseback, others on foot, became an army that restored the empire for the new qaghan, Ilterish, by 682. Tonyuquq, who clearly relished his role as kingmaker, adds, “because Tengri gave me wisdom, I myself made him [Ilterish] Qaghan.”19 In their monuments, Ilterish’s sons, Bilge Qaghan and his brother and chief adviser, Kül Tegin, chastise the Türks for succumbing to the “sweet words” and alluring “gold, silver, and silken goods” of China and for abandoning the ways of their ancestors. According to them, Ilterish, began with only seventeen warriors, but “was like a wolf” and his “enemies were like sheep.”20 Ilterish’s brother and successor, Qapaghan Qaghan (691–716), restored the empire to its earlier glory.
The Türk state apparatus, offices, and titles, many of Chinese, Sogdian, Tokharian, and Indian origins, were largely inherited from the Rouran. The qaghan claimed that he was “heaven-like, heaven-conceived” and possessed qut (heavenly good fortune), a sign of the heavenly mandate to rule. His person was holy and his blood could not be shed. If a qaghan had to be removed—permanently—he was strangled with a silk cord. His investiture ceremony included ritual strangulation in which, on the point of losing consciousness, clearly an induced journey into the spirit world, he was asked to state the length of his rule. Possession of the holy Ötüken Highlands and sacred grounds along the Orkhon River confirmed the qaghan’s political legitimacy. The ideology of qut was similar to the Chinese concept that the emperor was the “son of heaven” and ruled by divine favor. It is not clear whether this similarity was a borrowing from one to the other or simply part of a common pool of ideological resources.
The Türks, like many of their subjects, were believers in Tengri. They also worshipped Umay, a goddess associated with fertility, and Yol Tengri, a god of the road (or fate). In addition, there were cults of earth-water, holy mountains, and forests. They venerated their ancestors, annually conducting special ceremonies at the ancestral cave from which they believed the Ashina had sprung. Contact with other civilizations introduced new religions—usually brought in by the Sogdians. Tatpar became interested in Buddhism. He read Turkic translations of Buddhist tracts and ordered the building of a Buddhist temple. The nomad leadership opposed it. Bilge Qaghan also considered building Taoist and Buddhist temples. Tonyuquq dissuaded him from doing so, arguing, as others had before him, that Türk power derived from their nomadic lifestyle. Permanent structures threatened their martial vigor; the Türk “capital” was wherever the qaghan’s cart stopped or his tent was pitched. Temples were not portable.
Pastoral nomadism remained a mainstay of the Türk economy and horsepower remained the key to their military might. Highly mobile armies gave them control of the trans-Eurasian trade routes. They collected revenue from trade, tribute, agricultural, and manufactured products from subject tribes and city-states. Raiding was another source of income. The redistribution of wealth was one of the principal means that nomadic rulers had to maintain their power among the tribes. A qaghan was “loved” and respected only as long as he kept his military followers well-fed and clothed and provided opportunities for their enrichment.
The Türks grew wealthy, but the costs of maintaining a far-flung, ethnically diverse empire were great. The harsh Türk regime had to expend much energy on punitive missions against ever-rebellious tribes. Qapaghan perished in one such campaign. Internal discord persisted. Rivals poisoned Ilterish’s son, Bilge Qaghan in 734. External threats were not lacking. The Arabs after their conquest of Iran in 651 challenged western Türk dominance in Sogdia in the early eighth century, weakening their control of the Silk Road.
In 742, the Basmïl (led by a branch of the Ashina), heading a coalition of subject tribes, overthrew the Türks. The Uighurs then toppled the Basmïl in 744. The resultant Uighur qaghanate (744–840), centered in Mongolia and Xinjiang, with extensions into Siberia, exploited Tang difficulties. The Uighurs, numbering perhaps 800,000, led a tribal confederation called Toquz Oghuz, meaning “the nine related groups” of eastern Tiele origin. In a 759 inscription honoring the founder of the state, Qutlugh Bilge Kül Qaghan, he boasts to his people that the conquered Türks “thereafter ceased to exist.” Calling upon “the common people,” whom he left unmolested, to join him, the Uighur ruler drove off potential rivals, pursued the “sinful nobles” and “carried off their livestock, movable possessions, unmarried girls, and widows.”21
In 755, An Lushan, a Tang general of Sogdian and Türkic descent, allegedly the lover of the emperor’s concubine, revolted against his overlord. Rebellions continued even after An Lushan’s assassination two years later. The Tang turned to the Uighurs for help. They happily complied, defeated the rebels, and were allowed to sack the royal capitals as a reward. The Uighurs supported the Tang in order to better exploit China, extorting great quantities of silk and other goods under the guise of gift-giving and trade. In return for the silk, the Uighurs sent horses, many of them infirm or moribund. The Tang, understandably, were often late in their payments.
This policy was the work of Bögü Qaghan, whose mother was a Tang princess. In 762, Sogdian Manichaeans converted him to their faith. Sizable numbers of Sogdians in China appear to have supported the An Lushan revolt. Their search for a protector in China against an anti-foreign backlash might explain their interest in converting Bögü. His reasons remain obscure. The Uighur elite adopted Manichaeism. They believed, perhaps, that in addition to spiritual benefits there were political, economic, cultural, and social advantages to be gained by conversion, even though the bearers of the new religion were nowhere a politically dominant group. Perhaps the Uighurs were looking for a religion that came with no political encumbrances.
Important Uighur factions opposed the overweening Sogdian influence. Tun Bagha Tarqan, Bögü Qaghan’s uncle, an opponent of the new religion and the aggressive China policy, urged on the qaghan by his Sogdian advisors, led a palace coup. Bögü Qaghan perished, but Manichaeism survived.
Unlike the Türks, the Uighurs built cities—with the assistance of the Sogdians and Chinese. They established their capital, Ordu Balïq, on the Orkhon River in 757. Tamîm ibn Bahr, an Arab visitor to the capital in the early ninth century, was impressed with the size, wealth, and power of the Uighur Empire. The qaghan had a personal army of 12,000 and his seventeen subordinate chieftains each commanded armies of 13,000. This was an imposing force, including women warriors such as the “seven women archers skillful on horseback”22 whom the Uighurs sent to the Tang.
No less impressive was the capital, fortified with a series of walls. The qaghan’s palace had its own wall, as did the city center, which contained temples as well as administrative offices. The outer wall had twelve large iron gates leading into busy market streets filled with merchants hawking their goods and services such as ceramics and stone carving. Purveyors of the same products were usually grouped together on the same streets, as was typical of many medieval cities. There were high towers to watch for invaders coming from the surrounding steppes. Nomadic traditions, however, remained. The Uighur qaghan had a tent made of gold which stood atop his castle and could be seen from miles away. The tent could accom
modate one hundred people. In contrast to many nomad-founded “cities” in the steppe, which were little more than short-lived conglomerations of tents with a section containing a few mud-baked buildings, this was a real city.23
Medieval travelers occasionally encountered the ruins of abandoned steppe cities. Tamîm ibn Bahr passed by one such site, near Lake Issyk Kul. He reports that he saw “traces of an ancient town,” but none of the local Turks knew who had built it and why it had become deserted. Recent discoveries of a Uighur palace complex at Khökh Ordung (Blue Palace, in the eastern foothills of the Khangai Mountains in Mongolia), dating from the late sixth to the early seventh century, shed new light on the history of Uighur urban development. This city, built of white brick and pink-tinted gray roof tiles, resembled a nomadic encampment. Its centerpiece, the qaghan’s pavilion, imitated a tent on a grand scale. Kökh Ordung, meant to awe outsiders, indicated Uighur imperial ambitions well before their victory of 744. It was also the site of some kind of daily sun-worship by the ruler.24 Another example of Uighur imperial grandeur was Bezeklik (literally “the place with paintings”). Consisting of seventy-seven artificially created caves, dating from the fifth to ninth centuries, the paintings within depict Buddhist and Manichaean themes, in a mix of Sogdian, Chinese, and Indian styles. Because of the richness of its finds, scholars have called it “the Pompeii of the Desert.”
The image of these eighth-or ninth-century Uighur princesses, elaborately coifed and beautifully attired in silk robes, is preserved in the Bezeklik “Thousand Buddha Caves” near the site of Gaochang, an oasis city near modern Turfan in Xinjiang. In some respects Bezeklik, a major Uighur center containing Manichaean and Buddhist art and culture, is akin to Dunhuang, the Buddhist temple-cave cultural complex located in Gansu province in China. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, New York
The first half of the ninth century was a tumultuous era. China was in decline. Tibet, hitherto a major regional power, after 842 collapsed in civil war between competing pro-and anti-Buddhist factions. The Tibetans retreated from Central Asia and would never again be an important military power. The Uighurs faced factional power struggles and wars against the Tibetans, Qarluqs, and Kyrgyz, a powerful Turkic or Turkicized tribal union centered in the Yenisei region of Tuva. The Kyrgyz, pouncing on the Uighurs weakened by throne struggles, disease, and famine in the steppe, overran the capital in 840. A Kyrgyz gravestone commemorating Tirig Beg, one of the participants in this victory, describes him as “like a sharp-tusked wild boar” who killed twenty-two enemies.25 Weighed down by wealth and tied to their cities, the Uighurs were easy prey.
Some Uighur tribes fled to the Chinese borderlands and subsequently formed a series of small states in Xinjiang and Gansu. They mixed with and ultimately Turkicized the local eastern Iranian and Tokharian populations. The Uighurs, hitherto predominantly nomad pastoralists, began to settle, taking up urban and agricultural pursuits. Like their mentors, the Sogdians, they developed a rich commercial culture as Silk Road traders and a complex spiritual life in which Manichaeism, Buddhism, and Christianity were all represented. In the eastern steppe zone, they replaced the Sogdians as culture-bearers. The Aramaeo-Syriac script (related to the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets), which the Sogdians had adopted in various forms to write their language, was also used to write Uighur. From the Uighurs it passed to the Mongols and is still used by the Mongols of Inner Mongolia. The Manchus borrowed it from the Mongols. The post-imperial Uighurs produced a rich literature, largely religious in content, for a population of which perhaps one-third was literate. The shift in the role of the Uighurs is reflected in a phrase from an early tenth-century Arab historian, Ibn al-Faqîh, who called them “the Arabs of the Turks.”26
The Kyrgyz who replaced them stemmed from a complex society of nomads and agriculturalists, but were not as culturally sophisticated as the Uighurs. Their early history remains murky, as does their “imperial era” from 840 to the early tenth century. Breaking with traditions that dated back to the Xiongnu, they did not center their state on the Orkhon and Selenge rivers nor attempt wider conquests. Instead, they returned to their native Yenisei, from where they maintained commercial contact with China and the Middle East. Muslim geographers knew them as livestock breeders and a source of goods from the Siberian forests, such as musk, furs, special types of wood, and the khutu horn, apparently mammoth tusks which they dug up—a source of ivory.
This traveling monk is depicted in the art of the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang, also called “Caves of the Thousand Buddhas.” These man-made caves, begun in the fourth century CE, housed almost 500 temples. This religious and cultural complex, full of artworks and manuscripts, was China’s entry point onto the Silk Road. Monks followed the trading routes as they made their pilgrimages across Central Asia. British Museum / Art Resource, New York
The Qitan, a Mongolic people, filled the apparent power vacuum in Mongolia. They were a powerful tribal union of hunters, trappers, pigraising agriculturalists, and sheep and horse breeders from southern Manchuria. Former subjects of the Türks, they created an empire (916–1125) in northern China and Manchuria, adopting the Chinese dynastic name of Liao. Having taken Mongolia, they invited the Uighurs, who once reigned there, to return. The Uighurs politely declined. The Qitan garrisoned Mongolia, but focused on China. Their harsh rule and onerous taxes induced many Turkic groupings to migrate. During the tenth and eleventh centuries, the demographic balance in Mongolia tilted in favor of Mongolic-speakers. Mongolia became Mongolian, but Qitan rulers preferred to be Chinese Emperors.
The Türks created the first Central Asian transcontinental empire, from Manchuria to the Black Sea, promoting an extensive trade network that facilitated the movement of goods and ideas. It would be almost 500 years before another empire would similarly unite the steppes. The age of “Heaven-conceived Qaghans” had ended—for a time—but left a model of governance dating back to the Xiongnu. It became the template for nomad successor states, large and small.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Cities of the Silk Road and the Coming of Islam
On the eve of the Arab invasions of Transoxiana in the seventh and eighth centuries, there were a series of oasis city-states that formed links in the northern Silk Road. Khwarazm, an agricultural, manufacturing, and trading center west of the Sogdian cities of Châch (Tashkent), Bukhara, and Samarkand, was a major conduit to the Middle East for the goods of the Finno-Ugrian and Slavic peoples of the northern forests. Al-Muqaddasî, an Arab geographer writing around 985, enumerates an extraordinary range of goods imported from Khwarazm: “sable, squirrel, ermine, weasel, marten, fox and beaver hides, rabbit skins of various colors, goat skins, wax, arrows, hats, fish glue, fish teeth, castor, amber, honey, hazelnuts, falcons, swords, armor, khalanj [birch wood], slaves, sheep and cattle.”1
The Sogdians, farmers, handicraftsmen, and merchants, with trading colonies dotting Eurasia from China to the Crimea, dominated this commercial world, providing the technical and financial expertise. Traces of their presence have been found from Japan to Belgium. Some of their caravans crossed substantial parts of Eurasia; others simply delivered local goods from one town to the next. No job was too big or too small. Archaeological finds, scattered fragments of correspondence, and Arab narratives of their conquests have only recently allowed scholars to gain some insight into the internal workings of the Sogdians and their southern neighbors in Bactria. Sogdian traders often formed family companies with representatives in major cities and smaller settlements. Sogdians in China also became government officials, army officers, farmers and horse breeders. Communal leaders, called sartapao (Chinese: sabao), a word borrowed from Sanskrit sârthavâha (caravan-chief), emerged.2 This word alone shows the polyglot, international character of their connections.
The Sogdian “Ancient Letters,” from fourth century CE merchants in Gansu to their home bases in Sogdia, provide fragmentary but occasionally graphic descriptions of daily life, personal concerns, and contemporary event
s. One letter from a daughter to her mother tells of her difficulty in returning home since her husband’s family, apparently, would not allow it. The woman complains of her wretchedness and poverty. Only a “priest” helps her and is willing to give her a camel and a man to accompany her, but she seems to need a letter from her mother. Another woman, named Miwnay, writes to her husband Nanai-dhat, who apparently abandoned her, that she would rather be married to a dog or a pig than to be his wife.3
Tang artists produced accurate figurines of the Sogdians and other non-Han peoples carrying out their daily pursuits. Sogdians in what is today Xinjiang farmed and were engaged in a variety of crafts, including “nailers of camels’ feet.” As long-and short-distance traders, they were, by necessity, experts in camel handling. Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, New York
South of Sogdia lay Bactria, earlier under Kushan and Hephthalite rule, a major center of Zoroastrianism and Buddhism. Xuanzang reports that it had “100 convents and 3000 monks.”4 Statues of the Buddha were adorned with gold and gems—an attraction for raiders as well as the faithful. According to legend, Alexander the Great built its principal city, Baktra (later Balkh). Less urbanized than Sogdia, Bactria with its castles and villages resembled neighboring Sasanid Iran. The Iranian Bactrian language, mainly written in Greek script, had loanwords from Semitic languages, Greek, Sanskrit, Sasanid Persian, Chinese, and Turkic, reflecting its complex cultural history.
To the east, in Xinjiang, there was another series of oasis city-states or kingdoms clustered in the Tarim Basin and Turfan region in the north and Khotan in the south. Caught between the nomadic powers in the steppes and China they had often enjoyed an uneasy independence or autonomy since Han times. In the seventh century, China and Tibet contested the region. China organized Kashghar, Agni (today Qarashahr), Kucha, and Khotan into the “Four Garrisons of the Anxi Protectorate” (Anxi means “pacify the west”) and uneasily held sway here until 751.
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