Treasures of the Great Silk Road

by Edgar Knobloch

  Water, as well as trade, played a decisive role in the final destiny of western Khorezm. After an invasion, which resulted in large-scale slaughter of the inhabitants, the reduced population was unable to maintain the canals, which quickly fell into disuse. On the one hand, the irrigated area shrank and caused a further departure of the people. On the other hand, excess water, not used for irrigation, caused floods and even changes of the whole geography of the country. So after the Hunnic raid in the fourth century, the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth, and Timur’s devastation in the fourteenth, the Amu Darya burst its banks and, rushing through old dried riverbeds, flooded the large Sarykamysh depression south-west of the delta.18 This has been the source of legends that have spread far and wide about the river once emptying into the Caspian; but it has also been the reason why, on the southern fringes of the Ust-Urt west and south-west of the river delta, in certain periods of history short-lived settlements or even big cities appeared, built on an irrigation network that dried up as soon as the dams on the river were repaired, and the irrigation area of the main oasis again expanded.

  After the devastations effected by Timur, and the changes in the water system, the population shifted eastwards, upstream, where Khiva became the new capital of what emerged, in the late fifteenth century, as an independent principality of the Uzbeks. Some time in the seventeenth century one of the Uzbek khans, Abulghazi, finally transferred the remaining population from the Gurganj area to the neighbourhood of Khiva, where the present Urgench – New Urgench – was founded.

  The Uzbek khanate of Khiva was, up to the late eighteenth century, hardly more than a nest of caravan robbers, safely hidden behind the formidable barriers of the desert. At that time, however, and perhaps in connection with the raid of the Persian conqueror Nadir Shah on Central Asia, there was a sudden revival of artistic and cultural activity in Khiva.

  It almost seems as if the creative genius of Persia, unable to express itself at home, sought and found refuge in that isolated little world behind the Kara Kum sands. For Khiva, having surprisingly survived undamaged so far, is a genuine oasis of art, a relic of the past in a different world and a unique gem of city architecture.

  The Russians were interested in Khorezm as early as 1715, when Peter the Great dispatched Aleksander Bekovich to find the old riverbed of the Amu Darya leading to the Caspian. The purpose was to establish an easier route to India by cutting off the existing opening to the Aral Sea and bringing the river back to the Caspian, where a port and a fortress were to be built. Bekovich’s mission failed and almost all his people perished. Several punitive expeditions against the Khiva brigands also failed, and it was not until 1873 that the Khan of Khiva accepted the suzerainty of the tsar.

  Ichan-Kala (the Inner City or Fortress of Khiva) has a completely preserved belt of walls with ramparts, bastions and gates, built partly of clay and partly of sun-baked bricks. (See 6.) Only the gateways and the flanking towers are of burnt bricks. Outside the walls, the suburbs and gardens form a green ring with mulberry trees, orchards and small vineyards; further out lie the fields irrigated by a cobweb of tiny aryks and then, quite abruptly, come the sand dunes of the Kara Kum dotted with tufts of long dry grass or some thory bushes, an endless grazing ground for the herds of Khivan sheep.

  In Ichan-Kala there are two palaces: the older, eighteenth-century Kunya-Ark (Old Castle) and the newer Tash-Hauli (Stone House) built c.1830. The mosque inside the Kunya-Ark dates from 1838 and has a very fine iwan with majolica tiles. (See 12 and 23.) The Tash-Hauli has three courtyards (a harem, a banqueting hall and a court of justice) and six iwans, all richly decorated with glazed tiles and typical Khorezmian ornamental motifs, stylised doves of garlic, for example, in navy blue and white, with a touch of pale blue and brown. The majolica is of indifferent quality – the patterns lack definition, the colours are muted, and there are inaccuracies in design – but the architecture of the ensemble as a whole is distinguished by its purity. The yards are surrounded by two-storey buildings. The rooms on the upper floor form a gallery that opens into the yard and is supported by carved wooden columns. The iwans are two storeys high and their light roofs of beams, straw and clay are also supported by a huge wooden column. The tradition of carved wood had existed in Khorezm since time immemorial, and beautifully carved doors, columns etc. can be found almost everywhere, not only in official buildings. In the courtyards of Tash-Hauli there are flat, low circles of bricks that served as bases for yurts: the felt tents the inhabitants erected here every winter. The palace had no heating facilities, until some stoves were imported from Russia. The yurts were easier to warm by charcoal burners and braziers. The high iwan, both in the palace and in ordinary houses, had just the opposite function. It was designed to capture the cool northerly wind and, by turning it into the yard, to reduce the intense summer heat. That is why every iwan in Khiva is twice the height of the house and is invariably turned towards the north.

  The Djuma mosque (Friday, or Cathedral mosque) is a vast structure with a light roof supported by rows of carved wooden columns. (See colour plate 1.) Twenty-four of them may be considered the peak achievement of local craftsmen between the tenth and the fourteenth century. These columns have been analysed by Y.L. Voronina, who divided them into three groups with three different ornamental styles. Four of them (now in the Tashkent Museum) can be dated to the end of the tenth or beginning of the eleventh century. Seventeen others (four in the museum) belong to the second style, placed by Voronina in the twelfth century, while Rempel is more inclined to place them into the eleventh or twelfth century. The last three – the third group – belong to the fourteenth century.

  One of the most beautiful buildings in Khiva is the mausoleum of the local hero, the poet and wrestler Pahlavan Mahmud (1835). (See 17.) It has an octagonal dome raised over a rectangular ground plan that represents the latest type of mausoleum to be found, particularly in Persia. Inside, the walls and the ceilings are completely covered with blue and white ornamental tiles with Persian stanzas inserted in the ornaments.

  In the main room is the tomb of Alla Kuli Khan, the adjacent smaller one holds the tomb of the poet. The madrasa of Alla Kuli Khan dates from the same year and, like the mausoleum, has a fine decor of painted majolica tiles. Another madrasa, that of Muhammad Amin Khan, is of a somewhat later date and is now a hotel. The mausoleum of Khoja Allauddin, dated 1303, is a simple domed structure with a beautiful tiled cenotaph inside (see p.82). The skyline of the city is dominated by two minarets: the Kok-Minar (Green), also called the Kalta-Minar (Short), is remarkable for its unusually large diameter and the predominance of green and yellow in the colour scheme. (See 10 and 11.) It was begun in 1852, but remained unfinished. The Khoja Islam minaret (1908) is the last notable architectural achievement of the Islamic era in Central Asia. Among the city gates, which date from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Palvan Darvaza is perhaps the oldest and most interesting. (See 7.)

  Khiva ornamentation, although a part of the Central Asian tradition, has an individual character that distinguishes it from others. For example, it is different from those of Bukhara and Ferghana. Only one group of the traditional girikhs19 occur – star-shaped figures inscribed within pentagons. By extending the straight lines of these forms, new patterns of girikhs arise that are not to be found anywhere else. The vegetal or floral patterns of Khiva represent the crowning achievement of Central Asian ornament. Even if Khiva ornament falls short of Bukhara ornament from the point of view of technique, it surpasses it in the rich variety of its motifs. That of Bukhara evolves from architecture, while in Khiva ornamentation is an independent feature and its motifs persist equally in majolica, carvings, textiles, metalwork etc.

  The country houses in Khorezm, known as hauli, form a particular type of domestic architecture. They were traditionally constructed as miniature strongholds for protection against robbers. We have seen this in several periods of local history, when conditions were unsettled and the threat of raids fre
quent. The actual house, with its small courtyard and iwan, is surrounded by high earth ramparts with battlements and massive pillars, and instead of the usual small postern, a strongly fortified gateway. The surrounding wall was often decorated with folk ornaments, some motifs of which can be traced back to the prehistoric patterns of the steppe nomads. (See 3.)

  Among other important sites in Khorezm may be listed, on the left bank of the Amu Darya: Kalaly-Gyr, probably Achaemenid, begun in the fifth century BC, but abandoned in the fourth century; Kiuzeli-Gyr, same period, sixth to fifth century BC – typical site with wall dwellings; Shah-Senem, ancient settlement, revived in the twelfth century; Zamakhshar, Daudan-Kala and Kyzylcha-Kala, early medieval settlements; Ak-Kala (Adak), late medieval town, abandoned probably in the fifteenth century. On the right bank of the river are Angka, Bronze Age settlement, later Kushan fortress Angka-Kala, third to fourth century AD; Dzhanbas-Kala, Neolithic, Bronze Age, ancient period; Kavat-Kala, Bronze Age site, fortress built in fourth to third century BC, existed until the thirteenth century AD; Kuyuk-Kala, fifth- to eighth-century fortress on the eastern shore of the Aral Sea, probably of Hephthalite origin; Teshik-Kala, seventh- to eighth-century site; Yakke-Parsan, late Bronze Age, eighth to seventh century BC, a castle of the fourth century BC, and another of the sixth century AD; Guldursun, third to fourth century AD, resettled in tenth to eleventh century; Pil-Kala, second to third century AD, probably the ancient fortress al-Fir, sometimes identified with the citadel of the capital as referred to by al-Biruni; Shurakhan and Narindzhan, early medieval sites.

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  NOTES ON CHAPTER VI

  Full details of abbreviations and publications are in the Bibliography

  1 B. Vainberg puts the life span of the castle at only fifty years from the second half of the third to the beginning of the fourth century. See Abstracts of Papers.

  2 Frumkin, CAR XIII, p.80.

  3 Frumkin, CAR XIII, p.80.

  4 The language was local Iranian Khorezmian. See Stavisky, Bongard and Levin in Abstracts.

  5 Frumkin, CAR XIII, p.78.

  6 Tolstov, S.P., Po sledam drevnie-khorezmiiskoy tsivilisatisii, p.226.

  7 Barthold, Turkestan, p.143: says to 392 yards.

  8 Quoted by Barthold in Turkestan, pp.144–45.

  9 Gibb (tr), The Travels of Ibn Battuta, p.171.

  10 Tolstov, Po sledam, p.284.

  11 Hookham, Tamburlaine, p.33.

  12 Rempel, Ornament, p.262.

  13 Hookham, Tamburlaine, p.92.

  14 Hookham, Tamburlaine, p.93.

  15 Jenkinson, A.M., In Early Voyages and Travels, p.71.

  16 Ibn Arabshah, quoted by Hookham in Tamburlaine, p.94.

  17 Jenkinson, Early Voyages, p.70.

  18 This view is now being challenged by some archaeologists.

  19 Literally, ‘the knot’, used to describe geometrical ornamental pattern constructed on a grid. Geometrical arabesque.

  VII

  THE ZARAFSHAN VALLEY

  The valley of the River Zarafshan has always been the most fertile and populous part of Transoxania. Its biggest city, Samarkand, was always the most important city in the country even in times when Bukhara was the capital, as it was under the Samanids in the tenth century and under the Uzbek khans from the sixteenth century onwards. This was due mainly to the fortunate position of the city at the crossroads of several main trade routes; the Great Silk Road from China split into two at Samarkand, one branch going west to Persia, the other south to India. There was also important trade with the north, where the steppe nomads supplied furs, cattle hides and slaves in exchange for the more sophisticated products of the city craftsmen. The neighbourhood of Samarkand was and still is extremely fertile, and the fields and orchards of the oasis were able to support a very dense population.

  According to the Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus, the walls of Marakanda, as Samarkand was then called, had a circumference of 70 stadia, which is about 10 miles,1 or at least more than 6 miles.2 This may well be exaggerated because according to another source, the Chinese traveller Suen-Tsang, it was only 20 li, which is something between 4 and 5 miles. There are, of course, no statistics about the number of inhabitants, but Barthold, who based his guess upon the city area described fairly accurately by the Arab geographers, estimates the population in the tenth century to have been more than 500,000.

  The city in those days, however, was not quite identical with present-day Samarkand. It lay further to the north and closer to the river, where the cemetery and the excavation site of Afrasiyab are now situated. The mound of Afrasiyab was the site of Samarkand up to the Mongol destruction. After that catastrophe, the city centre was never rebuilt and the new town grew up from and around what were previously the outer suburbs on the southern perimeter. The reason for this was undoubtedly irrigation, as it was in many other cases. The city depended on the water from the Zarafshan, and an elaborate system of aryks (canals) had existed here from time immemorial. For this purpose a dam had been constructed several miles upstream from the city, and the river was divided into four streams, two of them navigable, probably by raft only. The longest of them flowed past Samarkand, and the aryks in the town were derived from it. The others irrigated the surrounding fields. This system naturally made the city extremely vulnerable in time of war, and it is worth noting that in the eighth century the Arab commander Asad ben Abdullah used exactly the same method as the Russian general Kauftnan in 1868 – he cut off the water supply to the city by building a dam, thus forcing the city to surrender. The Mongols destroyed the irrigation network within the city precinct beyond repair, and most probably the main canal also, and the surviving population quite naturally shifted to areas where some water supply was available.

  The post-Mongol city south of Afrasiyab thus became the capital of Timur, which Clavijo described, in 1403, in the following words:

  Samarkand stands in a plain and is surrounded by a rampart or wall of earth, with a very deep ditch. The city itself is rather larger than Seville, but lying outside Samarkand are great numbers of houses which form extensive suburbs… The township is surrounded by orchards and vineyards, extending in some cases to a league and a half or even two leagues beyond Samarkand which stands in the centre. In between these orchards pass streets with open squares. These are all densely populated and here all kinds of goods are on sale with bread-stuffs and meat… The population without the city is more numerous than the population within the walls. Among these orchards outside Samarkand are found the most noble and beautiful houses and here Timur has his many palaces and pleasure grounds… Through the streets of Samarkand, as through its gardens outside and inside, pass many water-conduits and in these gardens are the melon-beds and cotton-growing lands.

  Trade has always been fostered by Timur with the view of making his capital the noblest of cities, and during all his conquests wheresoever he came, he carried off the best men of the population to people Samarkand, bringing thither together the master craftsmen of all nations … so great therefore was the population now of all nationalities gathered together in Samarkand that of men with their families the number they said must amount to 150,000 souls… The population of Samarkand was so vast that lodging for them all could not be found in the city limits, nor in the streets and open spaces in the suburbs and villages outside, and hence they were to be found quartered temporarily for lodgement even in caves and in tents under the trees of the gardens, which was a matter very wonderful to see… Throughout the city of Samarkand there are open squares where butchers’ meat ready cooked, roasted or in stews, is sold with fowls and game suitably prepared for eating, also bread and excellent fruit both are on sale. All these viands and victuals are there set out in a decent cleanly manner, namely in all those open spaces and squares, and their traffic goes on all day and even all through the night time. Butchers’ shops are numerous, also those booths where fowls, pheasants and partridges are on sale; and these shops are kept open by night as by day.
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  On the one part of Samarkand, stands the Castle which is not built on a height but is protected by deep ravines on all its sides; and through these water flows which makes the position of the Castle impregnable… Within its walls Timur holds in durance and captivity upwards of a thousand workmen: these labour at making plate-armour and helms, with bows and arrows, and to this business they are kept at work throughout the whole of their time in the service of his Highness.3

  Barthold, on the other hand, gives the description for the pre-Mongol time (tenth to eleventh century) as follows: ‘The old palace of the Arab Amirs, in the citadel, was still intact in the time of Istakhri (c.951), but Ibn Haukal (c.976) found it already in a ruinous condition’. Among other buildings there was a prison (also in the citadel), the cathedral mosque nearby (west of the citadel in Afrasiyab), and another castle.

  The streets were, with few exceptions, paved with stone; the buildings, as now, were for the most part constructed of clay and wood… In the town and in the rabad (suburb), there were as many as 2,000 places where it was possible to obtain iced water gratis, the means for this being supplied by benefactors. The water was kept in fountains or was put in copper cisterns and earthenware vessels.

  Remarkable were some ‘astonishing figures cut out of cypresses, of horses, oxen, camels and wild beasts; they stand one opposite the other, as though surveying each other on the eve of engaging in a struggle or combat’.4

  Excavations on the mound of Afrasiyab extend to several layers: the Graeco-Bactrian period has been found in two of them, known as Afrasiyab II and III. Pottery production reached its highest level in Afrasiyab III, and the products are remarkable for the purity of the clay, the fineness and density of their texture, and their elegance of form.