Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane

"On the other hand, there are the nomads and their vast and ill-defined empires of the steppes. This book I’m recommending, Empires of the Steppes, is a classic treatment of the nomads. There are a lot of other, more recent works, but this is a classic study, and it has the virtue of being very readable as well. The original French edition is elegantly written, but the English translation is similarly lively and attractive. Grousset gives us a vivid sense of the vast territories that were conquered and briefly held by these numerous if elusive nomadic peoples. Needless to say, the Mongols, who conquered just about everything from China to Poland and Hungary, top the list. But as Grousset shows us, they weren’t the only ones. It is important to understand that these two forces, the urban and the nomadic, were constantly interacting with each other. In Lost Enlightenment I argued that they were mutually dependent. The nomadic peoples of the steppes raised horses and sold them in the cities. They also made saddles and did metal work—both forms of manufacturing—which they sold in the urban markets. Without the urban markets, there wouldn’t have been nomads. On the other hand, without the nomads, there wouldn’t have been urban markets. The great urban centers of Central Asia—Bukhara, Samarkand, Khwarazm, the great city of Merv in what is now Turkmenistan and Balkh in Afghanistan (known as ‘the mother of cities’) were the power centers. But to trade, they all had to be able to send caravans securely through the barren countryside. Who helped with that? The nomads. The deals struck between the nomadic and the urban people made the trade possible. In short, the nomads played the role of insurers for the urban elite. So the more recent view of these two great cultural phenomena is to appreciate their interdependence, and to acknowledge the intimate ties linking the two totally different civilizational types. There were so many! The Scythians are the best known because of the gorgeous goldwork that they did. There were many others that emerged from China. Some of them settled down early. The first Turkic group to settle down did so in in what is now in Xinjiang and ruled by China. The Karakhanids, as they are known, made the transition from nomadism and were the first urbanized Turkic peoples. They ended up taking over much of Central Asia for a while, and immediately absorbed the culture of the cities. It’s an absolutely fascinating and endlessly rich story."