Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present

by Christopher I. Beckwith

The first complete history of Central Eurasia from ancient times to the present day, Empires of the Silk Road represents a fundamental rethinking of the origins, history, and significance of this major world region. Christopher Beckwith describes the rise and fall of the great Central Eurasian empires, including those of the Scythians, Attila the Hun, the Turks and Tibetans, and Genghis Khan and the Mongols. In addition, he explains why the heartland of Central Eurasia led the world economically, scientifically, and artistically for many centuries despite invasions by Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Chinese, and others. In retelling the story of the Old World from the perspective of Central Eurasia, Beckwith provides a new understanding of the internal and external dynamics of the Central Eurasian states and shows how their people repeatedly revolutionized Eurasian civilization.

Beckwith recounts the Indo-Europeans' migration out of Central Eurasia, their mixture with local peoples, and the resulting development of the Graeco-Roman, Persian, Indian, and Chinese civilizations; he details the basis for the thriving economy of premodern Central Eurasia, the economy's disintegration following the region's partition by the Chinese and Russians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the damaging of Central Eurasian culture by Modernism; and he discusses the significance for world history of the partial reemergence of Central Eurasian nations after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Empires of the Silk Road places Central Eurasia within a world historical framework and demonstrates why the region is central to understanding the history of civilization.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Asia, China, Ancient History, World History, Medieval

501 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Christopher I. Beckwith is an American philologist and distinguished professor emeritus in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana.

Reviews

[Steve]

A physical map of most of Eurasia


This book is simply enormous in scope! (And so, unhappily, is this damn review. For that reason portions of the review are labeled as "spoiler" to be opened by the really curious.)


In Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (2009) Christopher I. Beckwith provides a kind of history of most of the region represented by the above map from the Bronze Age to the present ! This impossible task is made (barely) manageable by his intent to make two main points: 1. what he calls the Central Eurasian Culture Complex (CECC) has informed most of the cultures in that enormous region during that span of time; and 2. the Central Asian and northern steppe peoples blithely called "barbarians" by the peoples of the peripheral empires (Greek, Roman, Chinese, Arab, British, Russian) were anything but barbarians.(*) For Beckwith, they were the victims of the expansionary and imperialist fervor of the peripheral empires. Indeed, he asserts that modern culture does not derive from the Tigris, Euphrates, Nile, Indus and Yellow River valleys, but from the CECC. So, though this book is stuffed full of historical information (mostly linguistic and textual, but also some archaeological) about the peoples in that great expanse of time and space, the material is generally selected to explain and support Beckwith's primary aims.

What Beckwith calls Central Eurasia is whatever area (at any given moment of time) is under the influence of the CECC. This region has therefore expanded and contracted in time, but at its largest extent, according to Beckwith, it included basically everything in temperate Eurasia from Britain to Japan. The CECC is that complex of cultural traits identified with the carriers of the original Proto-Indo-European languages, which includes such things as a comitatus(**) and war chariots (and the associated burials), warfare carried out primarily by archers on chariots (and later on horses), certain types of heroic origin myths, religious beliefs focused on a Sky God and an Earth Goddess (before conversion to one of the "world religions"), and the Indo-European languages themselves. Beckwith clearly holds that the Central Asian and northern steppe peoples were the purest representatives of the CECC in historical times.

Like S. Frederick Starr in his excellent Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age From the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane (though with enormously expanded scope), Beckwith's polemical intent is to argue against the pejorative views of Central Asian cultures held by historians of and in the peripheral empires. This point they both make very convincingly, but since Starr is not so temporally and spatially inclusive, he is able to draw a more detailed portrait of the cultural and economic significance of the Central Asian peoples. Unfortunately, since the late 17th century they were squeezed and then swallowed by the Russian, Manchu-Chinese and British Empires and reduced to their current sad state when the latter energetically developed maritime trade and then clamped down their inner-Asian borders, thereby starving out the economies of Central Asia with natural consequences for their high culture. Beckwith expresses the hope that yet another Central Asian revival (there have been quite a few over the millennia) is in the offing.

In the process of setting up his Big Picture of the peoples of the CECC, Beckwith overturns much of accepted Proto-Indo-European theory. Curious to see how his colleagues reacted, I read a review of this book in the Journal of Indo-European Studies in which an expert lambasts much of Beckwith's linguistic theory. So, despite his tone of (at times, nearly supercilious) confidence, there is speculation in this text that will be threshed out over time by other specialists, not by me.

Nonetheless, the main points are well made (and accepted in their essentials in the mentioned review), the assertions about facts and quotes are backed up by detailed footnotes and a very extensive bibliography, and the book underwent a searching peer review in order to be published by the Princeton University Press.(***) So, despite the gleeful air of overturning the applecart Beckwith sometimes adopts, at least most of this book is solid and impressive scholarship.

There is much of interest in this book, but I would like to mention a suggestive idea Beckwith proposes, along with a few of the major building blocks of his point of view that provide a background for the proposed idea. He explains why CECC cultures, even when nomadic, must rely on trade, on commerce (and argues that they relied on raiding only when outside influences crippled that commerce), and why the intense trade along the Silk Road and the concomitant flourishing of the Central Asian and North Steppe economies manifested only when the CECC cultures were politically dominant (and this dominance was waxing and waning in step with the waning and waxing of the peripheral empires). At the end of the 2nd century CE both the Roman and Chinese empires began to crumble under internal pressures and under the external pressures of migrating nomads. Beckwith suggests that the Central Asian and North Steppe economies had entered a significant contractive phase due to the expansion of the Roman and Chinese empires into their regions and the partial closing of the borders of both empires, and that this depression (and the internecine conflict that the expansive pressures of the peripheral empires were causing) was the motivation for the migrations. Hence, in his words, "The aggressive foreign policy successes of the Chinese and Roman empires ultimately had disastrous consequences ... that eventually brought about the collapse of both the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Han Empire, ... and with them the end of Classical civilization." This is the first time I've seen a proposed cause for the Great Migration; in all other histories that have passed through my hands it is just a black box phenomenon - peoples move, but their reasons are unknown.

Another advantage of working at this scale: Beckwith points out some remarkable cases of synchronicity. For example, within a thirteen-year period in the mid-8th century every empire in Eurasia underwent a major rebellion, revolution or dynastic change, at the end of which each declared a particular world religion as the official state religion (upon which ideas of the afterlife began to change in ways that rendered the ritual suicide/execution of the comitatus unacceptable). Most of these empires built immediately thereafter a palace, central temple, even a capital city in a circular design. Some of these are certainly not coincidences: the Abbasid revolution in the Caliphate and the An Lu-shan revolt in T'ang China were connected via the Central Asian Sogdians, who led both revolts (though it is not clear if the participants were working together somehow); the design of the new, circular capital at Baghdad was directly influenced by Persian architecture in Central Asia (including a circular Buddhist monastery in Balkh). These are already known, but are the other cases of synchronicity here just coincidences? I rather doubt it, just as I doubt that the 5th century BCE efflorescence of philosophy in China, India and Greece are coincidences.(4*)

Nine of the twelve chapters are occupied with prehistorical, ancient and medieval times, but Beckwith brings his history to the present, which occasions some fiery polemics against what he calls Modernism (everything new is better than everything old) and against the kind of postmodern historiography that has resulted in a radical relativism of values and truth. Personally, I am quite sympathetic to some of his views in this regard, but these crotchety complaints are, finally, quite irrelevant to the primary content of this book. And to blame modernism for all the ills of the present is more than a little absurd. This reaches a paroxysm in Chapter 11, where the words "Modern" and "Modernism" diffuse to mean little more than "occurred in the 20th century." Every upheaval from Sun Yat-sen's to Mao's, from Lenin's to Ataturk's, from Hitler's to the Ayatollah Khomeini's is termed "Modernist" ! This chapter needs some calm rethinking and serious editing.

Aside from this overly ground axe, the main problem with this book is also its main advantage: its scope. As Beckwith's attention moves forward through time and around and around through space there are potted histories mostly culled from various series with the title "Cambridge History of ....." (though he also employs books I've never heard of which are now in my impossible TBR list). For the most part, these can do little more than form an initial orientation to the given time and place. Only when he has an opportunity to elaborate upon his primary points (or when the time and place is one of his many specialties - the bibliography contains two full pages listing his previous publications) does he wax loquacious. For some readers there may be too many passages where it seems Beckwith is just being dutiful and is not really engaged.

After the rather embarrassing Chapters 11 and 12, Beckwith closes with a summarizing Epilogue in which he returns to scholarly solid ground and brings his primary assertions to a very effective point. Let me be clear: despite my criticisms, I found this book to be well worth reading.


(*) That there was some unfair maligning of the nomads by their enemies (who, after all, were the ones who wrote the histories) I am quite willing to accept. But I have to say that Beckwith appears to go too far in the opposite direction. Consider an example I was previously familiar with - the Huns. For Beckwith they were pushed to their actions against the Roman Empire by acts of iniquity by the Empire (or for some unknown yet valid reasons(!)). Beckwith mentions that Attila's brother died, thus giving him sole rule over the Huns, but not that Attila killed him himself nor that after Attila killed his brother he murderously eliminated everyone even distantly related to his own family (except his immediate offspring) to avoid dealing with possible rivals. He even went to war with the Eastern Roman Empire because they didn't return all of the Huns who had sought asylum in the Empire and thus thwarted his housecleaning plans. Among other things. My point is that Beckwith rarely mentions any fact that could reflect poorly on the various nomadic tribes (or their leaders) but is less sparing when it comes to uncomfortable facts about the peripheral empires. He is particularly hard on the Chinese. His presentation appears to be biased in the attempt to correct another bias - not an unusual rhetorical ploy but a reader should have a suitable supply of grains of salt at hand.

(**) The word comitatus was used by Tacitus in his Germania to refer to the group of elite warriors who swore fealty unto death to their leader (the rulers of the respective Germanic tribes) and who, in return, were richly provided for by their leader. In the mainstream CECC cultures (for the CECC had been somewhat watered down during the Germanic tribes' wanderings) this fealty unto death was quite literal: Not only was it culturally impossible for a member of a ruler's comitatus to survive a battle in which the ruler was killed, but even if the ruler died of natural causes, his comitatus would be buried together with him, so that they could continue to serve and protect him in the afterlife. Such burials have been found from the Yellow Valley in China to western Europe, and Beckwith finds evidence of such comitati nearly everywhere. An associated point I hadn't appreciated before: The Arabs are not part of the CECC, but during the Islamic conquest of Persia and Central Asia, leading Arab generals adopted at least some of the CECC traits; for example, they returned to Damascus and Baghdad with their own comitati.

(***) Signs of emendations to the text due to the refereeing process are actually visible.

(4*) Zoroaster's dates are famously uncertain, and Beckwith argues against the currently standard dating of the Avesta, so Persia might have to be added to this list. Beckwith's assertions about the Avesta are among the most radical and hence controversial in this book.

[Dmitri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Make no mistake, this is an academic treatise. Beckwith explains in his preface he intended to write "an informed but readable essay for a general audience". His goal was to minimize notes and avoid chronology yet his pedagogical instincts got the better of him. The result is a book that a lay person can follow only with patience and commitment and the 320 page text extends to 480 pages. He writes "it has been said" and the footnotes lead to quotes of his own.

The theme advanced is that images of raiding hordes came from hostile sources and are an incomplete picture. Through the ages the region hosted agriculture, thriving commercial trade and cross cultural pollination. Great wealth was gained and knowledge from Greece to China exchanged. And yet casting coastal empires from the Yellow Sea, Indian Ocean and Mediterranean as 'peripheral' to the 'Central Eurasian Culture Complex' seems a stretch.

The idea Central Asian nomads in the Caucasus developed horse husbandry, families of language and migrated from Pacific to Atlantic and Arctic to Tropic is not new. William Jones and earlier linguists had suggested it since the mid 1600's. I once saw a dictionary map showing the spread of Indo-European languages and found further information impossible to resist. Called barbarians by the Greeks and Chinese, Central Asians were urbane and innovative.

The chariot was one secret to their success. Chariots were ridden from the Volga to the Indus, the Nile to the Yellow River. From 2100-1200 BC it was the super weapon of choice until javelin infantry and cavalry archers defeated them. Another cultural legacy was the comitatus, warriors sworn to live and die with their leader. If the head man was hit, the rest would get buried with him. This archetype lasted through the days of Genghis Khan in the 13th century.

Among Central Asians in the mid to late bronze age were the Scythians who helped advance European, Chinese and Indian civilizations. Early iron age Xinjiang and Tibet were then populated by Central Asians, until the Qin dynasty united China in 221 BC. Beckwith speculates the feared Xiongnu may have originated from proto Iranian mounted archers yet this theory seems sketchy. Even Japan's bushido are claimed as dubious derivatives of Central Asian warriors.

Beckwith continues to outline history across Eurasia for two millennia. It becomes an arduous task as he races towards the finish. The Roman and Chinese empires, Goths, Huns, Franks, Persians, Muslims, Turks, Mongols, and many more play cameo roles. Back and forth wars are waged in a Cliff's notes version of political and military history. It would be better if he had stayed with his original plan of a short 'French-style' essay. I'm not sure why he didn't.

Beckwith is a linguist who translates and teaches ancient tongues from Tokharian to Turkic. Things this old involve archaeology and DNA research, yet few recent findings are mentioned. Random critiques of modernism seem misplaced. Some find this book either too general or too specific. It does not achieve what it sets out to do, to clarify the Central Asian cultural contributions over three continents. Barbarians were sophisticated, but their story has yet to be told.

[Aroosha Dehghan · Rating 3 out of 5]

کلا بکویث خیلی دوست داره نظرات جنجالی مطرح کنه، برای همین خیلی وقت‌ها نظراتش پشتوانه قوی نداره. سند و مدرک و شاهد خاصی هم ارائه نمیده.
اگر پژوهشگر جدی تاریخ نیستید کتاب‌هاش رو پیشنهاد نمی‌کنم. می‌تونه گمراهتون کنه.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can’t remember what led me to this book. I often read history, but not generally sweeping histories like this, which generally sacrifice depth for breadth. All I know is that I picked it up and found myself hooked from the Preface on. Beckwith has a magisterial command of his material and moves easily from bird’s-eye to ground-level views without losing track of the broader story. He also offers up, here and there, amazing comments on the languages used in the cultures he’s discussing, which I, as a poet, find fascinating. I only hope I can do the book justice in the following comments.

Empires of the Silk Road follows the rise, development, and decline of the land-based network that at its height linked the Far East (Japan, China, Korea), Central Asia (from Tibet and India to Turkey), and Europe in the world’s first step toward globalized trade. This robust system thrived until an expansion of the ancient Mediterranean coastal trading system was expanded by Western Europeans into the “regular open-sea trade between Europe and South, Southeast, and East Asia” known as the Littoral System. Over time the Littoral System outperformed the Silk Road and spurred all kinds of technological developments that led to what some historians refer to as The Rise of the West. Beckwith traces this story all the way back to “the Indo-European diaspora”—mass migrations of proto-Indo-European speakers out of Central Asia, which began about 4,000 years ago. These migrations brought a new technology (the war chariot) and a new political idea (the comitatus) that proved crucial to the development of the Silk Road and its empires.

The war chariot and its effects alone are fascinating, but after all it was merely a technological innovation destined to be supplanted by other innovations. The comitatus as a political paradiagm, on the other hand, has proved more durable.

Essentially, the comitatus was a band of loyal warriors devoted to a single heroic lord, who compensated them through wealth, power, and social status. Members of a comitatus swore a blood oath that committed them to fight and die for their lord. If the lord died before his core comitatus members, they would commit ritual suicide and be buried with him in full battle regalia in order to fight on their lord’s behalf in the next world; sometimes, especially when a comitatus numbered in the hundreds, some less committed members would refuse suicide and end up being executed by the lord’s successor. This model shaped political structures across ancient Europe; the western, central, and eastern steppes; the Arabian peninsula; India, Tibet, China, Mongolia; and even down into Southeast Asia. In other words, the Eurasian Culture Complex united cultures that today seem neatly divided between West and East. The comitatus paradigm affected them all.

In fact, although beyond the scope of Beckwith’s book, clearly the comitatus is with us today. It exists in popular mythology (King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, for example), religion (Jesus and the Twelve Apostles, the Sahabah who supported the Prophet Muhammed), and in connection with any number of criminal organizations (the Japanese Yakuza, the Sicilian Mafia,). Even the bodyguards protecting members of the One Percent and the soldiers of fortune fielded by Academi (the former Blackwater) follow the comitatus model. Of course, these are my associations, not Beckwith’s!

As we follow Beckwith through the development of the Littoral System and its withering impact on the Silk Road, we also see that the roots of colonialism’s brutality reach all the way back to the rise of the Eurasian empires. With the advent of world religions—Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and their various subsets—Eurasian empires began adopting particular religions: Buddhism in Tibet and China; Christianity in Europe; Islam in Central Eurasia, the Arabian Peninsula, and much of North Africa. These choices had the effect of unifying each Empire from the ground up and projecting the glorious afterlife promised by the comitatus paradigm onto all the people in a given empire.

One outcome of this shift was the creation of our modern notion of “barbarians.” Eurocentric historians, sons and daughters of the Littoral System, have long portrayed Central Eurasians as “fierce and cruel natural warriors” whose “nomads’ life-style left them poor, because their production was insufficient for their needs.” As a result, Central Eurasians “robbed the rich peripheral agricultural peoples to get what they needed and wanted.” What Beckwith demonstrates, in wonderful detail, is that every element of this portrait is wrong. The “barbarians” were (and are) no more naturally warlike than other peoples; they were certainly not poor (in fact, they were generally much better off than their agriculturalist neighbors), their trading skills being more than sufficient to provide for their needs. (One startling fact supporting this view is that the Great Wall of China was expanded under the Ming Dynasty not to keep “barbarians” out but to keep the poverty-stricken agriculturalists of that area in.) In establishing the Littoral System, the colonialist West initiated war after brutal war while driving the native populations of their colonies into miserable poverty. Only by blaming their victims’ “barbarity” could the European kingdoms and nation states excuse their own.

Eloquent as Beckwith is in his defense of the cultures that developed from the Central Eurasian Complex, when he gets to the modern period his argument collapses, as often happens when historians try to account for a contemporary condition. The condition Beckwith critiques—attacks would be a better word—is what he calls “Modernism.” His argument hinges on the following definition: “The core idea of Modernism is simple, and seems harmless enough by itself: what is modern—new and fashionable—is better than what it replaces.” This attitude wasn’t a problem, he writes, “as long as classicism (or the idea that what is old is better than what is new) still acted as a counterweight.... But the classical and aristocratic became identified became identified with each other in opposition to the modern and nonaristocratic, along with the spread of industrialization and urbanization, when nonaristocratic people doing modern industrial, urban things came to dominate Europe, North America, and eventually much of the rest of Eurasia.” The whiff of elitism here is unmistakable, along with nostalgia for the comforts of the political structures destroyed in the last century’s two great wars and the eruptions that Beckwith calls “radical Modernist revolutions.”

Once he has identified Modernism with revolutions, Beckwith proceeds to trash Modernism in the arts—specifically music (Stravinsky, Webern, rock-’n’-roll), painting (Picasso and Pollack), and literature, especially the poetry of Pound and Eliot. Most heinous of all, in Beckwith’s view, is that Modernism—“not so much a philosophy or movement as a total world-view”—begat Postmodernism, a form of “hyper-Modernism” that he believes has destroyed all traditional intellectual values. He is especially distressed that Modernism has spread to Central Eurasia. “In [post-WWII] Europe,” he writes, “Paris is still characterized by its beautiful old traditional architecture, and the libraries and museums are full. [..] In Central Eurasia, by contrast, only a few famous monuments were not destroyed, and only a tiny percentage of the once vast number of old books was preserved. By the end of the twentieth century, the evil done in the name of Modernism and ‘progress’ left Central Eurasians bereft of much of their past.”

By “the evil done in the name of Modernism” Beckwith means primarily Stalin and Mao, although he cites the Iranian revolution’s deposition of the Shah and other similar events as well. For some reason, even though the book’s index has a “Modernism, in Germany” entry, the text it refers to never explicitly links Hitler with Modernism. This failure doesn’t indicate fascist sympathies; instead, it shows Beckwith glossing over a flaw in his argument about Modernism. Unlike the “all things new,” future-oriented totalitarianism of Stalin and Mao, Hitler’s revolution was a backward-looking fantasy, a pathological attempt to recreate the past. In fact, its was the clearly Modernist Weimar Republic Hitler had to crush in order to attempt his reestablishment of the Third Reich. Why would Beckwith, every inch the honest scholar, dodge this issue? My guess is that he does not want to admit that the Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were perhaps the last gasp of the ancient Central Eurasian Complex paradigm: each was a “lord” served by a suicidal comitatus; each used his “lordly” status to build an empire, just as every Central Eurasian warlord had attempted to do since the beginning of the proto-Indo-European diaspora. If Beckwith were to acknowledge the persistence of the comitatus idea, he might see Modernism for what it is: a visceral and intellectual reaction to the collapse of the paradigm which for 4,000 years had grounded the psycho-spiritual lives of people within the Central Eurasian Culture Complex.

I will admit that Beckwith’s critique of Modernism is persuasive in parts, and I haven’t given it the attention it deserves. In any case, his remedy—a call for “artists, musicians, and poets ... to focus their minds on the creation of a new high art tradition”—hearkens to the utterly discredited hierarchies rooted in the lord/comitatus paradigm. This paradigm consists now of nothing but vestiges. Modernism recognizes this, though some Modernists lament while others celebrate. Eliot and Pound, at whom Beckwith sneers more than once, are among the lamenters, looking to the past for their values, enamored of fascism (Pound in particular found inspiration in the 15th century poet and warlord Sigismundo Malatesta, whose image he loonily projected upon the strutting pagliaccio Benito Mussolini), and devoted nevertheless to “the new” in verse; among the celebratory Modernists were Walt Whitman (yes, I would argue for Whitman as the first English language Modernist), William Carlos Williams, and e. e. cummings. What a shame it would be to throw out all these poets and their fellows in music and visual art, all in the name of “Make It Old!”

Now, I will say that Beckwith is right that no one has yet figured out how to critique Modernism from the outside. That needs to happen. And yes, the stranglehold that Modernism’s bastard child, Postmodernism, has developed in the Academy needs to be broken. In fact, in his Introduction Beckwith mounts a succinct, powerful attack on Postmodernism that he can’t seem to match in his attacks on Modernism:

History is only opinion. Therefore, no valid judgments can be made. We cannot know what happened or why, but can only guess at the modern motivations for the modern “construction of identity” of a nation, the nationalistic polemics of anti-intellectuals and nonscholars, and so on. All manuscripts are equally valuable, so it is a waste of time to edit them—or worse, they are said to be important mainly for the information they reveal about their scribes and their cultural milieux, so producing critical editions of them eliminates this valuable information. Besides, we cannot know what any author really intended to say anyway, so there is no point in even trying to find out what he or she actually wrote. Art is whatever anyone claims to be art. No ranking of it is possible. There is no good art or bad art; all is only opinion. Therefore it is impossible, formally, to improve art; one can only change it. Unfortunately, obligatory constant change, and the elimination of all criteria, necessarily equals or produces stasis: no real change. The same applies to politics, in which the Modern “democratic” system allows only superficial change and thus produces stasis. Because no valid judgments can be made by humans—all human judgments are opinions only—all data must be equal. (As a consequence, Postmodernists��� judgment about the invalidity of judgments must also be invalid, but the idea of criticizing Postmodernist dogma does not seem to be popular among them.) In accordance with the Postmodernist view, there is only a choice between religious belief in whatever one is told (i.e., suspension of disbelief) or total skepticism (suspension of both belief and disbelief). In both cases, the result, if followed resolutely to the logical extreme, is cessation of thought, or at least elimination of even the possibility of critical thought. If the vast majority of people, who are capable only of the former choice (total belief), are joined by intellectuals and artists, all agreeing to abandon reason, the result will be an age of credulity, repression, and terror that will put all earlier ones to shame.

All this, I think, is undeniable, and does not at all understate what’s at stake. On the other hand, while Postmodernism is indeed dangerous, it is nothing like the hyper-Islamism of Al-Qaeda, the hyper-Christianism of the Christian Identity movement, the hyper-Judaism of Kahane Chai, or the hyper-New Ageism of Aum Shinrikyo—none of which can be described as “rooted in Modernism.” But the truth is, Postmodernism excuses these bizarre and deadly hyper-groups when it pretends that reason isn’t preferable to unreason and that all values are equal.

Ultimately, Empires of the Silk Road is brilliant history because of Beckwith’s commitment to reason, his openness to evidence, and his profound respect for the cultures he studies. I think that someday this book is bound to be recognized as a classic.

[Adam Calhoun · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although interesting at times, this book is not quite what it sets itself out to be. Rather than a history of Central Eurasia per se, it is actually a history of ALL of Eurasia, with a slight focus on the central bit, spanning the bronze age to the present. If that seems rather broad, well, it is. Beckwith does a good job laying out the importance of Central Eurasia to world history, and I definitely came away with a better understanding of the region and its connections to the rest of the globe. Instead of a hole in the map, I now think of an important node that not only connects East and West, but a region that has its own distinct cultures and happenings that forced East and West to react to IT.

Unfortunately, the book gets bogged down in its breadth and Beckwith's enemies, which are apparently numerous. Did we really need a huge section on the ills of the Modernist art movement? And how many times do we have to hear about how terrible China is? But its really how far it stretches that does the book in. His definition of Central Eurasian cultures seems a bit broad, especially when he starts encompassing regions as diffuse as Ukraine, Tibet, and India. But perhaps that's the accepted definition; I don't know. Regardless, the book could have used a lot more focus. I came away appreciative of Central Eurasia but hardly knowledgeable.

[Katia N · Rating 3 out of 5]

Firstly I need to say that i am not a professional historian. I have a great interest in this region simply because it constitutes a gap in my understanding of the history of the world. Also there are not many books available in english to fill it. This region is often treated as a part of Middle East, which creates additional problems for any person intrested to know more about. Therefore this review is written from the perspective a curious reader not weathered professional historian.

I was driven to this book after reading "The Silk Road" by Peter Frankopan. Which I found well written, but not very relevant. This book on the contrast is much more relevant, scholarly, but sometimes quite difficult to get through. In spite of this, I learned quite a few things, especially in respect of the historical reasons (according to the author) of the current state of the region. The most interesting part of the book was about the ancient period of history up to 15th century.

I appreciate the author trying to give much more balanced view on the history compared to the recounts when the nomad tribes considered as a "barbarians" vs settled "civilised" societies of the period. However, I think this book is almost unbalanced into other direction: big chunks of it are written in defence of the "barbarians". But some negative facts are not considered in sufficient details. For example, a sacking of the cities and killing off almost all the population indiscriminately were used like a legible tactic (eg Baghdad by the Mongols). Also it is unclear from the book whether those tribes had developed its own literacy.

But my main criticism of this book is that nearly the quarter of it is devoted to the author's rant against Modernism. There are a lot of definitions of modernism in the book. But according to the author it is an overwhelming evil. It created Russian revolution, Chinese Modernisation, Hitler and you name it. Neither TS Eliot, no Stravinskiy is spared in the process of this long and angry rant.

The author takes lots of time and space philosophizing whether Modernism is real art, and compares the old day to the current situation:

"Life undoubtfully has always been difficult for creative people, but it used to be that there was a fairly foxed socioeconomic slot for artists and artisants, because the aristocrats needed them. The aristocrats, bad as they sometimes might have been in reality or in practice, represented an ideal, not only something people could look up to but something the aristocrats expected of themseleves, too. Looking upward, they demanded perfection or as close to it as they could get, so they hired the best artistists to produce it, and those working for them tried their best to achieve it. If artists were not looking up and doing their best to serve God, they were doing their best to serve men they thought were "better"; it had nothing to do with the Church or the aristocrats really were somehow better. Trying to upend things, so the basest type of man above the others, cannot actually replace the old order - no one can look up to someone who is by definition as low as can be - so the result is elimination of order itself. Today the artist socioeconomic slot not longer exist, and nothing has really replaced it. But the entire purpose of art or goal of art is largely gone anyway. The total victory of Modernism meant consciences rejection of the traditional values of Reason, artistic order, and Beauty."

This is just an example how far it goes from the Central Asian history. If it would be written by some post revolutionary offended Russian exile a century ago, I would totally sympathise. But to generalise so grossly at the beginning of the 21th century looks simply ridiculous and even unfair. And it is not relevant for me as a reader.

[Omar Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great Book. I wont bother with a review because Razib wrote a very good one in 2009. See it here: http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/09/whos...
I learned more new things than i learn in most 500 page books. The writing is occasionally clunky and you have to stop and figure out where you are sometimes, but there is just so much information packed into it!
It ends with a long angry screed against modernism. Wow. This man is upset! but the book makes you rethink many lazy assumptions and makes you want to read much more. So definitely worth reading. Razib's review pretty much covers my thoughts (and more).

[Lee Broderick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had the good fortune to discuss this book with one of the author's colleagues while I was reading it. He informed me of two criticisms commonly levelled at it: the first is that it is over-reliant on the Chinese sources when, thanks to the author's command of several other languages, there is no need for it to be. I would not have known that without our conversation. The second common criticism was immediately apparent to me: a complete failure to include any archaeological evidence (of which there is an increasing ammount) in his narrative.

I used the word "narrative" deliberately: this is a grand narrative, in the full sense of traditional history writing. It does, in addition to its historical sources, make much use of linguistic resarch and places Central Asia quite properly at the centre of Eurasian culture and commerce. As anyone even vaguely familiar with European or Asian history will know, this is an idea that has been neglected for a considerable amount of time - for most of modern scholarship in fact - and this book occupies an exalted position amongst a growing library of work which seeks to rehabilitate the region in world history.

Where the book takes a strictly chronological structure, it begins to unravel in the penultimate chapter, covering the twentieth century. Here, the author's occasional political preaching (apparent at points throughout the text) is allowed to take over in his treatment of the twentieth century and develops into a bizarre, and somewhat out of place, rant against Modernism. This is then developed in the final chapter which looks to see what the future may hold for Central Asia, surely an unwise inclusion for any historian?

Just when the book appears to be at its most peculiar and infuriting though, a lengthy epilogue is included, summarising our knowledge of Central Eurasian history. This epilogue is worth the price of the book alone and should be required reading for any Central Asianist, containing some very useful ideas and reviews.

[Rindis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Late last year, I picked this book up, as it looked very interesting.

And it is, I highly recommend it as an extremely well done history of a part of the world that most people just don't know about from pre-history to the current date.

But—this book is not for the faint of heart. If you want some light informative reading, you will find the book overwhelming.

This especially holds true in the prologue and first two chapters of the book, where the footnotes and endnote references fly thick and furious. With all the flipping back and forth, and integrating the three different bits of text together, it can take over a quarter hour to get through two pages.

The reason for this is that for the early parts of the book, Beckwith is an expert holding forth on the more obscure parts of his field of expertise. He is well aware that almost everything he has to talk about hinges on specialized knowledge, and the footnotes and endnotes contain clarifications, and when he argues against the conventional interpretation, the general line of logic that leads to his conclusion.

That said, he does make some assumptions of knowledge. If you don't know about linguistic reconstruction (and I'm lucky that I've run across it before), you'll be wondering just what he's talking about at many points, and what all those stars in front of words mean (which is a symbol for deduced, but not attested form of a word). As it is, many of the notes, and all of Appendix B, go pretty heavily into the field, and there are pronunciation glyphs I've never seen before.

Speaking of Appendixes, there are two of them, to go with voluminous endnotes, a Prologue, and a Epilogue. Appendix B goes into the reconstruction of the names of various peoples from Chinese sources, working out likely earlier forms of the names, and where those names can be equated with names in non-Chinese sources. Appendix A goes into his reconstruction of the initial diaspora of the Indo-European people, and the initial branching off of Proto-Indo-European into daughter families. I recommend reading it before Chapter 1, and Appendix B before Chapter 2, as they are heavily referenced in those sections. The Prologue is concerned with the "First Story", which is a story cycle common to many Indo-European cultures (including the Romans) as a hero/foundation myth. The Epilogue is about the concept of 'barbarians' and how the modern conception of such is not only inappropriate to an understanding of the peoples of Central Eurasia (as he takes pains to point out during the book), but is inappropriate to an understanding of the original term, and some of original sources, but is especially inappropriate to use with Chinese sources, where several different terms for 'foreigner' that have little or no pejorative implications, are usually translated into English as 'a kind of barbarian'.

The main part of the book is a history of Central Eurasia, or, more properly, the "Central Eurasian Culture Complex". This history is delineated by broad cultural borders that change over time, not geographical ones.

I have to admit that there are large sections of the book where I am an unarmed man against some of his assertions. In general, I think his construction of pre- and early history are sound, but I don't know enough to raise many objections. My main problem is that he seems to be a bit too strong of a Diffusionist for my tastes, asserting that the chariot was only invented by the Indo-Europeans, and allowed them to impose themselves on the various peripheral cultures.

The bulk of his book spends some time pointing the importance of trade, and the fact it is generally the peripheral civilizations that try to restrict trade, and the Central Eurasian civilizations often attack with the stated demand of opening up trade again. The Age of Exploration is looked in the light of one trade system (the Silk Road) being replaced by another (the Littoral System), with the current backwardness of the area resulting from the collapse of trade in the area.

The last couple chapters turn into a screed against Modernism. Again, I'm largely mentally unarmed against his assertions, but I judge he paints with entirely too broad a brush. He sees Modernism not just as a new movement that overthrew previous traditions, but as a movement that relies on overthrowing the old, and therefore has led intellectual life down the blind alley of continual revolution without trying to move forward with the results of any of those revolutions. He then ties that into to efforts of "Modernist" regimes to destroy the cultural past (as examples, the Soviet efforts to destroy religious community and the Taliban's destruction of Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan).

Again, I do highly recommend the book. I have some potential problems with it, but it is far more important than those problems. I would certainly like to hear from people who can talk to my concerns better than I can, but in the end it's biases are fairly clear, and the value of a history that ties together the events of such a large area ranks very high, also the bulk of the most interesting points of the book have not been touched on by me here. Finally, the notes do a valuable service in pointing out places where further scholarly study are desperately needed, and I hope that some of these gaps are directly addressed in the future.

[Gordon Goodwin · Rating 1 out of 5]

On multiple occasions he goes on bizarre right-wing rants about the evils of Modernism and bizarre apologia for the Iranian monarchy. Seemingly out of touch with most of the modern developments in silk road (or lack thereof) historiography.

[Adrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Empires of the Silk Road is a scholarly, well researched book on the history of Central Asia, China, Europe and the Far East. As such, this is perhaps the strongest criticism I have of the work, namely that in purchasing it I was expecting a more specialized study of Central Asia, rather than Europe and China, areas I have previously studied.
In defense of this possible inconsistency, the histories of Central Asia, Europe and China are remarkably intertwined, especially when one considers the European invasions of Attila and the Mongol Conquests of the Middle Ages. However, a detailed history of the first and second world wars in the latter part of the book was somewhat unnecessary, and perhaps more attention could have been given to Central Asia.
For it's strengths, though, Empires of the Silk Road does break from conventional history in deconstructing stereotypes of Central Asian nomads, particularly the Mongols, portraying them not as barbarians (a term the author deconstructs at great length toward the conclusion of the book) but rather as traders like all other civilizations, whose main purpose in conquest was to break down the barriers to trade, an objective of most Empire builders throughout history.
Beckwith offers great examples of how traditionally vilified conquerors such as Attila, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane were no more brutal than the subjects they conquered, and no more uncouth than what are considered the greater civilizations, such as the Chinese.
The main strengths of the book are the focus on the Mongol Conquests, and later Tamerlane, and the conclusion of the book offers a great insight into the cultural destruction of central Asian cultures in the 20th century, namely the Tibetans, and the Central Asian constituents of the former Soviet Union. Within the conclusion, Beckwith demonstrates an adept understanding of modernism and post modernism, and analyzes art and culture with an interesting nostalgic bent, which may be discerned by some to be bias, but nonetheless offers a decent perspective on both art and culture.
On the whole, there is much to be learned within this volume, though those already versed in European and Chinese history may find the focus on these areas a little too familiar. Nonetheless, it is a book worth digesting in it's whole and complete form, and the insight into Central Asia is there, even if there are what some may consider to be unnecessary digressions.

[Miglė · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gera, nors ir kiek šališka, istorinė knyga, kurios pabaiga mane labai nuliūdino. Bet, sakyčiau, vis tiek verta paskaityti.
Parašysiu, kas mano nuomone, buvo ten gerai, o kas blogai.

Knyga yra MONUMENTALI vien savo apimtimi. Pasakojant Centrinės Azijos istoriją įtraukiama ir Kinijos istorija, ir arabų dinastijos, ir Vakarų Europos įvykiai - nieko nuostabaus, jei nori apimti procesus, kurie darė poveikį Centrinės Azijos istorijai (ir atvirkščiai), reikia įtraukti ir kaimynines valstybes / imperijas / konfederacijas.
• GERAI tai, kad tikrai daug sužinojau. Skaičiau, pasibraukinėjau ir gėriau į save informaciją kaip jūros agurkas. Sužinojau apie Jurchen imperiją, kitanius, tangutus ir kitus, turėjusius milžinišką poveikį istorijoje, bet man kažkodėl visai iki tol nežinotus.
• BLOGAI tai, kad kiekviename skyrelyje pasakojama labai platus tautų ir imperijų judėjimas, bet žemėlapiai pateikiami tik du ir tik knygos gale. Kodėl gi nepadarius žemėlapio prie kiekvieno skyrelio, kad būtų geriau įsivaizduoti, kas ten dėjosi?

Autorius pateikia daug įdomios informacijos ir gal netgi bando būti nešališkas, bet iš tikrųjų tai labai matosi, ką jis mėgsta, o ko nemėgsta, o nemėgsta jis kinų.
• GERAI tai, kad kai pagalvoji, didelė dalis istorijos yra šališka (pvz Europocentrinė istorija, kurią mokėmės mokykloje). Todėl tas šališkumas nelabai ir trukdo, kai pateikiamas iš kitos pusės. O kodėl gi neįsivaizdavus istorijos, kur CA "barbarai" yra normalūs faini pirkliai, o Europa ir Kinija - plėšrūnai?
• BLOGAI: Nu bet ir užsisėdo jis ant tų kinų, gaila, kad biškį ir sveikas protas nukenčia. Kinų kalba - indoeuropiečių? Bitch please. Jiems pastoviai prirašinėjamos blogiausios intencijos, o CA imperijoms - geriausios. Pvz: "Although Ghadan appears to have had no intention of threatening China, and continued to behave as a peaceful neighbour, when he moved eastward along the Kerulen River and then southeast toward Jehol, he is said to have been positioned to attack Peking. However, he was actually so far away..." etc. Ko tu taip gini Ghadaną, autoriau? Ar tikrai jau taip gerai žinai jo intencijas? A?

CA imperijų pagrindinė intencija ir išsilaikymo pagrindas buvo prekyba - sako autorius. Ir labai daug istorinių procesų aiškina būtent ekonominiais veiksniais.
• GERAI: tas yra įdomu ir dažnai (bent jau man) negirdėta. Gali pritarti, gali nepritarti, bet faina išgirsti tokį aiškinimą. Pvz Islamo atsiradimą aiškina išsiplėtusia Bizantijos įtaka pietuosna, kur trukdė arabų genčių prekybos keliams, todėl arabams prireikė kažkokio susivienijimo, todėl atsirado ir taip išpopuliarėjo islamas.
Ištobulėjus laivybai europiečiai ėmė brautis į Aziją ir kurtis pakrantės miestuose, kurie tradiciškai CA imperijų būdavo gana apleisti ir nelabai svarbūs. Taigi išaugo Europos prekyba regione, taigi ir įtaka ir prasidėjo kolonizavimas.
• BLOGAS ir labiausiai mane nuliūdinęs dalykas - priėjęs XX amžiaus istoiją autorius kažkodėl atsisako taip gerai iki tol veikusio ekonominio aiškinimo ir pradeda visas to amžiaus bėdas aiškinti kažkokia mįslinga idėjine konstrukcija vardu Modernizmas. Tas Modernizmas neva kaltas ir dėl stalinistinio teroro, ir dėl Tibeto okupacijos ir, kas durniausia, dėl menų "nunykimo". Kažkodėl jisai nusprendė įdėti net du skyrelius apie tai, kaip modernizmas sunaikino meną, pvz: "Modern poets stripped poetry of its elite status in relation to prose: free verse, a thinly disguised form of prose that anyone could write and was therefore accessible to anyone, replaced poetry." Net nepasakosiu, ką jis mano apie modernizmą dailėje. Šitą vietą man buvo net ne pikta, o liūdna skaityti, nes jaučiausi lyg diskutuočiau bare su draugeliu, su kuriuo ne visada sutinku, bet gerbiu jo nuomonę, o draugelis prigėręs šotukų pradėtų staiga šnekėti visiškas nesąmones, man tuo metu bandant įtikinti save, kad tai ne mano draugelis, o šotukai kalba.

Apskritai labai vertinga knyga iki pat XX amžiaus, bet patarčiau paskutinių skyrelių neskaityti - vis tiek visi jau žinom tą XX a. istoriją, nieko neprarasim.

BONUS: man žiauriai patiko sogdai! Tokie CA pirkliai - pilkieji kardinolai, kurie plotino prieš Umajadus ir įsteigė Abasidų dinastiją arabų imperijoj ir beveik tuo pat metu su An Lu-Shan plotino prieš Tangų dinastiją Kinijoje. Be to, jie nešiojo juokingas kepurėles.

[Mihai Pop · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was an incredible ride in the steps of the mostly unknown history of the non-littoral Eurasia, what gets equated with Central Eurasia in the book. The history presented is just a outline, a summary, an introduction, to what probably must have been tens of history tomes, with a lots of additional reading. In this sense, the book seems to me to be quite authoritative and a delight to delve into.
There are a few views which even if one agrees with, they don't really seem to fully add value to the book, namely the views over how modernism affects our current views over beauty, and the overused and wrongly-used concept of barbarian/barbarism.
All in all, it was a highly interesting read, one which I would highly recommend as it did enlarge my views over how the world cultures came into being.

[Spencer Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mostly decent, but for some reason the author kept going on off-topic rants about "modern art" and how it has ruined all things beautiful and is a failed experiment, then tried to tie that in to bronze age turkistan 🤷‍♂️

[Eressea]

弄本電書來比較會看

[Joanna Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first 2/3 of the book is basically a high speed ride through 4000 years of rising and falling civilizations in the Eurasian area. I was already familiar with many of them, so it really helped them to put them in their proper chronological places, although it was a long slog that basically consisted of dates, places and wars with few stories.
Strong argument against the view of central Eurasian peoples as barbarians, and the silk road as a pipeline that only picked up things of value at each end.

Last 1/3 was a seemingly disconnected rant against modernism that seemed unrelated to the main topic. Definitely took my rating down and the book would’ve been better without it. Furthermore, the analysis of the last hundred years and the prognosis for the future was seemingly biased, and lacking evidentiary support.

[ConfusedMagpie · Rating 2 out of 5]

While i found the topic super interesting and I did learn some, this book is such a mess I could not recommend it. It fails as an introduction, since it barely describes peoples or places I was not at all familiar with (and I have been a History fan reading academic texts for a long time).

It fails as an in depth look at the empires of central asia, as the author constantly goes into very long tangents about topics that have absolutely nothing to do with them, and relegates them constantly tot he background.

It fails as an eagle’s view kind of book as well, since the cultures it describes are sometimes not even organized chronologically or geographically, so one finds oneself jumping in time and place in a way that renders a lot of this book very difficult to follow.

I guess this ine goes into this year’s huge pile of books I really wanted to be into but was incapable to enjoy.

Also there is a super long and random old man yells at cloud rant against modern art that clearly the author was desesperate to put somewhere. How does that relate to empires of Central Asia? Dont ask me.

[Larrycarlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent history, not just another retelling. The focus is on the history of the peoples of Central Eurasia and their interaction with the "peripheral" countries such as China and France. The story starts far back in early prehistoric times with the proto-indo-europeans and comes up to the 21st century. And it's clear that Beckwith sees the large picture.
That said, there is a strange interlude, near the end, trashing Modernism. It's strange for several reasons. First, it's only losely connected to Central Euroasia and it's recent decline. It seems that Modernism is responsible, not the growth of the Littoral System which brought trade routes to coastal regions via international shipping.
Second, it's not clear what, and who, Beckwith considers Modern. And third it barely discusses the impact of commercialism on art and culture.
But the discussion on Modernism is food for thought. And as such, it fits in with this informed discussion of the peoples who were largely responsible for international trade for 3 millenia.

[Simon Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book of two halves this one in terms of both content and quality. The first half is a narrative history of Eurasia, with a focus on central Eurasia, heartland of the Silk Road. This was excellent, in particular the early chapters dealing with the Indo-European migrations. The second half of the book which discusses the rise and fall of the Silk Road empires and the reasons for their demise suffers a little from an excess of bias which presents them largely as victims and on occasion the author labours a particular point ad nauseum. Nevertheless the arguments are interesting even though I remained slightly unconvinced that the likes of the Huns or the Mongols were primarily motivated by a desire for peaceful trade. Well worth reading for an overview of the subject and in order to get a viewpoint which challenges the mainstream.

[Daniel Macgregor · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good beginning, providing overarching history of central Asia and its people, but end took a left turn right into how post-modernism that felt like the author taking the whole book off the rails and into some surprise personal vendetta.

[Joshua Buhs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange, for good and ill.

As the subtitle has it, Beckwith wants to present a story of Central Eurasia since the beginning of history. That's a lot to do in less than 400 pages (if you take out the appendices, back matter, and account for their being three different versions of introductions: preface, introduction, and prologue.) It's a very interesting way to take a bite out of history.

Central Eurasia, as he defines it, has shifting boundaries, but might be thought of as everything from Central Europe to China, Siberia to the Persian Gulf. In much historical writing, Beckwith notes, this area is either ignored or marked off as the home of barbarians--thieves and nomads that preyed on the more advanced civilizations as they tried to conduct trade over what came to be known as the Silk Road: really a ramifying series of arteries that ran through the region. Beckwith is not down with this idea of the region and sets out to turn our historical notions on their head.

Which is the way that this book is strange in a good way: it tells history from an unusual perspective and so we get a new way of looking at the world, and the past. In this story, Central Eurasia is not the periphery, but the center--the heart--while Europe and China and Rome--these are the peripheries. From this vantage, history looks different and evergreen historical questions have new answers.

Beckwith starts by defining what he calls the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex, which, he says, dominated the two continents for 4,000. Key to this complex is the idea of the comitatus: that around a strong warrior would coalesce a band of other warriors who pledged their allegiance, even unto killing themselves should their leader himself die. The comitatus valorized the throwing over of existing regimes and the conquering of all four directions. To afford these comitatuses, strong warriors needed goods--and so they valorized trade, too. The region, then, was not a hodge-podge of ethnolinguistic tribes, but solid social organizations that greased the wheel of trade. Large cities were build along the way, and there was a connection between these cities, the surrounding rural areas and the far-flung nomads who engaged in trade. This was an area of civilization and it survived best when trade moved easily--or as easily as possible given the rigors of the passage.

This cultural complex, Beckwith argues, spread through the region in three waves, the most important being from 2,000 to 1,000 BC. In each case, the origin was near the Caucuses and involved the proto-Indo European peoples. Beckwith is at pains to explain that languages developed as the people spread out and inner-mingled with natives, creating new creoles, not--as some scholars apparently have it--developing within central region and then spreading. Early on, these people also had a technological advantage, having developed the chariot. They often became mercenaries for groups on the periphery, eventually taking over those areas. Early on, Iranian peoples, as he calls them, controlled much of Central Eurasia. Later it was the Scythians, who came from a bit further north.

Under both the Iranians and the Scythians, trade flourished across the continent, though as a daisy chain, with middle men, rather than any one person making his or her way across the entire route. (And her is necessary, because early on, at least, there were female warriors.)

The book starts to become burdensome by about the third official chapter, with endless recountings of one empire defeating another, most of them with names you've never heard of. This problem recurs throughout the book, as Beckwith has a lot of trouble judging what is important to his narrative and what is not--which leads to some of the not so good strange aspects of the history.

With the Fall of China and Rome's high civilization occurring at about the same time, there was a vas movement of people from the north of Central Eurasia south. This included the Goths and the Huns. Beckwith is unconvinced that these migrations had anything to to do with the fall of the two classical civilizations--those collapsed due to internal reasons. And the northern people moved according to their own whims and battles--the Huns, for example, chasing the Goths, with whom they were at war. The proto-Japanese made their way to those islands via Korea, brining with them the same central eurasian cultural complex that was then dominant in Europe: Beckwith doesn't make the point, but he is explaining why both Japan and Europe developed feudalism--another way the strangeness of the book serves to make history look fresh.

A Turk empire then arose, from the Eastern Steppes, uniting Central Eurasia and bringing trade and riches to the region. On the periphery, the T'ang Dynasty in China tried to recreate classical civilization; meanwhile, Eastern Rome and Persia were at war, disrupting the balance of power--which brings up one of the good strangenesses of the book: Beckwith reads the rise of Islam as a response to this political situation. Mohammed's radical solution to the problem of Eastern Rome an Persia was to unite all of Arabia under a single religion. (This may be a standard interpretation, but it was the first time I heard it, and it fit really nicely with his thesis.)

A series of revolutions across the region in the 700s brought drastic changes: the new empires became associated with particular religions, Mannichaeism, Christinaity, Islam, Buddhism, and others. The religions, based on written texts, increased literacy. (Religion also put a stop to the comitatus committing suicide when their leaders died.) Buddhists started colleges, which the Muslims copied. Arabic Muslims, having moved to Baghdad from the north, began translating Greek (and to a lesser extent Indian) texts, sparking an interest in science, which was fed by the libraries that dotted the urban areas spread over Central Eurasia.

A recession of unknown causes in the 800 slowed this work; when the recovery came, there was more focus on religion, less on philosophy and science. Because the states were mostly small, however, scholars persecuted in one area could move elsewhere to continue their work, and there started to be the movement of Arabic learning into Europe: Arabic numerals, algebra, algorithms, and rediscovered Greek writings.

These trends were consolidated with the coming of the Mongols and Genghis Khan, who unified Central Eurasia, assuring continental trade again, and becoming rich on taxes. There was a Renaissance across the region, not just in Europe, but in Buddhist and Islamic lands, too. Beckwith, whose main speciality is Tibet, argues that Tibetan became the lingua Franca of Asia--the Latin equivalent. This was an important moment, but not pivotal: more of a restoration of what Central Eurasia could be: indeed, the best it could be. It's clear that Beckwith's sympathies are with this age.

The pivot comes in the fifteenth century, when Spain and Portugal pioneer trade routes along the sea, challenging the powers that controlled the continental rut (and the merchants, too). Russia, too, becomes an empire in this period, because of its connections to the open ocean. Over the next several centuries, the inland empires die and become backwards, as trade dries up and, finally, as Russia and China divide the region between themselves, closing the road completely.

This story--so far--connects to some other bits of history I have read. There's the obvious alliance with Guns Germs and Steel, for instance, the structure of the Eurasian continent allowing for trade from east to west and west to east--even if the movement of goods was never as easy or straightforward as Jared Diamond seemed to suggest. The book also provides something of an answer to the question of why the scientific revolution didn't happen in china: in large part, it did. It occurred across the entire continent. But China did not get the resources necessary for a technological jump forward because it did not discover (and plunder) the New World. That was the historical accident that allowed Europe to take the lead.

All that is good strangeness. But there's bad strangeness, too.

The book starts out with Beckwith blasting at postmodernism, which seems odd this late in the game. He affirms a universal human nature built around alpha-males. (blech!). (He also calls for more research into this history, which is reasonable, but, given the lack of sources and diversity of languages, really, really hard.)

That attack on postmodernism becomes more relevant as he winds up the book--because he doesn't just hate postmodernism. He really, really hates modernism in general, and the world that was built in the twentieth century (on European foundations dating back to the 18th). His view of modernism is not very developed--and is largely based on Adorno, which seems dated, too, but there it is. Modernism, he says, means permanent revolution, and it is the modernist ideology that is responsible for World War I and II, the Cold War, communism, fundamentalism, totalitarianism, and capitalism, all of which are predicated on valuing the new over the old and destroying traditions. Modernism killed Central Eurasia with its Soviet system, and continues to reek havoc even after many of the states have become independent, either through fundamentalist governments, or democratic ones that are really just covers for sociopathic greedheads.

All of which, up to a point, I guess I get. I even agree with him that fundamentalism is mostly a product of modernity. And that there's really no such thing as postmodernism--its just more modernism. (So when he was hating on postmodernism int he intro, he was really tipping his hand that he hates modernism altogether.) The 20th century was a bloody and horrific one in many ways.

But the argument seems very personal. (Incidentally, I'll note that in my experience it seems that Princeton University Press gives its authors more range for personal arguments than other academic presses. This is a feeling--I don't have numbers and wouldn't say it officially, but since no one is reading this far down, I might as well.) Beckwith spends an inordinate amount of time berating modern art--a big part of a chapter attacks Ezra Pound and T.S. Elliott as artistic dead-enders. He chirps about the death of classical music, and wonders why there is no more high art, even with so many more people producing art, just popular dross. This is a weird digression in a book that is already trying to explain 8,000 years of Asian history in 400 pages. The endnotes are weirder still, as he devotes one to speculating on how rock and roll music could become a high art by following in the tradition of Frank Zappa but sidestepping his atonal period. What this has to do with the Mongols is anybody's guess.

The book ends up in a comfortable enough place, though--a more standard historical argument. Where have all the barbarians gone?, is a historical question that Beckwith answers two ways, straightforwardly and implicitly. The straightforward answer is that they never existed: they were a creation of the imaginations of the peripheral peoples. And the Central Eurasia could become great again by unifying, a la the European Union, and promoting trade along its paths. The implicit answer is that we are the barbarians--we moderns with our lust for the new and our destruction of a once flourishing cultural area.

Probably, Beckwith had it right at the beginning. In his preface, he said he first planned to write a French-style essay, only lightly annotated. And the skeleton of that book is here, and is the best part. He never really argues for the existence of the central eurasian cultural context, nor does he explicitly argue the people of this region weren't raiders: he asserts those and goes on with the tale. If he just kept with the assertions and trimmed down all the various back and forths of the various empires, he could have had a trenchant little essay (well, 200 pages instead of 400) that unified his love of Central Eurasia with his hatred of modernism in a more stylistically integrated way. Oh well. You can still skim the book and find that argument.

[Riq Hoelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

With the dramatic DNA discovery that the ancient people living in the Tarim Basin were ANE rather than Indo-European speakers, this book seems surprisingly already somewhat out of date.

It's also a little bit wrong in its understanding of the difference between the Ostrogoths and Visigoths.

The book, supposedly about the Silk Road eras, goes on rather long, all the past the Cold War in fact. I guess it's okay if the author was willing to do the work, but it does make for rather a long read, more than the reader bargains for.

Perhaps the most objectionable part of this is that readers may miss some very important sections at the end:

- An attack on Modernism, here defined as newness purely for the sake of newness, and encompassing everything from government to the arts. It's hard not to sympathize with the view when one thinks about 20th century nationalism, twelve-tone serialism or where painting is now.
- A long essay of myth busting about the nature of barbarians (which however would have been strengthened by more concrete examples)
- The idea that all Indo-European daughter likes, such as Italian, or Greek, for example, are creoles. Essentially they are Indo-European as modified by the newly-colonized peoples.
- an explanation of some important historical words such as Ch'iang, Saka/Scythian/Sogdians and Tokharians/Yueh-Chih.

This very learned book is a good replacement for things like the outdated The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia by Grousset.

[Bryan Lovely · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent overview of several millenia of history of a region most of us don't think about much. He demonstrates that, contrary to our image of the steppe barbarian, the peoples of Central Eurasia from time immemorial have been a combination of nomad, farmer, and urbanite, and more interested in trade than in war.

He's... opinionated. In some ways that I like (e.g. rejection of postmodernism in history), and some ways that I don't (rejection of Pinyin transliteration of Chinese -- Wade-Giles is so hard to read anymore). And the next-to-last chapter, ostensibly concerning the 20th century, gets sidetracked into a rant against Modernism in not just politics but art, music, literature, education, etc., etc. Skim that one.

The rest is quite good though, and hits a lot of my intellectual buttons, like Indo-European origins and expansion, Old/Middle Chinese phonology, cross-cultural mythology, and so forth. And there's a lot of good information in the end notes, to which he directs you from the footnotes from time to time.

Other than the one chapter, I recommend it.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somehow this book was both very informative and frustrating. While authorial bias especially in history is par for the course, Beckwith's was obvious in a way that often took me right out of the book. The multi-page rants about Modernism without a peep on Central Asia itself were tiresome, and he really, really does not like the Chinese from a historical pov. Sometimes he makes a point and two pages later he contradicts that point with another.

That being said, it's clearly well researched and overall is a solid tome for a trajectory of Central Asia, but I do wish he had gone into some more detail about certain peoples - often times a name would be thrown around with an expectation of prior knowledge, when this book seems to be marketed as an introductory survey of the region. The emphasis on the realities of the Silk Road trade structure were a highlight, as well as the explanations for it's collapse and the partition of the region by outside powers (largely Russia and China), and those were the parts that left me wanting more.

[Dabao · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beckwith has done an impressive job of compiling and condensing the history of Central Eurasia into one readable book. Generally I found the information that was presented to contain the right level of detail, enough to paint a vivid picture of life in some of these empires but still maintaining the bigger picture. Yet, sometimes I missed a more prominent thread taking me through the histories and connecting the different chapters. But perhaps this book was never meant to be read in one go chronologically, but rather to be a reference work. Towards the end Beckwith does provide some summarizing remarks, and also gets into what seems more like a personal rant against modernism. Or perhaps this criticism is just how our present day civilization would have seemed through the eyes of an ancient horse archer.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok, so upon finishing the book, my reaction was "What the fuck is a polemic about modernism doing in a book ostensibly about the silk road?!? I get that you hate it, but I don't care that you hate modernism." So I gave it two stars. Overall, the book was better than that, but finishing with this tirade on modern art was so not what I signed up for when I got the book was frustrating to get through. That brought into focus the fact that the author had a few other axes to grind in this book so be aware, e.g., that he isn't exactly neutral vis-a-vis the subject central Asian peoples vs the ruling empires of the day (primarily Greece/Rome or China). He very much feels they've gotten a bad rap and it is his job in this book to set the record straight damn it!

Anyway, it was a book that w/3 stars meaning I liked it, I can say I liked most of it.

[LaMarx]

DNF
The author’s weird rant about postmodernism and modernism in the preface was odd and honestly jarring in comparison to the relatively good tone before that point. He just goes off the rails for a couple pages about these vague blobs he gestures at.

[Andres Felipe Contreras Buitrago · Rating 3 out of 5]

La verdad desde el siglo XVIII el libro se vuelve muy débil, además que toca muchos temas, que ya para una persona que sabe algo de historia, se vuelve repetitivo, poca profundidad en muchos apartados. Dicho lo anterior, el libro sí me decepcionó de cierta manera, en comparación con otros libros que tocan estos temas, esperaba más.

En la introducción el autor nos dice qué es lo que abarca Eurasia central, los pueblos que vivieron allí fueron importantes para el comercio mundial, estos mismos se movían por diferentes lugares, el problema es que ha habido una gran visión negativa hacia estos, si bien eran grandes guerreros en las sociedades sedentarias centrales también había grandes militares, los pueblos no más no eran tan pobres ya que también habían personas ricas y pobres, lo que quiere decir el autor con esto es que era una sociedad compleja como cualquier otra, llena de personas dinámicas y creativas que hicieron avances para las ciencias y la cultura.

Las primeras personas que habitaron Eurasia central fueron los proto indoeuropeos, estos comenzaron una gran migración que se basó en 3 oleadas, muchos de estos indoeuropeos se mezclaron con los locales a donde llegaban, ejemplo de ello fueron los hititas que llegaron a anatolia y empezaron a usar los carros de combate. En mitanni, también había guerreros y de europeos que trajeron los carros de combate y caballos, aunque estos posteriormente serían derrotados por los mismos hititas, en el norte de India igualmente llegaron estos pueblos, Por su parte en Grecia los micénicos trajeron los carros de combate y pertenecía a los indoeuropeos. En China también fueron estos los que trajeron los carros de combate y las primeras formas de escritura, esto es principalmente actúan como mercenarios los cuales se mezclaron con los locales de allí. Con todo lo anterior el autor nos dice que los carros de combate fueron la gran innovación de los indoeuropeos de Eurasia central, estos eran los únicos que sabían en un primer momento en manejarlos y construirlos, aunque posteriormente los imperios a donde llegaron los adoptaron.

El capítulo dos es sobre los escitas, los cuales mantuvieron un gran comercio con Grecia, estos pueblos llegaron a la meseta iraní como los primeros arqueros montados, estos fueron guerreros muy importantes para los imperios del cercano oriente aunque posteriormente serían derrotados por los medos. Los escitas tenían un gran interés por el oro el cual lo pagaban con el grano que producían en sus tierras muy fértiles, contra lo que se cree este pueblo practicaba la agricultura y tenía ciudades. Los persas fueron los primeros en darse cuenta de la gran riqueza que tenía este pueblo, aunque los intentaron invadir estos usaban tácticas de guerrilla para evitar, cosa que también se dio cuenta Alejandro magno de que necesitaba mucha caballería para derrotarlos, finalmente los escitas evolucionaron en los sármatas, los cuales tenían un gran estatus debido a sus mujeres guerreras.

China también contaba con sus pueblos esteparios, para ello, los chinos debieron construir murallas para defenderse, en estos pueblos posiblemente estaban los que serían los futuros unos de Europa, el autor deja claro que el gran comercio mundial de la época fue gracias a los imperios nómadas y posiblemente gracias a estos es que mucho de la filosofía de Grecia llega a China, por lo que estos pueblos fueron un puente importante entre la ciudad de Oriente y Occidente. El autor defiende a estos pueblos como personas que se interesaban en comerciar mas no en destruir y saquear.
El tercer capítulo el autor nos habla sobre los primeros pueblos germánicos que habitaron Eurasia central, posterior a esto nos habla de cómo los alanos llegaron a la frontera del imperio romano, los cuales serían derrotados por los romanos y asimilados, los godos serían otros pueblos que se asentarían cerca del mar negro, Por su parte el imperio persa caería por un pueblo nómada llamado los partos, los cuales tenían un gran dominio sobre el arquero montado y la poesía épica oral. Cerca de la India se creó el imperio Kushan el cual sería importante para la expansión del budismo y se benefició del comercio de la región. En China Por su parte se dan a cabo las primeras grandes descripciones de los pueblos esteparios gracias a la dinastía Han, los chinos siempre estuvieron en guerra con esos pueblos esteparios, pero vieron que era mejor comerciar con estos que atacarlos, el problema es que hubo una gran reducción del comercio y a causa de guerras internas o una gran migración de pueblos esteparios que atacaron los grandes imperios centrales.

Esto nos sitúa en el cuarto capítulo que habla de la gran migración de los pueblos esteparios, se empieza con los unos los cuales se asienta cerca del mar Azov, su primer objetivo fue destruir a los visigodos y esto causó que este pueblo se adentrará hacia el imperio romano, los hunos también llegaron a invadir Persia aunque no pudieron tomar su capital, los unos por mucho tiempo fueron un pueblo muy fragmentado que contaba con varios líderes locales solo sería con la llegada de atila que se unificarán a los hunos, estos lograron amenazar el imperio bizantino y por supuesto lograron grandes conquistas en la península itálica, contrario de lo que se cree estos lucharon con mucha infantería y no solo con caballos, el gran logró de atila fue propiciar la futura caída del imperio romano de Occidente. Posterior a esto se nos describe cómo muchos pueblos cerca de Roma empezaron a migrar como los germánicos a Gran Bretaña o los vándalos hacia el norte de África, el más importante estos son los francos. En el ámbito oriental tenemos la derrota del imperio Kushan a manos de los persas sasánidas, aunque estos últimos también se vieron asolados por los hunos blancos.

El quinto capítulo es sobre el imperio turco el cual derrota a los avaros logra controlar la ruta de la seda, pese a la derrota de los avaros, los turcos aprendieron de ellos cómo establecer y mantener un imperio estepario, 1 de los grandes enemigos de los turcos fueron los hunos blancos los cuales derrotaron con la ayuda de los persas, aunque posteriormente estos últimos serían sus nuevos enemigos, posterior a esto se nos describe en la expansión árabe por todo El Mundo oriental, donde se nos mencionan que los jázaros, fueron importantes para los bizantinos ya que lograban detener a los árabes. Los turcos siempre fueron una amenaza para China, y siempre eran invadidos con justificaciones por parte de la dinastía Tang. más al sur de China se desarrollaría el imperio tibetano el cual lograría mantener la paz con los chinos luego de una guerra y un matrimonio de conveniencia. Los turcos se rebelaron contra los chinos y crearían una nueva Confederación, aunque estos serían expulsados de Samarcanda demostraría que El Mundo cada vez estaba más conectado entre sí gracias a los pueblos esteparios.

El autor afirma que en el siglo 8 se produjeron grandes revoluciones en todo el mundo, en esta época existieron muchas luchas por el poder turco, en el imperio árabe se llevó a cabo la revolución abasí, en el imperio tibetanos también se llevó a cabo una rebelión y por último está la rebelión carolingia. algo interesante que menciona el autor es que los jasaros adoptaron el judaísmo para evitar el dominio Cristiano bizantino o el musulmán árabe, en esta época también muchos de los grandes imperios empezaron a adoptar las grandes religiones como el budismo o el islam, también se mencionan como muchas ideas de la India como el álgebra fueron tomadas por los árabes, en Asia central cada vez se ha centrado más en la isla llevando a cabo una nueva alfabetización en este lugar y traducción de textos, aunque la dinastía Tang por mucho tiempo fue una muy brillante y cosmopolita con la persecución de los budistas dio fin a esto.

Otra gran migración de pueblos se llevaría a cabo se empieza así con los húngaros que atacan a los jázaros y se establecen esto es húngaros llegando incluso hasta España y el norte de Italia, aunque posteriormente serían derrotados por Otón primero y finalmente establecerán el Reino de Hungría y se convertirían al cristianismo. Por su parte los vikingos pese a su imagen de grandes guerreros su principal interés era comercial para ellos fueron muy importantes los ríos De la Rus de Kiev para comerciar con los árabes, aunque sería este mismo imperio el que daría fin a los jázaros. en Asia central luego en muchas luchas surgen los turcos selyúcidas los cuales logran expandir enormemente su imperio al punto de derrotar a los bizantinos y establecerse en la península de anatolia, en el Tíbet también se expande mucho nuevas formas del budismo, y en China se desarrolla la dinastía Song. En la región de Asia central también se llevó a cabo una gran actividad literaria, finalmente esta última dinastía llevaría a cabo un gran desarrollo del comercio marítimo y grandes innovaciones como la pólvora o la impresión.

Hablar de los pueblos esteparios inevitablemente nos lleva a hablar de los mongoles para ello el autor nos hablan sobre las luchas esteparias que habían entre mongoles y tártaros el ascenso mongol frente al debilitamiento de otros y como Temujin logra derrotar a los tártaros y logra unificar diferentes tribus para así proclamarse el gran Gengis Kan tomando el control de Asia oriental y adoptar máquinas de asedio para describir las murallas que defendían las ciudades chinas posterior a esto debido a un ataque a una embajada comercial decidí atacar el imperio corasmio, con los años se expandirán por la Europa del este atacando Kiev y luchando contra los húngaros, estableciéndose allí la famosa horda dorada, con la conquista de Bagdad y el revés en contra de los mamelucos se crearía el ilkanato. Por su parte otro pueblo mongol avanzaría hacia China conquistando la dinastía Song aunque para administrar usar un uso de musulmanes y no tanto de asesores chinos debido a su desconfianza, pese a que muchos canes empezarían a adoptar religiones siempre tendrían muy arraigada las tradiciones paganas.

Se nos describe cómo se propagó la peste negra y se yo fui a la gran paz mongola donde muchos kanatos colapsaron. El último gran imperio estepario sería a manos de Tamerlán el cual iniciaría una gran expansión haciendo a su paso guerras contra la horda dorada, India y los otomanos con estos últimos lograría una gran victoria también usaría mucho la infantería y haría uso de armas de asedio, por lo que no solo se centraba en el manejo de la caballería 1 de los grandes aportes de Tamerlán fue su patrocinio en las artes al igual que los mongoles incentivaron el comercio por medio de los musulmanes y lograron la expansión de ideas y personas por todo oriente y Occidente.
Posterior a esta época tenemos el desarrollo de nuevos imperios como el otomano, safávida y mogol, frente a estos 3 imperios también se estaba desarrollando la expansión marítima portuguesa la cual necesito de mucha ayuda local, lo que se demuestra en esta época es que los mares empezaban a ser muy importantes, se nos describe brevemente el ascenso de estos 3 imperios de la pólvora y cómo los portugueses necesitan aliarse con los pueblos locales a donde llegaba y no seguir tanto su paso destrucción, el mayor choque que hubo fue en el mar arábigo ya que los portugueses eran no musulmanes por lo que muchos pueblos no querían comerciar con estos, aunque se hizo una coalición para derrotar a los portugueses estos al final triunfaron y lograron obtener el monopolio del océano Índico.

Por su parte los chinos no estaban tan interesados en el comercio marítimo por ello los portugueses tendrían el monopolio del comercio marítimo al sur de China, otro imperio que estaba creciendo enormemente era el imperio ruso y en la misma China serían los manchúes los que tomarían el control político. Mientras en Europa se estaba llevando a cabo un Renacimiento en Eurasia central también se estaba llevando el suyo como se puede ver en la poesía persa, en las mejoras de arquitectura. La construcción de mezquitas y santuarios y el gran apoyo hacia el arte el mayor ejemplo de esto el Taj Mahal.

En los últimos capítulos el autor nos habla de los últimos imperios esteparios a manos de la mayor expansión rusa y China que querían conquistar la periferia, se nos describe todos los intentos por parte de los chinos y rusos por controlar a los mongoles que quedaba así como la expansión China por el tipo, ello da inicio a un empobrecimiento de la región y por supuesto un gran dominio de los europeos en el mar, se nos describe un poco sobre cómo Japón se cerró hacia El Mundo y luego llevó a cabo una modernización y apertura gracias a que tenían un gran conocimiento marítimo al ser éstos una posición insular, se nos habla de todas las colonias británicas y territorios. De aquí en adelante el libro la verdad se pone muy mal describiendo cosas de la guerra fría de la India de China y en muchos aspectos o sea toca tantos temas que no profundiza en ninguno y que para cualquier persona versada un poco en historia le parecerán obviedades sin embargo es pronto para una persona que se está entrando en el mundo de la historia y quiere conocer una perspectiva diferente estos capítulos pueden ser muy útiles.

El epílogo eso sí es bastante interesante porque nos habla como Eurasia central contaba con los mejores caballos y debemos dejarlos de ver como pueblos crueles y despiadados porque hay que ser sincero y es que también los imperios centrales sedentarios se hicieron a base de guerras y destrucciones, otro ejemplo de ello es que muchos de los emperadores romanos son bien vistos pero otros como Atila o Gengis Kan son mal vistos, como lo ha defendido el autor una y otra vez los pueblos no más estaban interesados más en el comercio que en la guerra eran muy prósperos y desarrollaban muchos productos valiosos para otros pueblos, muchas veces estos atacaban siguiendo un modelo defensivo o reaccionario no atacaban porque sí, por lo que he conquistaban el enemigo solo si era necesario ya que muchas veces estos pueblos también eran invitados por facciones rivales que habían dentro de los imperios, muchas veces estos pueblos esteparios no lograron tener un control duradero y crear imperios que durarán por muchos años necesitaron como se vio de armas de asedio e infantería no solo dependían de los caballos, también construyeron grandes ciudades.

Las acciones de los pueblos esteparios también muchas veces eran comprensibles y justificables no todas eran irracionales, hay que mirar más allá de las causas de la guerra porque son más complejas de lo que parece debemos dejar de mirar la historia como los pueblos esteparios como malos y los imperios como buenos. Bajo esta misma idea se da la idea de lo bárbaro y es que ningún pueblo estepario se llamaba así bárbaro y es más una idea de los griegos y romanos para nombrar todo aquello que era ajeno a ellos inclusive los mismos chinos no tenían una palabra como tal para bárbaro, sino que hablaban más de pueblos extranjeros por lo que en últimas la palabra bárbaro es una idea europea muy peyorativa y hay que tener mucho cuidado al usarla.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beckwith's book was recommended by a friend to give me a context for understanding the cultures from which early Tibet emerged. Beckwith touches on Tibet, but it really was refreshing to experience his sweeping perspective.

Although I did not read all the way through to the chapters on more-recent history (which several people found not as good as the early chapters), I came away with a new sense that Eurasia is a much-more unified ancient culture than I'd previously been aware. Although the "civilizations" on the periphery—China, Persian, Greco-Roman—have given us a warped perspective on "barbarian" invaders, Beckwith convinced me that the violence was usually started by the "civilized" to close down frontier trading centers which were crucial to Central Eurasian survival.

And although there were multiple ethnic and linguistic groups that swept across the steppes, Beckwith showed how they all shared some common cultural characteristics, from the mythologies of founders raised in the wild to the practice of warriors pledging their lives to a leader.

I also loved learning about the mostly forgotten civilizations that thrived in Central Asia: The Kushan empire which built Buddhist monastic complexes on the banks of the Oxus River along what is today the Afghan-Uzbek border; the Khwarezm empire, a Zoroastrian culture in the mid-desert wetlands at the end of of the Amu Darya River, who later gave us the mathematician al-Khwarezmi ("algorithm"); and the fascinating Kazar culture on the Volga-Don Steppes bewteen the Caspian and Black Seas whose Turkic leaders converted to Judaism to remain independent of the competing Orthodox Byzantines and the Muslim Persians.

[Robin Tell-Drake]

Well, I've read the preface, and it's clear the author is a bit of a prat. I've seen a few reviews around that warned of this. I'm reading it on a Kindle, which is a bit of an experiment--this is a hand-me-down first edition Kindle with a bum scroll wheel, so it's prohibitively difficult to skip in and out of footnotes. Also, the Kindle makes it a pain to skip over things like the preface. Or the bloody acknowledgements. But maybe it's just as well I read the preface.

Mr. Beckwith talks about himself, his interests and his motives kind of a lot. And he clearly has an axe to grind (tediously) about modernism and postmodernism, and within the preface he shows himself to be a seriously sloppy thinker at least about those things. So I'm going in wary.

But then again, he knows a great deal more than I do about the history of this region of the world, not only more detailed history but he knows about whole ethnicities that I've never heard mentioned even in passing, so I can't help but gain by reading this thing, warts and all. We shall see.