Gain Access Empires Of The Silk Road: A History Of Central Eurasia From The Bronze Age To The Present Produced By Christopher I. Beckwith In Digital Copy

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,

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 PresentChristopher 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:.
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.
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 ProtoIndoEuropean 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 IndoEuropean 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 lateth century they were squeezed and then swallowed by the Russian, ManchuChinese and British Empires and reduced to their current sad state when the latter energetically developed maritime trade and then clamped down their innerAsian 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 ProtoIndoEuropean theory.
Curious to see how his colleagues reacted, I read a review of this book in the Journal of IndoEuropean 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 thend 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 thirteenyear period in the midth 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 Lushan 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 theth century BCE efflorescence of philosophy in China, India and Greece are coincidences.


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, where the words "Modern" and "Modernism" diffuse to mean little more than "occurred in theth century.
" Every upheaval from Sun Yatsen'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 Chaptersand, 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,

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, .