History Of Central Asia!

In its historical application of the concept of Central Asia designate an area which is significantly larger than the central parts of the Asian continent. Were it not for the awkwardness of the word, it would be better to speak of central Eurasia, which includes all parts of the great Eurasian land mass, which develops a distinctive sedentary civilization of their own. But the real boundaries of Central Asia are determined at a given moment in the history of the relationship between the "civilized" and "barbarian"-the two opponents, but complementary. The equation so often propounded-of the civilized with the sedentary and the barbarian with the nomad-is misleading, however. The most striking difference between the two groups in Eurasia are probably in the successful trials in the civilized change and navigating the physical environment, while the barbarian just use it, often in a masterful way to gain an advantage. In its essence is the history of Central Asia, the barbarian, and its dominant feature is the sometimes latent, sometimes open conflict where barbarian clashes with the civilized. Two basic patterns of conquest is evident in the history of Central Asia, namely the barbaric carried out with weapons and ephemeral in its results and that the civilized-slow, but unspectacular, achieved through technological superiority and absorption.

The biggest problems for the historian of Central Asia are very few and relatively late original written sources. The first Aboriginal sources, written in Turkish language dating from the 8th century AD, and sources of equal value will not be available again until the 13th century. Most of the written sources dealing with Central Asia originate in the surrounding sedentary civilizations and are almost always heavily biased against the barbarian, the most important of them are in Chinese, Greek, Latin, Arabic and Persian.

Without a sufficient number of indigenous written sources, is the language of a certain Central Asian people is difficult to determine. However, it is reasonable to assume that many of them spoke a Uralic and Altaic languages, and it can be taken for granted that the Paleo-Asiatic languages were in wider use in early times than they are now. Although it seems likely that the primary language of many great nomadic empires was Turkish or Mongolian, the distribution of these languages to peoples about whose speech inadequate linguistic evidence, as in the case of the Hsiung-nu or Avars, is unjustified and it is wiser to confess ignorance.

Two of the natural vegetation zones of Central Asia has played a prominent role in history: the forest belt, 500 to 1000 miles (800 to 1600 km) wide, and south of the steppe, a vast grassland extending eastward from Hungary to Mongolia, facilitating communications and providing grass, the only raw material absolutely essential to the creation of the great empires Nomad. The northern frozen marshes and the southern deserts played a minor role in Central Asian history.

Within the broad concept of Central Asia, as defined above, is based on the historical geography a more precisely delineated Central Asian heartland consisting of three adjacent regions, collectively, as the 19th century explorers and geographers as Russian and Chinese Turkestan.

The first of these regions are known to the ancient Greeks as Transoxania and Arabs as Ma Wara an-Nahr ( "what lies Beyond the River"), consists of the area between the Amu Darya (Oxus River of the Greeks and the Arabs Jayhun ) and Syr Darya (river Jaxartes of Greeks and Sayhun of Arabs). It is a dry, semi-desert country where, before the development of large irrigation projects in the 20th century, the sedentary population is maintained even with intensive cultivation of the fertile tracts bordering on the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, or the cultivation of the oases, which were located in major urban centers such as Bukhara and Samarkand.

The second, predominantly steppe, the region stretches northward from the upper layer of the Syr Darya to the Ili River valley and the foothills of the ranges lying between the Altai Mountains and the Tien Shan. Bounded on the south by the line of Tien Shan and north of Lake Balkhash, this area was known to Turks as Yeti Su, the "Land of the Seven Rivers," hence its Russian name Semirechye.

The third area focuses on the Takla Makan Desert, bounded on the north by the Tien Shan, west of the Pamir, south of the Kunlun Mountains and the northeastern part of Dzungarian (Jungarian) Basin. Often referred to as Kashgaria, from its principal city, Kashgar (K'a-shih), the region is characterized by small oasis settlements lying between the desert and the surrounding ranges, such as Khotan (Ho-T'ien) Jarkent, Kashgar itself and Aksu (Ak'o-su), which served as way stations on the famous Silk Road between China and the West.

Prehistory and antiquity:

In early human history in Central Asia date back to the late Pleistocene Epoch, about 25,000 to 35,000 years ago, covering the last full interglacial and the last ice age, the latter of which is followed by the interglacial period, which still exists today. The Aurignacian culture coincided Upper Paleolithic of the last ice age, which was much less severe in northern Asia than in Europe. In a period when ice covered northern France, Siberia, under the 60 ° N were ice-free. The Paleolithic Malta site, 28 miles northwest of Irkutsk, is clearly Aurignacian, and it is safe to assume that during this period, Siberia and the subarctic regions of Europe belonged to the same civilization. The differentiation between Central Asia and the surrounding civilization began Neolithic times, characterized by enormous technological advances and a wide spread of cultures. This article is not to discuss the development of these cultures or their contacts with eastern, southern and western cultures, and most of the archaeological finds are important, however, are controversial and are subject to various interpretations in light of new knowledge.