KARAKALPAKSTAN BLOG: August 2020

Sunday, August 30, 2020

MODERN TURKEY - AN ETHNIC MIX OF TURKS, GREEKS, PERSIANS AND MANY OTHERS

Asia Minor–modern Turkey–was formerly inhabited by a variety of non-Turkic peoples. Most of these people spoke Indo-European languages and included the Hittites, Phrygians, and Luwians (Troy was probably a Luwian city). After the conquests of Alexander the Great, Asia Minor was mostly Hellenized and remained solidly Greek until the 11th century, with Armenians forming the majority in the eastern parts of the region, as they had since antiquity. In the second half of the first millennium CE, Turkic peoples were gradually streaming into most of Central Asia from their original homeland in the Altai mountains of western Mongolia. They gradually displaced or assimilated both the settled and nomadic Iranian-speaking people. But how did they get all the way to Turkey, which has the largest concentration of Turkic peoples today?

In the 11th century, Turks began appearing at the edges of Asia Minor (Anatolia), which was then controlled by the Greeks. Many of the Turks were mercenaries in the employ of local Arab and Persian rulers to the east of the Byzantine Empire and Armenia, the dominant states in Asia Minor. In 1037, the Seljuk Empire, a Turkic state, was founded northeast of Iran in Central Asia and quickly overran much of Persia, Iraq, and the Levant. By the 1060s, the Seljuk Empire bordered Byzantine Asia Minor. It should be noted that the Turks were a minority, ruling a Persian, Arab, and Kurdish majority. The main strategic threat to the Turks was the Fatimid Caliphate based in Egypt. The Fatimids were Ismaili Shia and ruled over Jerusalem and Mecca at that time while the Turks upheld Sunni Islam. The Sunni Caliph in Baghdad was their puppet. By this time, the Caliph had ceased to exercise any political role while the Seljuk sultans held the reigns of power. As was the case of many empires, many problems arose due to the conflicts between nomadic rulers and a sedentary population. Thus, many of the Turkic tribes under Seljuk rule actually posed a problem for the Seljuks since they were restless and sometimes raided settled populations ruled by the Seljuks. As a result, many of the Turkic tribes and families were placed on the frontiers of the Seljuk Empire, including on the frontier of the Byzantine Empire. Turkish raids into Asia Minor commenced, greatly annoying the Byzantines.

In 1045, the Byzantines conquered Armenia. Their frontier with the Seljuks was not particularly strong or pacified as a result of the intermittent warfare there. Additionally, many Armenians did not like the Byzantines and did not help them resist the Turkish raids. Eventually, by 1071, the Byzantines, exasperated at constant Turkish raiding, decided to move a large army to their borders to eliminate the Turkish threat once and for all. Unfortunately, this was not a particularly good idea, because their strength lay in manning border forts against lightly armed tribal warriors. By attempting to fight a pitched battle, they also risked total defeat. Furthermore, the Seljuk Turks did not want to antagonize the Byzantines. Their state apparatus was directed against Egypt; it was only tribes that were barely under central Seljuk control that were raiding the Byzantines. Romanus IV Diogenes, the Byzantine Emperor, created a previously non-existent threat for the Seljuks by moving some 40,000 troops to his eastern border, thus alerting the Seljuk Sultan Alp Arslan to the threat from Asia Minor. Thus, the Byzantines, by diverting the Turks’ attention from Egypt, brought a Turkic army to Asia Minor from Persia and Central Asia.

The Seljuk and Byzantine armies met at Manzikert in eastern Turkey, where the Byzantines were crushed. This is arguably one of the most decisive battles in history, as it resulted in the eventual establishment of Turkish power in Asia Minor. It was likely that the battle was lost by the Byzantines due to treachery, because units commanded by generals belonging to alternative court factions in Constantinople simply never showed up for the battle, despite being in the vicinity, and returned home afterwards. Sultan Alp Arslan captured Emperor Diogenes and and offered him generous terms before sending him home. However shortly afterwards, the Byzantine empire suffered a civil war between Diogenes and other contenders for the throne and several generals broke his treaty with the Turks. This left Asia Minor devoid of soldiers and gave the Turks good reason to occupy it. By 1081, they were across the Bosphorus Straits from Constantinople. Although the Byzantines and Crusaders later recovered some territory in Asia Minor, from then on, the majority of the region remained under Turkish control.

But groups of Turks ruled over many states in the Middle East and South Asia at this point in time. Why did they become the majority in Turkey? After the Seljuk victory, many Turks poured into Asia Minor, establishing little statelets, and ruling over the native population. Following the subsequent Mongol invasions, even more poured in, fleeing from their former lands in Persia and Central Asia. Unlike in many other cases, where a dominant minority eventually became assimilated into the majority population, because of the unstable, chaotic frontier situation, the Turks did not assimilate into the population. Indeed, many locals (ethnic Greeks and Armenians) attached themselves to Turkish warlords for protection as clients. This client-patron relationship spread out over many bands and tribes across Asia Minor and ensured that the majority of the population assimilated into the Turkish religion (Islam), language, and culture instead of vice versa. This is a cultural process known as elite dominance, wherein a minority imposes its culture on the majority. The Turkification of Asia Minor is evident in the fact that genetically, the majority of today’s Turks are most closely related to Greeks and Armenians rather than Central Asian Turkic peoples, like the Uzbeks and Kazakhs. Thus, while the Turkic culture dominated in Asia Minor, the Turks themselves quickly merged genetically into the native population. Genetic studies show that around 15 percent of the Turkish genetic mixture derives from Central Asia.

Asia Minor was the most populous part of the Byzantine Empire, its heartland. Without it, the empire simply didn’t have enough resources to compete in the long run. Turkification was also helped by the fact that the Greeks were of a different religion than the Turks. Greeks converting to Islam would adopt Turkish language. Furthermore, in the later Ottoman Empire, the Turkish language prevailed at the official level, and not local languages. As a result of all these factors, densely populated Asia Minor became the region of the world with the largest concentration of Turkic-speaking peoples, far away from their original homeland in Central Asia. ED: https://thediplomat.com/2016/06/the-epic-story-of-how-the-turks-migrated-from-central-asia-to-turkey/

Turkification of Mawarannahr

The first people known to have occupied Central Asia were nomads who arrived from the northern grasslands of what is now Uzbekistan sometime in the first millennium B.C. They began to build an extensive irrigation system along the rivers of the region. In time cities such as Bukhara and Samarkand began to appear as centers of government and culture. By the fifth century B.C., the Bactrian, Soghdian, and Tokharian states dominated the region. As te silk route these settlements took advantage of this commerce by becoming centers of trade and in time became known as Mawarannahr (a name given the region after the Arab conquest) >

The wealth of Mawarannahr was a constant magnet for invasions and numerous intraregional wars were fought in Mawarannahr. Alexander the Great conquered the region in 328 B.C., bringing it briefly under the control of his Macedonian Empire. In the same centuries, however, the region also was an important center of intellectual life and religion. Until the first centuries after Christ, the dominant religion in the region was Zoroastrianism, but Buddhism, Manichaeism, and even Christianity also attracted followers. The conquest of Central Asia by Islamic Arabs, which was completed in the eighth century A.D., brought to the region a new religion and culture that continue to be dominant. The Arabs first invaded Mawarannahr in the middle of the seventh century through sporadic raids during their conquest of Persia. The Arabs were led by a brilliant general, Qutaybah ibn Muslim, and were highly motivated by the desire to spread their new faith (the official beginning of which was in A.D. 622). The new religion brought by the Arabs spread gradually with the destiny of Central Asia as an Islamic region not being firmly established until the Arab victory over the Chinese armies in 750 in a battle at the Talas River.>

Under Arab rule, Central Asia retained much of its character, remaining an important center of culture and trade for centuries after the Arab conquest. However, until the tenth century the language of government, literature, and commerce was Arabic. Mawarannahr continued to be an important political player in regional affairs, supporting the Abbasid Caliphate in its struggle against the then-ruling Umayyad Caliphate.>

During the height of the Abbasid Caliphate in the eighth and the ninth centuries, Central Asia and Mawarannahr experienced a truly golden age. Bukhoro became one of the leading centers of learning, culture, and art in the Muslim world, its magnificence rivaling contemporaneous cultural centers such as Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba. Many of the greatest historians, scientists, and geographers in the history of Islamic culture were natives of the region. As the Abbasid Caliphate began to weaken and local Islamic states emerged as the rulers of Central Asia. the Persian language began to come intp the region as the language of literature and government. Under the Samanids and the Buyids, the rich culture of Mawarannahr continued to flourish.>

From the fifth to the ninth century AD Turkic tribes who lived in the great grasslands stretching from Mongolia to the Caspian Sea started to move permanently into the region. In the late tenth century, as the Samanids began to lose control of Mawarannahr and Turks started to come to positions of power eventually they established their own states. With the emergence of a Turkic ruling group in the region, other Turkic tribes began to migrate to Mawarannahr.>

The first of the Turkic states in the region was the Ghaznavid Empire, established in the last years of the tenth century. Their dominance was curtailed, however, when large-scale Turkic migrations brought in two new groups of Turks in the east the Qarakhanids and the west the Seljuks who conquered the Ghaznavid territory of Khorazm (also spelled Khorezm and Khwarazm).>

In the late twelfth century the Turkic leader of Khorazm united Khorazm, Mawarannahr, and Iran under his rule. Khorazmshah Kutbeddin Muhammad and his son, Muhammad II, Mawarannahr continued to be prosperous and rich. However, a new incursion of nomads from the north soon changed this situation. This time the invader was Genghis (Genghis) Khan with his Mongol armies.The Mongol invasion of Central Asia is one of the turning points in the history of the region leaving imprints that were still discernible in the early twentieth century.>

The Mongol conquest of Central Asia, which took place from 1219 to 1225, led to a wholesale change in the population of Mawarannahr. The conquest quickened the process of Turkification in the region because, although the armies of Chinggis Khan were led by Mongols, they were made up mostly of Turkic tribes that had been incorporated into the Mongol armies as the tribes were encountered in the Mongols' southward sweep. As these armies settled in Mawarannahr, they intermixed with the local populations.

Following the death of Chinggis Khan in 1227, his empire was divided among his three sons. Despite the potential for serious fragmentation, Mongol law maintained orderly succession for several more generations, and control of most of Mawarannahr stayed in the hands of direct descendants of Chaghatai, the second son of Chinggis. Orderly succession, prosperity, and internal peace prevailed in the Chaghatai lands, and the Mongol Empire as a whole remained strong and united.>

In the early fourteenth century, however, as the empire began to break up into its constituent parts, the Chaghatai territory also was disrupted as the princes of various tribal groups competed for influence. One tribal chieftain, Timur (Tamerlane), emerged from these struggles in the 1380s as the dominant force in Mawarannahr. Although he was not a descendant of Chinggis, Timur became the de facto ruler of Mawarannahr and proceeded to conquer all of western Central Asia, Iran, Asia Minor, and the southern steppe region north of the Aral Sea. >

Timur initiated the last flowering of Mawarannahr by gathering in his capital, Samarkand, numerous artisans and scholars from the lands he had conquered. By supporting such people, Timur imbued his empire with a very rich culture. During his reign and that of his immediate descendants, a wide range of religious and palatial construction projects were undertaken in Samarkand and other population centers. Timur also patronized scientists and artists; his grandson Ulugh Beg was one of the world's first great astronomers. It was during the Timurid dynasty that Turkish, in the form of the Chaghatai dialect, became a literary language in its own right in Mawarannahr--although the Timurids also patronized writing in Persian. >

The Timurid state broke into two halves after the death of Timur and an era of chronic internal fighting greatly destabilised the area. This instability attracted the attention of the Uzbek nomadic tribes living to the north. In 1501 the Uzbeks began a wholesale invasion of Mawarannahr and in 1510 the Uzbeks had completed their conquest of much of the territory of the present-day Uzbekistan. Of the states they established, the most powerful, the Khanate of Bukhara, centered on the city of Bukhara. The khanate controlled Mawarannahr, especially the region of Tashkent, the Fergana Valley in the east. A second Uzbek state was established in the oasis of Khorazm at the mouth of the Amu Darya. Near the end of the sixteenth century, the Uzbek states of Bukhara and Khorazm began to weaken because of their struggles among the khans in power and their heirs. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Shaybanid Dynasty was replaced by the Janid Dynasty. Another factor contributing to the weakness of the Uzbek khanates in this period was the general decline of trade moving through the region. This change had begun in the previous century when ocean trade routes were established from Europe to India and China, circumventing the Silk Route. As European-dominated ocean transport expanded and some trading centers were destroyed, cities such as Bukhoro, Merv, and Samarkand in the Khanate of Bukara and Khiva and Urganch (Urgench) in Khorazm began to steadily decline. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Khanate of Bukhara lost the fertile Fergana region, and a new Uzbek khanate was formed in Kokand. Source: http://factsanddetails.com/central-asia/

Tuesday, August 25, 2020

Scythia

The Scythians (pronounced ‘SIH-thee-uns’) were a group of ancient tribes of nomadic warriors who originally lived in what is now southern Siberia. Their culture flourished from around 900 BC to around 200 BC (Iron age). The Ancient Greeks whose lands bordered Scythia gave the name Scythia (or Great Scythia) to all the lands north-east of Europe and the northern coast of the Black Sea. In the seventh century BC, the Scythian's controlled large swaths of territory throughout Eurasia, from the Black Sea across Siberia to the borders of China. Its location and extent varied over time, but it usually extended farther to the west and significantly farther to the east than is indicated on the map. The Scythian's were energetic but peaceful people, they preferred a free-riding way of life. No writing system that dates to the period has ever been attested, so majority of written information available today about the region and its inhabitants at the time stems from proto-historical writings of ancient civilizations which had connections to the region, primarily those of Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome and Ancient Persia.

The most detailed western description is by the"Father of History”, Herodotus, who referred to the “Scythian's” as Sacae and said their own name for themselves was "Scoloti" they were nomads, wandering from place to place in search of the most convenient land for farming. They held horses with especially high esteem. They were most famous for galloping on a horse at full speed while shooting bows, a skill particularly useful in warfare. The Scythian warrior spirit led them to become an archetype for the Greek valiant half-man and half-horse centaur. Their invasions into distant nations resulted not only in spoils, but also in the accumulation of a wealth of knowledge regarding different cultures that they brought back with themselves.The Scythians were not only talented in warfare, especially cavalry, they were also developed an outstanding art called “beast (or animal) style”, which is characterized by the flowing movements of beasts of prey, some mythical like griffins, and herbivores like the horses they loved and the fierce struggle between them. Women were valued just as equally as men in Scythian society, and their civilization saw great women leaders in international affairs. For example, when the Persians invaded the territory of the Massagetae Scythian's in 530 BCE (now part of todays Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan) Tomyris, the Scythian queen leading her army defeated the Persians. In one of the most famous stories of antiquity, Tomyris ordered the head of the captured Cyrus the Great, the Persian King, to be cut off and placed into a wine skin filled with his blood in revenge for the death of her son in a prior battle.

The nearly continuous war between the Scythia's and the Persians eventually resulted in the partial alliance of two groups. In 518 BCE Persians set their troops against the Scythian's again, with Persian king Darius I leading his army. The Persian troops were intimidated by the valiant Scythian cavalry, which forced the panic-stricken Persians to flee. As a result of a prolonged battle with the Persians, a part of the Scythian's forces were defeated, and they were forced to provide cavalry for the Persian army. In the Battle of Marathon (490 BCE) the Scythian's fought on the side of the Persians, previously an enemy, now an ally, against the Greeks. The records of Herodotus survived to tell of the bravery of the Scythians and their alliance with the Persian King Xerxes I (the son of Darius I) against the Greeks in the Battle of Plataea (479 BCE). The land of the Scythian's also drew the attention of Alexander the Great. He led a war to crush the Scythian's in the Jaxartes River region, known today as Syr-Darya, in around 329 BCE. He founded his ninth city, Alexandria Eskhate (“Farthest Alexandria”), at the banks of the Syr-Darya River now in southern Kazakhstan.

Many of the customs, traditions, and language of the Karakalpaks are deeply rooted back to the Scythians.According to historical sources, Saka people lived in Karakalpakstan back in the Neolithic Age. The gravestones tombs of Darius I, dating back to the 5th century BC show that the territory around the Aral Sea and Syrdarya were was occupied by the “Saka tigraxauda” (Scythians with pointy hats"). From the 2nd century BCE to the 6th centuries ACE Turkic tribes migrated from the territory of the Altay and Siberia. An assimilation of the indigenous and nomadic Turkic Saka population resulted in a new ethnic group known as Pechenegs. These tribes formed the basis of the formation of ethnic Karakalpaks and Kazakh hordes. The very word 'karakalpak "means " black hats "and refers to the fact that Karakalpaks wore hats from the black sheep's wool.

Friday, August 21, 2020

Big Guldursun

Big Guldursun is located 35 km east of the district center Boston (Ellik-kala district) and 20 km east of the Beruni district. The monument was first excavated from 1937-40 by Y.G.Gulomov and O.T.Dospanov from 1987 untill 1995. Subsequently, a number of numerous articles and a separate book called “Ayemgi Guldursun qalasi” were published. (Dospanov, 1993.) The monument is one of the largest border fortresses of Ancient Khorezm Empire during IV-I centuries BC., I-VIII AD., and IX-XIV AD. The outer walls were built on the basis of a desolate ancient fortress once conquered by the Arab troops. It is has a form of a rectangle with a total area of 350х230 meters, strictly oriented with corners to the cardinal points. There is a preserved medieval gate of a semi-oval shape in the middle of the south-eastern wall. The early antique walls were made of raw bricks measuring 40х40х10- 11 cm, stacked on the lower pakhsa blocks. The walls have survived to a height of 15 meters. The inner parts of the walls are medieval, made of bricks of 24х24х5cm and are closely attached to the ancient walls. During the rebuilding of the fortresses in the time of Khorezmshalhs’ reign, the inner part of the walls of the ancient shooting gallery was demolished. At present, the interior of the ancient walls has preserved traces of rifle loopholes arranged in two rows in a checkerboard pattern. In some places in the pakhsa wall, you can see the clogged, high-altitude arched passages. The fortress was reinforced by the construction of a pretented barrier with a second row of outrigger towers flanking the approach to the wall, and for this reason they form a so-called “gateway structure” along the entire diameter of semicircular (semi-oval) planes. Excavations and research have shown that the fortress played a purely strategic role and was of great importance in the defense of the head structures of the ancient Gaukhare canal. During the study of the monument, a deep pit was dug in the inner part, up to 14 meters deep. The analysis and the materials revealed showed that the inner part of the monument was intensively settled down at all times of its existence. The monument is very interesting architecturally. The “kaptar khana” (room for keeping pigeons) is perfectly preserved in the inner eastern wall. In the scientific literature, it has been written about such "dovecotes" on some medieval monuments in this area. And also, this information gives reason to assume that carrier pigeons were used to maintain connections between fortresses, cities and individual regions. For this reason, it is no coincidence that a special room was allocated for keeping pigeons, consisting of special niches, deepened in several rows, arranged between the shooting gallery of the eastern wall. Its eastern and southern corner towers, which were used in the Middle Ages as a warehouse for storing cotton seeds, are of no less architectural and material interest. For proper preservation of seeds on the floor, special “air vents” were used - ventilation holes on the floor, which could actively ventilate the stored seeds.