Threads from the Silk Road

By Joe Rittmann (With Permission)
20 January 1997

My assignment in Kazakstan and then around the Aral Sea gave me a chance to travel along the Silk Road in early December 1996. It was a quick trip, but one that stirred me.

As you know, the Silk Road was a caravan route to move things along the way from China to Europe. As we studied in our history books, Central Asia was a place filled with hordes and khans, depicted as murderous and ruthless. We also think of this region as a great steppe making it easy for great numbers of people, or hordes, to move around.

To review this, let me summarize the "Lonely Planet" guidebook. Recorded history begins with the Achmaemenid Empire of Iran in 6000 BC. Alexander the Great conquered the area about 300 BC. The Silk Road flourished until Attila the Hun threatened Europe in 400 AD. Not only did the Silk Road provide the route for trading but it also carried along with it culture and religion. Islam covered the region in 700 AD which is when Bukhara developed into the "Pillar of Islam" a city with over a 100 madressahs and lead the way in medicine and mathematics.

In the 1100s, the ruling dynasty was Khorezmshah (see below, where I visited Konye-Urguench), but in 1200, Jenghiz Khan laid them low, including the destruction of Bukhara. He created a great empire from China to Ukraine which was left his sons. Marco Polo travelled the Silk Road in the 1200's. The Golden Horde took the northern and western parts). The Mongol empire in northern China led to Kublai Khan. By 1300, the steppes south of the Aral Sea were known as Moghulistan (and to the Moghul Empires of India). But by late 1300, Timur the Lame came out of Samarkand, which led to the glorious days of that city.

From 1400 until 1600, the steppes were ruled by the Kazaks and the rivers by the Uzbeks. The Kazaks classify themselves according to one of three hordes, which turns out to be a French form of the word for yurt-the typical dwelling structure. The Russians were poised in the north to start taking over things in 1700. In Uzbekistan, there were khans in each Khiva, Bukhara, and Samarkand, each a city state. By the middle of the 1800's, the Russians had conquered the whole region.

I started my trip at the Aral Sea, the inland sea that receives the flows of the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya. These two rivers start in the earth's greatest mountain mass that bridges from China to Uzbekistan from Kazakstan to India and Pakistan. When we recently flew from Almaty to Islamabad at 30000 ft (about 10 thousand meters) we felt that we could reach down and grab the snow from the mountain tops that stretched like an ocean below us. They start as one river in Kyrghzstan and then the Syr Darya travels north into Kazakstan, while the Amu flows through Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. On the flight from Tashkent to Nukus on the Aral Sea, I could see this mighty river snaking its way towards the Aral Sea.

About 30 years ago, Soviet planning began the destruction of the Aral Sea. Now the coast of the sea has receded over a 100 kilometers from its main ports- Muynak and Aralsk. The Soviet idea was to take a good idea, irrigation, and expand it. What worked in Egypt for thousands of years with the Nile seemed like something that ought to be expanded with the Darya rivers. So, irrigation channels were expanded and fertilizers were used for cotton and rice. Well, the result is that no water reaches the Aral Sea, vast amounts of water are lost in evaporation and seepage, and the soil has become saturated with chemical salts. Now the people who have long lived in the river deltas can hardly survive, since the water is too salty to drink and there is hardly enough of it. The international community has made the Aral Sea a pet project, but the truth is that they have not been very successful over these past 10 years in changing the way that Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakstan use the water. Kazakstan is depopulated in the Kyzl Orda region-its main benefit from the Aral Sea was fishing and trading. Uzbekistan still maintains a state controlled agriculture system so that it protects is stake in cotton and rice production. Turkmenistan is downstream from Uzbekistan, but has the same policies at Uzbekistan.

At Konye-Urguench (old Urguench, the former center of the Khorezmshah dynasty), I stopped to see the remains of a very large, wondrous city. The most colorful monument was a exquisite mausoleum designed according to the parts of the calendar both solar and lunar built in mid 1300's. I like geometrically or numerically designed buildings, so I was glad to see another example of this after we visited the Heavenly Temple in Beijing last year. There the numerical principal was nine. Konye-Urguench is in northeast Turkmenistan south of, or under the Aral Sea, but maybe 200 kilometers of Karakalpakstan desert from the Sea. We traveled 100 km up the river on the Turkmenistan side and crossed over the Amu Darya into Uzbekistan at Urguench on our way to Khiva.

The part of Uzbekistan that is related to the Aral Sea is Karakalpakstan, somehow a self-administered area but not defined as a state in its own right. As a place, it is rough and undeveloped, even though the Amu Darya flows through it. I guess it was not included in the grand Soviet scheme. The part of Uzbekistan that surrounds Urguench is irrigated delta, like one finds in Egypt. This part of the Amu Darya irrigation system obviously existed before the Soviet time, so it could support cities like Khiva. Khiva is a walled city which was famous for its slave-trade and its strong defenses in the 1700's. Now, the remains provide a satisfying glimpse of of Islamic civilization-madressah or schools, mosques, bazaars, and courts. But, unless one is making a pilgrimage to one of the saints buried in Khiva, one feels like one is in a museum.

For me, the height of Islamic culture was the city of Isfahan in Iran, where we lived in 1976. There I was introduced to the magnificence of its society. My encyclopedia says that it reached this level in the 1700s, the same time as Khiva. Khiva by itself is not so grand as that, but as one extent of the great carpet of Islamic civilization, if you consider its architecture, design, and culture, then Khiva is marvelous. This carpet stretched from northern Africa in the west to India in the east, to the Amu Darya valley in the north and Persia in the south. It was in Isfahan that I bought my first carpet, though I think that the carpet bought my parents back in the early 30's is a fine piece. The original silk road crosses the Amu Darya at Bukhara about 8 hours drive across the Kyzlkum or Red Desert from Khiva. For the first part of the drive, I could admire the great Amu Darya river valley. Bukhara reached its height much earlier than Khiva (see above) but what I visited dates from 1600. In this post-soviet era, the bazaars are starting to bustle again. I enjoyed sitting around one of the cities watering holes, Labi-Hauz, built in 1620, where local people still come to eat, talk, and drink tea under mulberry trees that are were planted 380 years ago.

Samarkhand is another 4 hours east. It is surely the grandest of the Islamic cities that I have seen-somewhat on the scale of Beijing. Beijing has its central palaces, but the entire design spreads all around the current city and includes manmade mountains, rivers, and lakes. Samarkand didn't go that far, but its monuments are not just concentrated in one place. The mosques are not as big as they are in Pakistan and India. The largest madresseh is not as big as the Taj Mahal, but the blue mosaic that covers so many large and diverse buildings exceeds what you see in Isfahan, where they proclaim themselves to be half the world. And having heard about Islamic contribution to science and medicine, it was wonderful to see another example of Islamic ingenuity in the design of a 100 foot, 3 storey astrolabe that the ruler Ulughbek built in 1420 that he used to locate 1000 stars. Of course, it seems also be typical that he was beheaded as being too progressive. Maybe the assassin is buried in a beautiful cemetery where it is said that if you can count the steps going up and down and obtain the same number that your sins will be forgotten and you will enter paradise.

It was in Samarkand that I felt that I was getting close to a traditional way of life. The bazaars are terrific, as open and wild as those we saw in Afghanistan in the 70's. The restaurants offer native food. The monuments are attractive. My trip to a country bazaar brought me within minutes of a range of mountains in Tajikistan. The most aggressive salesman in that bazaar was someone want to sell me dope.

From Samarkhand, the silk road goes up across the mountains of Kyrghzstan and into China. But travel on this part is more arduous, for sure. Having traveled to Bishkek, I'd say that Kyrghzstan is more interesting for being unsettled. By the time the road gets into China, the way is strenuous, taking a traveler down into Turfan the second lowest part on earth after the Dead Sea.

But, I finished my trip by driving on a four lane separated highway to Tashkent. Not my favorite city at all but a classic example of a soviet built place (rebuilt after an earthquake in 1966). Kazakstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan are all moving ahead in this post-soviet period. They maintain strong, dominant leaders while facing a developing spirit of liberty in their population. The strongest challenge facing these leaders is how to give more people their economic freedom. The leaders are frightened about giving too much freedom, as it means loosening the few threads of control that they can hold. But, unless they manage to liberate things, the excessive control exercised by a few will continue to condemn the whole population to a grim existence.

Yet, there are very few ways that anything we do in the West in terms of liberty and freedom can be applied directly. The specific culture of Central Asia that predates the last 150 years of Russian and then Soviet imperialism requires serious understanding, especially as they develop their vast resources. If the glories of their past civilizations tell anything about the future, they will certainly enjoy greatness again.

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