The urban fact in pre-Islamic Central Asia : diachronic approach, synchronic approach, III : the urban crisis and reurbanization (^IIIe-VIe s.), a general process ? (continued) (2)

In anticipation of the detailed examination that follows, we can sketch a balance sheet for the ^{4th-6thcentury} using the criteria applied by Ward-Perkins to the Roman West.

1. Urban decline: yes, but this applies above all to the largest organizations.
2. Monetary regression: yes, overall, for gold; far from generalized for the rest. Bactrian documents from the small kingdom of Rōb (332-771), though not very urbanized, attest to the continuity of state taxation.
3. Decline in craft production: yes, particularly for pottery, but not in a lasting or general way.
4. Decline in the use of writing: we have few clues, but the conditions for observation are very different, as writing was, much more than in the West, the business of scribes, and these crossed all regimes with routines intact (see here again the archives of Rōb). The "Old Letters" of^4th-century Sogdian merchants were written by scribes, but according to a^7th-century Chinese account, the children of this class of Sogdians learned to read. Poor literacy" is attested by the numerous inscriptions incised on shards.

In addition to successive invasions, there are possible non-migratory factors. Samples taken from Altai lakes indicate a cooling phase (c. 370-580), which we are tempted to link to the successive migrations of the Huns and then the Turks [4]. As for the "Justinian plague", in the absence of any paleopathological studies, we don't know whether it reached Central Asia (we know from chronicles that it was present in Iran at least at the beginning of the 7th^century ), but at certain sites in Tokharestān, massive deposits of corpses suggest epidemic episodes. In contrast to the periods covered in previous years, we have relatively numerous and above all highly diverse written sources: Chinese [5], Roman-Byzantine, supplemented by Armenian, Arabo-Persian (retrospective) and even, for once, Indian sources (epigraphic "chronicles"). These sources provide information on the overall political situation, sometimes with precise indications of the existence of cities.

[3] C. Lo Muzio, Archeologia dell'Asia Centrale preislamica, Milan, Mondadori Università, 2017, published too late to benefit the present lecture, will now be the reference.

[4] F. Schlütz, F. Lehmkuhl, "Climatic change in the Russian Altai, southern Siberia", Vegetation History and Archaebotany Journal, vol. 16, 2007, pp. 101-118; D. V. Chernykh, V. P. Galakhov, D. V. Zolotov, "Synchronous fluctuations of glaciers in the Alps and Altai in the second half of the Holocene", The Holocene, vol. 23, no. 7, 2013, pp. 1074-1079.

[5] All official Chinese sources (apart from Buddhist pilgrims) are collected and amply commented in YU Taishan, A Concise Commentary on Memoirs on the Western Regions in the Official Histories of the Western and Eastern Han, Wei, Jin, and Southern and Northern Dynasties, Beijing, The Commercial Press, 2014.