The urban phenomenon in pre-Islamic Central Asia : diachronic and synchronic approaches (continued) (1)

In the more southerly regions where we carried out our survey last year, the archaeological landscape comprised both fortified cities, sometimes immense, deserted at various times, and small and medium-sized sites with a very uncertain survival rate. Pre-Islamic Khorezm has a very different face (fig. 1): there are no very large cities (the first capital, Akchakhan-kala, is 42 ha in size, compared with 130 ha at Aï Khanoum, 220 ha at Samarkand and 400 ha at Bactres; the largest sites are largely empty enclosures). Outside the cities, many areas are - or at least were until the 1950s - an intact landscape of castles, farms and irrigated plots, preserved in some cases since the ^4th century BC (see the spectacular ground and aerial photos published by the Khorezm Archaeological Expedition). There are also enormous contrasts in the nature of the archaeological material: highly sophisticated mud buildings - sometimes veritable architect's sketches with a real concern for inventiveness - are contrasted with furniture of an often mediocre standard, degraded transpositions in small format of Iranian or steppe models, with, however, rare flashes of brilliance in the decoration of palaces (Akchakhan-kala, Toprak-kala, Gjaur-kala).

Another specificity of Khorezm archaeology that needs to be emphasized now is that, far more than anywhere else in Central Asia, it has from the outset (i.e. from the late 1930s) been at the service of genuine geographical thinking, with a global vision on the scale of an entire country. This quality is of course due to the exceptional conservation of the landscape, but it is also the work of one man, S.P. Tolstov. He and his collaborators, notably the geographer B.V. Andrianov, understood from the outset that canals were the major articulation of the anthropized landscape and that sites should be grouped in spatial and chronological clusters according to the canals that served them. Before them, only Aurel Stein had done this in the Taklamakan oases. This powerful method lends the Expedition's publications a family air with the great texts of the French geographical and historical school of the same period - although there was no exchange between them.

Within its current agricultural boundaries, acquired through Soviet recultivation, the Khorezm currently measures around500 x 300 km (a quarter of France), divided between :

• the right bank, the historic heart of the country between the beginning of our era and the Arab conquest, currently occupied by Karakalpakia, an autonomous republic within Uzbekistan, capital Nukus ;
• the left bank, center of the Khiva Khanate, the last political formation of the pre-Soviet era, directly attached to Uzbekistan( Khorezmoblast );
• peripheral areas attached to Turkmenistan (site of Old Urgench) and Kazakhstan (Lower Syr-darya).

These boundaries had no impact on archaeological exploration during the Soviet era, but they do now.

From a hydrographic point of view, this is not strictly speaking an oasis, but an imbrication of the Amu-darya and Syr-darya deltas. The country is surrounded on all sides: to the north by the Aral Sea and the Ustjurt plateau, the southern wintering ground for steppe nomads; to the east and south by the Kyzyjk-kum and Kara-Kum deserts. The only way to avoid crossing the deserts was by river: the Amu-darya (nine stages in the Middle Ages to Bukhara), and at times its western effluents. The myth of the river route between the Oxus and the Caspian determined Peter the Great's decision to launch the disastrous Bekovich expedition (1717), the first attempt at Russian control of Central Asia, and then, under Stalin, the aborted project for the "Great Turkmen Canal" (the canal that was eventually built, the Karakum Canal at the foot of the Kopet-dagh, avoided the Khorezm).

Khorezm in ancient historical sources (up to the 4th^century AD)

In the Avesta, it is mentioned once (Yt.10.14) as Xvāirizǝm. The most likely etymology is "scorched earth" (*hvāra-zam-), cf. today's Karakum ("Black Sands") and Kyzylkum ("Red Sands"). Toponymy expressed not the progressively cultivated landscape but what it was created at the expense of. It could also reflect an external, in this case southern, point of view.

We find this in Achaemenid inscriptions whenever there are lists of peoples, from Bisutun onwards (but not among the revolting peoples), in the form Uvārazmīy, an artificial retranscription of the authentic name. The country appears in the same group as Parthyene, Arie, Bactria and Sogdiana; it probably never constituted a satrapy, but was administered by the satrap of Bactria. It also appears in the foundation tablet of Darius' palace in Susa: "the turquoise worked here was brought from Khorezm". As for a long time, the main known mines were in the Nishapur region, this was seen as an argument in favor of a "Great Chorasmia" that would also have included Arie and Margiane - a historiographical myth built from over-interpreted passages by Hecataeus of Miletus and Herodotus (Henning believed in it and made it Zoroaster's homeland). Since then, archaeologists have rediscovered mines in Kyzyl-kum, which were mined in the ^7th-5th century BC.

Chorasmian contingents are mentioned by name only once in the context of the Median Wars (Herodotus VII.66), at the review of Doriskos in Thrace, but thereafter they are not mentioned in any battle. This was probably a symbolic contingent (P. Briant), or they could have been confused with other contingents from Eastern Iran. However, it is known that there were Chorasmians in the Achaemenid garrison of Elephantine on the Upper Nile, around 400 A.D. The fact that they are not mentioned in the battles against Alexander has been taken as an argument for assuming that the country had broken its ties with the Achaemenid Empire by then, but this deduction may be excessive. What is certain at the time of Alexander's conquest is that Chorasmia had one or more kings: Spitamene, leader of the Bactrian rebellion, took refuge or attempted to take refuge with them (Arrien IV.15.4); in 328, after he had been surrendered, Pharasmanes "king of the Chorasmians" sent Alexander an embassy to Bactria or Samarkand (Quinte Curce VIII.1.8), or, according to Arrien, he himself came with 1,500 horsemen. According to Quinte Curce, the Chorasmians were neighbors of the Massagetes and Dahes, which is correct; according to Arrien, who reworked the geographical data based on literary references, they were neighbors of Colchis and the Amazons. Pharasmanes proposed a joint operation against the "Euxine Bridge", for which he would serve as a guide. Some modern commentators assume a misinterpretation on the part of the Greeks: the "Euxine Bridge" would be the Aral, and the aim was in fact to obtain Alexander's alliance in order to consolidate his power in Khorezm. In any case, the Macedonians believed that Khorezm was closer to their country than it was, because they confused the Syr-darya and the Don under the name of Tanais.

After this single contact at the summit, Chorasmia was lost to sight. Strabo (XI.8.8.) mentions the Chorasmians alongside the Apasiakai / Apasioi (the "aquatic Saces"?) and as part of the wider group of Massagetes and Saces, but admits that nothing is known about these regions. Otherwise (Ptolemy, Pliny the Elder), it's just a name in lists, with no precise spatial reference. The geographical specificity of the Aral Sea is unknown and will remain so in the West until the ^13th century, when Guillaume de Rubrouck will be the first to recognize it. But when Strabo, Pliny and Ptolemy mention the river route between the Oxus and the Caspian, there is indeed a local basis:

"For Aristobulus, he declares that the Oxus is the largest of all the rivers he saw in Asia, those of India excepted. He also says that it is easily navigable, a claim which he, like Eratosthenes, takes from Patroclus(a general in the service of Seleucus ^I), and he assures us that it is used to carry to the Hyrcanian Sea many Indian goods, which then cross the sea to Albania and are transported to the Euxine Bridge by the Cyros and the stages that follow it." (Strabo XI.7.2.).

Notwithstanding the lyricism that this passage once inspired in Edward Gibbon ("silk cargoes descended the Oxus, crossed the Caspian Sea, ascended the Cyrus (the Koura) and the current of the Phase (the Rion) carried them into the Pont-Euxin and the Mediterranean"), the geological and archaeological reality is more modest: the Uzboj, an effluent of the Amu-darya towards the Caspian, flowed abundantly in the Neolithic period, then, for a time, from the^5th to the ^9th century., and again between the end of the ^14th c. and the end of the ^16th c., but it never gave rise to a lateral irrigation system or to major settlements, although the channel may have been cultivated. The only fortified site, Igdy-kala, was probably a Parthian and then Sassanid outpost facing the steppe; there are also nomadic cemeteries from all periods. The waterfalls made continuous navigation impossible; in fact, it was easier to follow the banks. In 1717, the unfortunate Bekovitch's troops made the same observation as Patroclus had once made, sailing 80 km upstream from Balkhân Bay (Krasnovodsk), and drew the same erroneous conclusion.