The urban phenomenon in pre-Islamic Central Asia : diachronic and synchronic approaches (continued) (2)

In the 12th^century , descendants of the Ghaznevid Turkish governors created the short-lived Khwârezmshâh empire, which extended from Afghanistan to Baghdad. Then came the era of devastation with the Mongols, followed by Tamerlane; the flow of water was disrupted, the desert gained ground everywhere, and the Aral Sea shrank to an extent never seen before, not even today (which puts the current catastrophe into perspective). Life retreated to the Khiva oasis, home to a sometimes brilliant artistic life. The Russian protectorate was imposed in 1873, and the khanate abolished in 1920.

The Tolstov expedition

Before presenting the different periods in the history of Khorezm and their main sites, it is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the man without whom this history would undoubtedly have been irretrievably lost: Sergej Pavlevich Tolstov (1907-1976) [1]. Few civilizations owe the bulk of their rediscovery to a single man: Sarianidi for the Oxus Civilization, Tolstov for the Khorezm (and unlike Sarianidi, he put together a team that outlived him).

Tolstov was an orphan, but with a cumbersome pedigree: he came from a family of Ural Cossacks who had been officers in the Imperial Guard in St. Petersburg, and above all his uncle Vladimir Tolstov was one of the leading generals of the White Armies. Throughout his career, his detractors reminded him of his origins as the "son of enemies of the people", a fact that must be borne in mind before judging the painful manifestations of political conformism to which he was constantly subjected.

As a student at Moscow University's Faculty of History and Ethnography, where he specialized in Turkish peoples, he received a more solid historical and philological training than the other pioneers of Central Asian archaeology. But around 1930, Soviet ethnology found itself caught up in the brutal, sometimes physical, liquidation of folklore circles and museums inherited from the pre-revolutionary period, at the very moment, not coincidentally, when collectivization was about to destroy peasant society. The young Tolstov published the first Marxist ethnography textbook. In the end, he embraced a path that would save the discipline from extinction and allow it to climb out of the trap: allying himself with archaeology and becoming part of a "complex" approach to the past - we'd say multidisciplinary today - invested with a social mandate (for example, the scientific study of popular religious beliefs "to facilitate their total disappearance" - in retrospect, we can see this as at least partly a rhetorical device). He discovered archaeology, as well as the Khorezm, which high authorities had decided to explore because Russian military topographers had already noted before 1914 that it was strewn with ruins testifying to an ancient prosperity, which could return with the help of modern technology, in the Saint-Simonian climate of the time. From 1929 onwards, he took part in the first exploration missions to the Khorezm, led by others. In 1937, he established himself as the man for the job, with the creation of the Khorezm Archaeological and Ethnographic Expedition, which from the pre-war period onwards produced a considerable body of results, with still primitive means (the mission travelled by donkey and camel caravan). In 1948, he published Le Khorezm ancien, written as a thesis before the war, and the same year, Sur les traces de l'ancienne civilisation du Khorezm, aimed at a wider audience and recording the results of the immediate post-war period [2]. Unlike many Soviet archaeologists, Tolstov wrote well. He knew how to convey the emotion of the discoveries made during this heroic period: Toprak-kala, Koj-Krylgan-kala, sites that were to form the basis of the mission's work until the end of the 1950s.

In the aftermath of the war, Tolstov became a man of power, accumulating positions in Moscow, principally as Director of the Institute of Ethnography and Secretary of the Academy of Sciences. It's a well-known fact that he enjoyed Stalin's personal protection: in 1948, he was awarded the coveted Stalin Prize at Stalin's personal instigation. He then obtained considerable resources for his mission, unlike any other expedition, including military vehicles and aircraft. The Khorezm was the only region of Central Asia to be photographed from the air until the post-Soviet era; everywhere else, aerial photography was out of the missions' financial reach, and publication of existing photos was forbidden.

However, shortly before Stalin's death, his political fortunes began to turn. In 1951, he had to make a public self-criticism at Moscow University for having quoted too much from the work of the linguist-archaeologist Nikolaj Marr (1864-1934), once Stalin's pet subject, whose theses were condemned after his death as "perversion of Marxism" (which would have to be re-examined: Marr was no Lyssenko, and not quite one of those swindlers who took advantage of the system's loopholes). In the 1950s, his life seemed to be divided in two. In Moscow, he managed a power base on the defensive, retreating into the Institute of Ethnography. His great rival Boris Rybakov now had the upper hand, occupying the key post of Director of the Institute of Archaeology at the Academy of Sciences. He blocked Tolstov's election to the Academy, which for a Soviet scientist was the ultimate humiliation. Beyond these career rivalries, hardly interesting today, there were real ideological issues at stake, between chorasmocentrism and slavocentrism. To overstate the case, Rybakov derives the whole of medieval and post-medieval Russian civilization from Kievan Russia, which is purely Slavic and free of any Scandinavian, Iranian or Steppe heritage. On the contrary, Tolstov sees the ancestors of the Russian state in the hybrid political formations, both nomadic and sedentary, which in antiquity had spread between Rome and China, well south of what would become the first historical Russia. He believes he can discern a political "carcass" carried by related dynasties, such as those of Khorezm, the Kushans, the Arsacids of Iran and Armenia, the kingdom of Bosphorus, with also South-Siberian alliances. Indeed, we're not far from Marr's insistence on the role of Asian peoples in historical processes, including the future advent of world socialism.

Meanwhile in Khorezm, Tolstov returned to the field every summer, although his Stakhanovist work regime was beginning to cause him serious health problems. He was supported by a large, young team recruited from among Moscow's best students. Those I still knew remembered his visits to construction sites as permanent conferences, where he would try out the most daring ideas in front of his student audience. He would make the careers of many. He also endeavored to promote local scholars, but in this he was no different from other mission chiefs in Central Asia. He gave many Jewish students a chance, unlike Rybakov, who made no secret of his anti-Semitism. To illustrate the mission's publications, he brought in "avant-garde" artists such as Igor Savitskij, founder of the now-famous Nukus painting museum.

Despite his relative disgrace at the top, Tolstov was the first Central Asian archaeologist to be translated abroad [3]. As soon as the "thaw" began in 1956-1958, his friend Gordon Childe organized a lecture tour for him in England, Paris, Rome and India. Childe shared his Marxist ideology and also his conception of the unity between archaeology and anthropology - Childe's legacy is undoubtedly to be recognized in the fact that even today at Cambridge there is a single department of Archaeology and Anthropology, the British counterpart to Tolstov's Institute of Ethnography.

In 1962, his best book, Les anciens deltas de l'Oxus et du Iaxarte [4], was published, in which he corrected certain earlier excesses and extended the scope of his research to the lower Syr-darya. In 1964, a stroke put an end to his scientific activities. His team worked until the 1970s, but increasingly on the periphery (lower Syr-darya, Ustjurt), since in central Khorezm after some twenty campaigns the work could be considered complete, and in any case it had become largely impossible with the revival of irrigation (today the only sites that can still be studied are those on higher ground). Then the excavations died out for lack of funds. Since 1995, a "Karakalpako-Australian" mission has been working on the last intact oasis of the central Khorezm, that of Tashkirman; it is co-directed by Alison Betts, professor at the University of Sydney, and by Vadim Jagodin, one of the last direct disciples of Tolstov, who has just left us. It was a new beginning, on a much smaller spatial scale, but with the full benefit of today's methods and techniques.

During his lifetime, Tolstov's work was rarely questioned, at least not openly, in the USSR and elsewhere. Even today, the solidarity between his heirs, and even beyond, creates strong defensive reflexes; until the 1990s, articles criticizing the Expedition doctrine were blocked in leading Moscow journals.

All the same, it must be remembered that many things have aged. I'll group them under four headings.

1) A rigid scheme of socio-historical periodization, borrowed not directly from Marx but from Engels via Stalin (his opuscule Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism). All societies pass through four stages: primitive community, slavery, feudalism, capitalism. Until the end of the Soviet period, and sometimes even today, this framework remained as rhetoric: only the names were changed to "prehistoric", "ancient", "medieval" and "modern". At least, Tolstov made sense of it: the digging of the great magisterial canals from the ^7th century B.C. onwards (a date now revised downwards) could only have been achieved with masses of slaves. Since then, Boris Litvinskij has recalculated and shown that village drudgery mobilized over short periods could suffice, as demonstrated in 1939 by the digging of the Ferghana Grand Canal. It is true, however, that census inscriptions from Toprak-kala (see below), dating from the end of the ^3rd century AD, indicate the abundant presence of slaves in every household, all bearing or having received Chorasmian names. Its location on the steppe front gave Khorezm a privileged position (confirmed until the Russian protectorate) as a slave market.

2) Absolute chronology: this remains the main problem to this day. Khorezm archaeology could not rely on ^14C, which was not used in the USSR at the time, nor on dated inscriptions (the "Chorasmian era" - still not precisely defined - only attested in inscriptions from the ^3rd c. B.C. onwards, was only discovered in the 1960s), nor on imported, in this case Kushan, coins before the ^2nd c. A reliable study of Khorezm's own coinage only appeared after Tolstov's death [5]. For the pre-monetary periods, material analogies with the best-known series from southern regions are fairly limited, given the originality of the local material culture. Tolstov and, above all, his successors put a lot of faith in arrowheads, which were themselves dated by comparison with series from the Scytho-Sarmatian domain. We've come full circle since then.

Since the use of ^14Cdating (admittedly vulnerable to sampling conditions), we've realized that Tolstov's dates are often a century or two too high. His successors have sometimes pushed things even further [6]. At present, there is a need for a general overhaul. Paradoxically, Khorezm is the only region in Central Asia whose settlement map can be comprehensively mapped for each period, and at the same time it is very difficult for a given period - at least before the beginning of our era - to synchronize sites, some of which are still only accessible through Tolstov's publications - and therefore poorly dated - while others have been subject to chronological revisions. G. Khodzhaniyazov, The military architecture of ancient Chorasmia, Paris, 2006, supplemented by notes from the Australian excavators, provides a partial revision of dating, but without proposing new synchronic maps. A more systematic and carefully argued re-examination, for the period up to the ^1st century AD, has been undertaken by Michele Minardi in Ancient Chorasmia: A polity between the semi-nomadic and sedentary cultural areas of Central Asia, forthcoming in the Acta Iranica series.

[1] Apart from Tolstov's own books, which are often quite personal in tone, see S.A. Yatsenko, "The biggest expedition", Transoxiana, 15, August 2007(online), and V. Germanov, "S.P. Tolstov: maître, docteur, commandeur, ou l'histoire à travers l'archéologie et l'ethnographie", Cahiers d'Asie centrale, 12, 2002, pp. 193-215 (to be used with caution, as affected by a conspiratorial bias).

[2] Drevnij Khorezm, Moscow, 1948; Po sledam drevnekhorezmijskoj tsivilizatsii, Moscow-Leningrad, 1948.

[3] Auf der Spuren der altchoresmischen Kultur, Berlin (GDR), 1953.

[4] Po drevnim del'tam Oksa i Jaksarta, Moscow, 1962.

[5] B.I. Vajnberg, Monety drevnego Khorezma, Moscow, 1977.

[6] Ju.A. Rapoport, E.E. Nerazik, L.M. Levina, V nizov'jakh Oksa i Jaksarta, Moscow, 2000.