Despite the astonishing richness, historical importance, and cultural fecundity of the Iranian world in the first millennium, and the fact that it is vital to understanding world history in both Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the Iranian world of this era has been, and still is, as noted, woefully understudied, due no doubt to the very high scholarly demands required for such study of Iranian Central Asia in particular. Not only does such an attempt necessitate collaboration among historians, philologists, paleographers, archeologists, and numismatists, but it also requires the knowledge of many different languages, some archaic, ranging from Bactrian and Soghdian to classical Arabic, Persian, and Chinese. When one undertakes to examine change and transformation from the pre-Islamic period of Late Antiquity through the early Islamic period (up until the eleventh century, when Turkic political domination entered a new phase), matters become even more complex and the obstacles more formidable, since it requires full mastery of both civilizational worlds.
The rationale behind this volume, therefore, is that such an undertaking can only be accomplished collaboratively, by bringing together the various experts on these two completely different eras and the discrete linguistic areas: no one can possibly be a real master of all of the various demanding areas of study. This kind of collaborative effort to cast light on the transition from pre-Islamic to Islamic Iran and Inner Asia is therefore also, unfortunately, rare, since the resources required for bringing the various experts together from the far-flung corners of the earth are considerable. Such an enterprise, in fact, has been undertaken only thrice before the present volume, and the aim of the present work is to extend a bit further the trailblazing path laid out by those works.
The approach we have adopted is slightly different, however, from those three previous efforts, which both involved much narrower foci of inquiry respectively, the Islamization of Central Asia; the role of nomads from pre-Islamic into Islamic times; and material culture of the period. The present volume, though it obviously contains essays by some of the same scholars (inevitable in a field such as, for instance, Bactrian, in which the number of experts worldwide can be counted on the fingers of one hand), did not limit the scope of its investigation to any one subtopic or type of historical source, but rather asked participants to focus upon any particular aspect of life and human civilization, either in which important change took place during the transition from the pre-Islamic to the Islamic period, or, conversely, in which one finds the creative reuse of the pre-Islamic past. Its topic is therefore the much broader one of change and continuity over time in Iran and Central Asia, during the long transition from the pre-Islamic to the Islamic period.
Some of the essays herein thus offer a wide vision of the longue durée, for instance the archeological examinations by Frantz Grenet and Rocco Rante of, respectively, the design, structure, and characteristics of Iranian towns and of the oasis of Bukhara, and how these changed and developed over time; Sören Stark’s essay provides a similar analysis for early Islamic Bukhara, also utilizing archeological evidence.
Four of the essays, by Nicholas Sims-Williams, Etsuko Kageyama, Yutaka Yoshida, and Michael Shenkar, provide fascinating illuminations of Sogdian culture and influence– in Sogdia, China, and points in between, both at specific moments in time and over the course of the transition to the Islamic period after the Arab conquest.
Minoru Inaba and Arezou Azad’s articles are devoted to Bactria and beyond. Minoru Inaba’s study examines the eight-century narrative of the member of a Chinese diplomatic mission that traveled through Central Asia en route to India at the time of the ʿAbbāsid Revolution and the battle at the Talas river, returning from India forty years later, and what the mission’s travel account reveals about trade routes, the state of the Islamic conquests, and the eastern borders of the Caliphate over that forty-year period; while Arezou Azad’s research analyzes the view of Islamization contained in the literary sources, in this case, the important surviving local history of Balkh.
Finally, the three essays by Louise Marlow, Gabrielle van den Berg, and Dilnoza Duturaeva all involve investigations of culture, using very different and less usual kinds of sources than either historical chronicles or archeology: Marlow examines the literary reflections of an important Iranian author, writing in Arabic in the late tenth and early eleventh century, but musing on the Persian language and also the pre-Islamic Iranian past; van den Berg also utilizes the literary record, but of a different sort – Persian poetry of early Islamic times– in order to capture how the Iranian pre-Islamic past was viewed and used by Muslims of the time; and Duturaeva’s essay, treating the eastern end of the Iranian world, adduces Chinese records in order to illuminate the Qarakhanid attempt “to establish themselves as middlemen between the Turko-Islamic and the Sino-Tibetan worlds,” and to show the developments undergone by the Silk Road trade at this time.
Of course, numerous aspects of the transformations that took place in the Iranian world remain to be explored, and no volume ranging over a world so dazzlingly fecund, and encompassing such a vast quantity of material, both temporally and spatially, can even aspire to be in any way comprehensive; but it is the hope of the editors and contributors to the present work that it will have cast a little more illumination upon this particular, vibrant corner of the “dark backward and abysm of time.”