A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Introduction 11
Silk Road’s trunk routes linking Sinkiang through Samarkand with
Nishapur and points farther west, as well as the routes going to Balkh
and India, and those going to Khwarazm and Russia.This made the city
one of the great emporia of Central Asia, a role enhanced by exports of
its own products, such as textiles woven from local silk and from cotton
grown in the fertile oasis.The latter benefited from a sophisticated dam
built some distance upstream, later destroyed by the Mongols, and partly
rebuilt not long before the nineteenth-century Russian conquest (Bandi
Sultani, “The Royal Dam”).The rebuilding of the dam did not restore
the city to its former importance, nor did the railroad built by the
Russians; the latter did reaffirm, however, the location’s strategic importance
as a station on the road to India: the railroad’s extension to Kushka
had the purpose of a supply line in the event of a push into Afghanistan
and the ensuing likelihood of a war with Britain.Merv itself is a historical
name correctly applicable only to the ruins of the metropolis
destroyed in 1221 by the Mongols; the modern name is Mary, a town
that grew about 30 kilometers to the west of the archaeological site.
To the east of Khurasan, in present-day northern Afghanistan, is the
aforementioned region known in antiquity as Bactria and called by the
Arabs and Persians Tokharistan.Bactra, its capital, became the Balkh of
the early Islamic centuries, and flourished until it was destroyed by the
Mongols in 1221.It eventually recovered, but since the end of the
fifteenth century it has had to yield primacy to a funerary sanctuary
called Mazar-i Sharif located a short distance to the southeast; this
shrine competes, in popular Islam, with the Iraqi town of Najaf for the
distinction of allegedly being the final resting place of Ali, the prophet
Muhammad’s son-in-law and Shii Islam’s first imam.The originally
Iranian Bactria came to be known as “land of the Tokharians,” in the
early centuries of our era, as a result of this group’s migration into its
territory.Unlike their kinsmen who settled in northeastern Sinkiang and
asserted their ethnolinguistic individuality there (the Tokharian-speaking
inhabitants of Turfan, Karashahr, and Kucha), the Tokharians of
Bactria, memorable as the people who played a leading role in the creation
of the famous Kushan empire, became Iranized without leaving any
trace of their original identity.The Iranian population also remained
unaffected by the rule of lateral branches of Western Turks that
extended there shortly before the inception of Muslim conquests.On
the other hand, in more recent centuries the originally Iranian
Tokharistan became infiltrated by Turkic tribes, chiefly Turkmen and
Uzbek, to such an extent that it is also called Afghan Turkestan.