A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Introduction 25
favorite winter camping ground, and the town of Barskaun or Barskhan,
on its southern shore, functioned as a place of trade and a way station
on the Silk Road network.
We have already proposed the Syr Darya as the northern limit of
Transoxania, a demarcation line beyond which, as we have said, lay
what early Arab geographers called Turkestan (Bilad al-Turk or Turkistan),
land of the Turkic nomads.A rather wide swath along the northern bank
of the river, however, had the same physiognomy as Transoxania and
Fergana, as we have pointed out, with irrigated agriculture, towns, trade
routes, and a similar population of Sogdian stock, though with an
increasing proportion of the Turkic element.This was especially true of
the middle course of the Syr Darya, to the northeast and east of which
loom the westernmost spurs of the Tianshan, ultimately protruding into
the Kazakh steppe under the name of Karatau.Streams descending
from those mountains created conditions similar to those along the
Zarafshan.One of these streams is the Chirchik; an early town near its
banks was Chach, which the Arabs (whose language and alphabet lack
the consonant ch) spelled Shash or Tash, and which, with the addition of
the common Sogdian suffix -kent, came to be known as Tashkent.Shash
was also the name of the surrounding region, and it seems that a competing
or earlier name for the city was Binkath before giving way to
“Shash city,” Shashkent or Tashkent.A number of other towns
appeared in this area.Some of them succumbed to the effects of the
nomadic movements and wars which frequently afflicted the area; others
have survived and even risen in prominence; still others are new administrative
and logistical centers developed since the Russian conquest.
Tashkent is the most obvious example; from among the others, Isfijab,
Otrar, Yasi, Sighnaq, and Kyzyl Orda reflect the history of this area as
a transition zone.Isfijab was situated on the northern bank of the Arys,
a stream flowing into the Syr Darya, on the road from Tashkent to Taraz
and on to Semireche at the fringe of the steppe.In the eighth and ninth
centuries it thus had the function of a borderland city facing the world
of the pagan Turks, and a rallying point for the ghazis, holy warriors of
Islam penetrating the steppe with the new message.These ghazis often
preferred communal living in separate structures known as rabats or
ribats, fortified cloisters or hostels situated along the limes of the Dar al-
Islam or as advanced posts beyond those limits.Such were the many
rabats of Isfijab, financed in part by its citizenry.The religious zeal of
the Isfijabis was to earn their city an honor they could not have foreseen
at the time of their conversion: for Sayram, as Isfijab increasingly came