A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Introduction 27
an archaeological site today, whereas Yasi/Turkestan not only survived,
but also became one of the main railroad stations on the line connecting
Tashkent with Orenburg, Moscow, and St.Petersburg.This line,
built in the first years of the twentieth century, follows the northern bank
of the Syr Darya and, some 200 kilometers downstream from Sighnaq,
passes by Kyzyl Orda, a town founded in 1820 as a fortified frontier
outpost of the khanate of Khoqand at the peak of its expansion.It was
then called Aq Meshit (Kazakh for “White Mosque”); its strategic position
made it a prime target for Russia’s incipient conquest of Central
Asia, and the town fell in 1853.Its name was then changed to Perovsk
in honor of General Perovskiy, the commander of the Russian troops.
Kyzyl Orda means “Red Camp” in Kazakh, a name that replaced
Perovsk in 1926 when the town became the capital of the Soviet republic
of Kazakhstan, a distinction ceded in 1929 to Alma-Ata.One may
ponder the similarity as well as the difference between the roles played
by Sighnaq and Kyzyl Orda: both proved their strategic worth for invaders
from the Kipchak steppe or as defense posts against them.Down to
the sixteenth century, these invaders, whether Turkic or Mongol, were
medieval nomads; in the nineteenth, they were the vanguard of a
modern Western empire.
Another town with still more modern associations, Jasaly, grew up on
the right (northern) bank of the Syr Darya half-way between Kyzyl
Orda and the Aral Sea.In the final decades of the USSR it acquired the
important function of a support city for the “Soviet Cape Canaveral,”
the space program base at Baikonur in central Kazakhstan; it was then
renamed as Leninsk.In contrast to Jasaly/Leninsk, two historical cities
on the lower Syr Darya are now archaeological sites.Not far downstream
from where Leninsk was eventually to appear but on the bank of
a now extinct branch of the Syr Darya lay Jand, near the modern town
of Kazalinsk.Still farther downstream lay Yangikant, a town on the left
(southern) side of the apex of the river’s delta by its debouchure into the
Aral Sea.Both Jand and Yangikant played a significant role in the tenth
and eleventh centuries as centers of interaction between the sedentary
world to the south and that of the steppe nomads to the north.The merchants
and urbanites of the settlements were Muslims by then, whereas
the nomads, mostly Oghuz Turks, were still pagans or on the verge of
conversion.
If we draw a line due north from Yasi/Turkestan, we pass through the
core of modern Kazakhstan.The republic’s territory coincides with the
eastern two-thirds of what Muslim authors of the Middle Ages called