An Historical Atlas of Central Asia.

• Author: Perry, John R.
• Position: Book Review

An Historical Atlas of Central Asia. By YURI BREGEL. Handbook of Oriental Studies, vol. 9. Leiden: BRILL, 2003. Pp. xii + 110, maps. $181.

In response to the enthusiastic reception of a portfolio of historical maps of Central Asia which he published in 2000, and building on several series of historical maps of the Soviet Union and China in particular, Professor Bregel has crowned his bibliography of reference works on this region with a splendid folio volume of forty-seven maps, each with a facing page of commentary. By the nature of the geography and history of Central Asia, they are predominantly fluid and dynamic creations, tracing the lines of migration, trade, and invasion, and the undulating outlines of the imperial and nomadic polities that dominated the region from the time of Alexander to the post-Soviet world of A.D. 2000. The first eight maps deal with the period before Islam (map 2 shows 193 major archaeological sites); maps 9-17 take us up to the Mongol conquests; 18-31 to the eve of Russian expansion; and the remainder through the Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet eras, with period city maps of Bukhara, Samarkand, and Khiva, and one showing the location of Islamic monuments (this last with three pages of accompanying text). A preface on methodology, a bibliographical introduction, and a four-column, eleven-page index complete the volume.

Other topical maps show trade routes, tribal migrations, and the course of revolution and civil war in western Turkestan during the years 1917-22. As Bregel notes in his preface (p. vii), the cultural definition of the region is more significant than its geographical delineation: Central Asia is the western, Turco-Iranian, part of the Inner Asian heartland, progressively Islamicized, though still sharing features in common with the non-Muslim nomads of eastern Inner Asia--a borderland to both of these cultural regions. The major political events and processes traced on the maps were often bound up with developments beyond the physical frontiers of the Qara-Qum and Kopet Dagh, the Dasht-i Qipchaq and the Altay, the Kunlun, Karakorams, and Hindu Kush. Though partitioned entirely between Russia and China in modern times, this region of the Silk Road, the Paper Trail, and the Great Game has retained and even increased its appeal to archaeologists, anthropologists, and strategists of today. The central hydrological features have of course changed dramatically, as can be seen in the...