Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the present.

• Author: Hitch, Doug
• Position: Book review

By Christopher I. Beckwith. Princeton: Princeton university press, 2009. Pp. xxv + 472. $35.

The many years Beckwith has dedicated to the study and teaching of the history of Central Eurasia shine through in this intellectually wide-ranging book. Not many scholars are comfortable working with materials in Chinese, Old Tibetan, Arabic, Old Turkic, and a range of other languages. And not many books discuss the Koguryo, whose realm bordered on the Pacific, and the Franks, whose territory touched the Atlantic, on the same page (135). However, the strong points in this book are often overshadowed by glaring flaws. It probably should not be used as a textbook unless the instructor knows the subject well and can help students focus on the book's strengths and avoid its flaws.

The historical core of the book, twelve chapters long (pp. 29-319), begins with "The Chariot Warriors" and the Proto-Indo-Europeans in the late third millennium B.C. and ends with "Central Asia Reborn" and the twenty-first century. The most important historical points are well covered. The lengthy bibliography (pp. 427-55) and comprehensive index (pp. 457-72) magnify the usefulness of the volume. A book covering such enormous historical geography as this one should contain many detailed maps. Instead, there are only two maps, one inside the front cover on premodern Central Eurasia and a corresponding one inside the back with modern political details. The book would be significantly more useful with more maps, especially if it is intended for use as a textbook.

The author almost seems to seek out and relish the role of iconoclast, frequently and with vigor challenging traditional views. In some cases the traditional ideas deserve to be overthrown and here the author does a fine service. He amply succeeds in showing that Central Eurasia is central to world history rather than peripheral to it, and that Central Eurasia was no more made up of barbarians than any other part of the world. But in other cases the author goes too far with his proposed intellectual revolutions. The idea that Avestan, the Old Iranian liturgical language of Zoroastrianism, was a "phonologically Iranized Indic language" (p. 368) will probably not win converts among Iranian historical linguists. And he wishes to cast away the idea that civilization might come from Sumeria, Egypt, or China: "Central Eurasia is our homeland, the place where our civilization started" (p. 319). The author is also prone to expounding idiosyncratic theories and is often highly opinionated. For instance, in chapter 12 he asks, "Why have Modern artists failed to produce much real art after an entire century of revolution and experimentation?" (p. 314). This is in a section several pages long decrying what he sees as the failure of an artistic movement, and culminating in a call to arms: "It is time for artists to reject the death grip of Modernism ..." (p. 318). Perhaps he is correct, but most readers would agree that such a rant is out of place in a work on history.

In the first paragraph of the preface the author describes his original intention "of writing professionally informed but readable essays for an educated general audience, with minimal annotation" (p. vii). But besides the core of the work, there is a preface, an introduction, a prologue, an epilogue, two long appendices (all of the above heavily footnoted), and forty-one pages with 111 endnotes in compact type. In order to explore this book at its deepest level, one must face the heavy chore of jumping about among all of these parts. The book would work better if it were structured with a more sequential narrative. Some extraneous ideas, like the diatribe on modern art (see below on chapters 11 and 12), could be eliminated, and other good ideas, like the exploration of the concept of "barbarian" (see below on the epilogue), could be condensed and included in the core of the work.

The prologue, "The Hero and His Friends," sketches the author's thesis that there are common cultural currents, specifically an origin myth and the comitatus, which he names the Central Eurasian Culture Complex, that spread from the earliest Indo-Europeans down to the Mongols and likely beyond. While there are indeed interesting parallels in the myths, they do not seem to prove much. As for the comitatus, I doubt that there is anything uniquely Central Eurasian about it. All military organizations have an inner circle: they cannot function without concentric circles of authority. This is probably true of all large organizations. One could describe both the Knights of the Round Table of King Arthur and the lieutenants of a mafia don as a comitatus. The epilogue, "The Barbarians," is more...