Hugh Kennedy in his book The Great Arab Conquests notes that it’s at this point that we start to have real contemporary history that we can trust. Two Abbasid-era historians collected everything they could find from this wave of invasion, including biographies and accounts of battles and sieges. The History of Prophets and Kings of al-Tabari, published in 915, preserves what they found. Dates become reliable, not legendary.
The Oxus River is one of the world’s great boundary rivers like the Mississippi or the Danube. Oxus is its western, Greek name; in Arabic it was Jaihoun, and locally it is the Amu Darya River (darya means river). It flowed from Afghanistan’s mountains into the Aral Sea. It is easily seen from space. The area Americans call “the ‘Stans” lies beyond it (except for Turkmenistan and Afghanistan itself). Our mental world maps tend to be blank in this area, so I want to take a little time to fill in the blank before telling what happened there.
In ancient times, the area west of the Oxus River was Iran, while across the river to the east was called Turan. Greeks just called it Transoxiana. It was unknown, wild territory, though rich with possibility. Iran/Persia had always been part of the western world, but Transoxiana was just Other. Its people mostly spoke Turkic languages in 700, not Indo-Iranian ones. They were still very nomadic and the wave of Turks crossing from east to west, out of Central Asia to Anatolia, had just begun.
Transoxiana had the major, ancient city of Balkh, capital of the kingdom of Bactria. In the map below, it’s called “Bactres,” its Greek name.
Balkh was the last outpost of Hellenic culture, built to look Greek and minting Greek-style coins. But by 700, it was a center of Buddhist culture. Balkh had been conquered by Arabs in 653, but Nezak Tarkhan, a Buddhist prince, had driven them out. The Buddhist statues of Bamiyan were already carved out in the mountains. Balkh also had a longstanding population of Jews, probably moved there after Assyrian or Babylonian conquest.
The plain where the river slowed down and moved toward the Aral Sea was called Khwarazm or some version of that during most of the Middle Ages, so I’ll call it that now. It had rich farmlands as well as gem mining: rubies and lapis lazuli. Khwarazm will be featured in later history events, especially as it bore the brunt of early Mongol assault.
To the east, there was another kingdom known as Sogdia, roughly where Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are now. Sogdians were the last link on the Silk Road as it went into China, so their main income was in trade, shuttling silk from China to the Oxus River, where it could be handed over to merchants working in Persia. In the century before Muslim conquest, the silk trade was booming. Silk’s value per pound was much better than the bronze coins China used.
Samarkand and Bukhara were Sogdia’s biggest cities. Both Khwarazm and Sogdia were literate, using a form of Aramaic writing for their Iranian-related languages. We know a lot about the Arab conquest of Bukhara because a native Sogdian wrote a history in Arabic, in the mid-900s.
North of Sogdia, across the Jaxartes River (modern Syr Darya), the land became the wide sea of grass, the steppe.
The only major city here was Shash, now Tashkent. The steppe seems to be the homeland of the Turkic tribes. It stretched through Kazakhstan into Siberia and Mongolia. The Turks were not a unified people, but they spoke dialects of the same Turkic language from Lake Baykal to the Amu Darya river and shared cultural traits, chiefly being nomadic. Turkic tribes were moving into the easier lands of Sogdia and Khwarazm, and from there into Persia. Their rulers were called Khagans, or Khans (the middle “g” fading into a “w” or just a long vowel).
The Turkic people were horse warriors even more than the Arabs were. As nomads, they lived with their horses, drinking mare’s milk or even horse’s blood. They were very tough, since they had been surviving on the steppe. Their culture meted out harsh punishments and valued high pain tolerance. They were the opposite of chivalrous—ironically, a later European value system also derived from horses—because in a difficult climate, you can’t afford to be noble. If deceit will save your life and spare some calories, do it.
They put armor on the chests of their horses and trained to shoot bows on horseback. They didn’t form battle lines like Romans or Persians, so the Arabs, having adjusted to these tactics, now had to adjust again. On horseback, the Turks preferred to encircle the enemy as though they were encircling a herd of deer. They chased down escaped enemies, running them off their feet, again as though they were herds of deer. They liked to hide an ambush, feint an attack, retreat, and then spring the ambush. Their greatest vulnerability was the need to feed vast herds of horses, which was fine on the steppe but could be an issue in farmland. Eventually, all this will describe the Mongol invasion, too, but that’s because the Mongols were Siberian people who adopted an essentially Turkic way of life and ran armies that were mostly Turks.
The conquest of this vast land was not accomplished in one big push. Big military excursions were made, and they duly besieged cities and fought battles. But overall, it happened because the Arabs found it impossible to govern the territory (that is, receive tribute) while living in Merv, at the border of Iran and Afghanistan. They really wanted to control Sogdia so they could tax the Silk Road trade. It simply couldn’t be done without making farther-east Samarkand the new Muslim capital.
The battle for Sogdia entailed first contact with the Chinese empire. Both the Muslims and the Sogdians sent embassies asking for Chinese support. The Chinese response was to encourage some Turks on the border to move west in support of the old Sogdian princes, against the Arabs. The battles between Turks and Arabs were many and bloody, with Samarkand ended up as an Arab city because they had to fall back and defend themselves from there so many times.
There are a few notable points in the story. Around 740 Nasr, a new governor for Khurasan and Transoxiana was sent east from Damascus. He reformed the tax system to stop favoring Arabs as much; instead, taxing favored Muslims of whatever ethnicity. No Muslim had to pay the jizya, the poll tax, but all infidels must. It was a way to shore up Damascene support among eastern Muslim converts; 30,000 of them were suddenly off the tax roll. The region became much easier to govern.
The tax policy had two unforeseen long-term results. The newly privileged Khurasani Muslims invested politically in the new system, embracing it rather than tacitly (or openly) resisting. With so much wealth in the east, they quickly became politically powerful and fueled the overthrow of the Umayyad dynasty only ten years later. Oops.
The other result, of course, was to encourage wholesale conversion. Only the cynical and worldly people convert to a new religion just for money, but others need the nudge of special circumstances and hard times. If the jizya tax is going to sink you this year, conversion looks good. Over time, the region became solidly Muslim, but consequently, the jizya tax income fell. The region could no longer be governed as a conquered land paying tribute, which had always been its purpose in the imperial economy. It still brought in taxes from the Silk Road trade, but that wealth more and more stayed local, going to Samarkand instead of Merv or Damascus. This sets up a ripe situation for regional rebellion and independence, and that’s exactly what began to happen, but not yet in the 8th century.
Nasr began only one major military campaign that went into Azerbaijan. He forced the city of Quba to surrender terms, and that pretty much ended the power of the region’s Turks. This marked the eastern extent of the Muslim empire, give or take a few towns. Kazakhstan and Kyrgizstan went on with nomadic Turkic lifestyles, undisturbed, until later Turkic migrations—and eventually the Mongols—changed them.
But there was one more military encounter that is worth noting for its cultural exchange. A Chinese force occupied Shash (Tashkent) and its prince sent for help to Samarkand. In 751, there was a battle at Taraz, the only one in which Arabs and Chinese directly fought. The Arabs won, and prisoners taken from the Chinese at Taraz are credited with bringing the paper-making craft into the Muslim lands. We know it came from China into the Muslim empire around this time, because the availability of paper fueled the next dynasty’s massive translation and publishing project.
- Great Arab Conquests, by Hugh Kennedy