Entangled Central Asia: Central Asia between Greece, Persia, India, and China

(4 Credits)

Central Asia is often seen through the eyes of outsiders, as a place traversed on the way somewhere else. This course takes the opposite view: it treats Central Asia as a nexus between east and west, north and south; a region defined by connections, innovations and originality. Tracing entanglements across three thousand years from the Bronze Age to the coming of Islam, we reframe standard narratives about this dynamic region. At each stage, we assess how local communities responded materially to global events by investigating archaeological evidence: the objects, architecture and sites people left behind across the region's deserts, steppes, oases and mountains. Students will engage critically with key scholarly debates about the ‘Silk Roads,’ about ‘nomadic’ and ‘settled’ peoples, about the Eurocentric terms often applied to the region, and about who decides which places count as centers and which as peripheries. Underlying these debates is a bigger question: how is knowledge of the past constructed, and by whom?