In the Gates of Turan

Long before the age of certainty and hard facts, there ruled the mighty king Fereydun. This just and pious ruler, who freed the world of men from the hand of his predecessor, the tyrant Zahhak, reigned for five centuries before giving in to the teeth of time. Acknowledging the last days of his reign, he summoned his three sons — Salm, Tur and Iraj — and told them the order of succession and how his kingdom would be divided in three. Salm, the eldest, was to receive Rum, the western part of the kingdom (today's Anatolia); the second son, Tur, would rule the eastern part, beyond the Amu Darya (the Oxus, in modern Uzbekistan); while the youngest and most virtuous, Iraj, would reign over the kingdom's prime land, Iran.

The two elder brothers, envious of their younger sibling, slew him. Iraj's son and heir, Manuchehr, swore vengeance upon his father's killers and marched into Tur's domain.

Thus began the epic clash of Iran and Turan.

The realm of Turan represents the dark, the barbarous and the chaotic, standing in complete contradiction to Iranian cultural and enlightened order. The Iran–Turan wars went well beyond matters of territory and culture: they dealt with questions of good and evil, pure and impure, and above all with the ever-whirling sphere of destiny, casting its unbearable weight upon men and beasts.

This is the theme that threads through the great Persian epic, the Shahnameh (شاهنامه) of the tenth-century poet Ferdowsi (940–1020), who based his composition on the pre-Islamic histories and mythologies of Iran.

Two ecologies

The origin of the primeval distinction between Iran and Turan lies in the early differentiation between the sedentary, agriculture-based societies of Central Asia and the pastoral nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples to the north. At that time these were tribes of Iranian stock, not the Turkic groups, who did not penetrate the area before the tenth century AD.

Historically speaking, Iran is not the limited territory of the modern Islamic republic but a far vaster land, ranging from Anatolia and Azerbaijan in the west, through the Iranian plateau, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, Fergana, and all the way to the Tarim basin in what is today the Chinese province of Xinjiang.

This definition rests on the linguistic and ethnic distribution of those territories before the Turkic and later Mongol invasions.

Iranian peoples such as the Sogdians established prosperous trade centres in what are today Samarkand and Bukhara, thriving on the routes that stretched east to west. Far to the east, the people of Kucha and Khotan sat on the margins of the terrible Taklamakan desert, writing commentaries on the Buddhist scriptures in their own Iranian languages.

The people of Afghanistan and Tajikistan largely speak Iranian dialects to this day.

And Turan?

Turan is the steppe.

The steppe is an ecological zone stretching across northern Eurasia, from Manchuria in the east, through Mongolia, modern Kazakhstan, southern Russia and Ukraine, all the way to Hungary in the west. It is composed of temperate grassland and shrubland, originally unsuitable for agricultural cultivation.

This ecological niche was first exploited by human populations only with the development of appropriate means of transport, which allowed people to move themselves and their belongings across the sea of grass.

The domestication of the horse, which occurred around southern Russia c. 4000 BC, together with the invention of the wheel, enabled people to venture far into the previously impenetrable steppe and to exploit its lavish grassland for pasture.

A new kind of human society was born.

The economy of the sea of grass

Pastoral nomadism is a specialised economic system relying on the periodic migration of an entire population in search of pasture for its herds. The domesticated horse, first used for pulling carts and later for riding, enabled the nomadic population to rely solely on its livestock and to keep vast numbers of herd animals — especially sheep and goats, but also Bactrian camels and sometimes cattle.

The horse also gave the nomads something entirely new, unheard of in human history until then: the swift mobilisation of fighting men from one place to another.

The pastoral nomadic economy is not, unfortunately, an autarky. There are products that nomads cannot obtain on their own, whether because of their surroundings or their social and economic structure. Grain, metals, textiles and even luxury goods were indispensable to nomadic societies, and this factor bound them with an unbreakable link to the sedentary cultures.

The usual method of obtaining these materials was trade, exchanging steppe goods such as furs, glue, honey and slaves for the much-needed products of the agricultural lands.

But trade was not always an option, and raids and extortion were an acceptable way of extracting the desired commodities.

Historically the cultivators feared the pastoralists, and for good reason. The nomad's absolute mastery of equine warfare, along with his use of the mighty composite bow, made him an intimidating foe, unmatched by his sedentary rivals.

In that sense, the epic struggle between Iran and Turan is a distant echo of an ancient rivalry between two sharply distinct cultures, differing in political and economic organisation as much as in their social values.

Even today, travel across the Eurasian continent, and especially through Central Asia, is a journey through multiple layers of contact and collision between societies, cultures, values and material worlds. These overlapping layers are what make such journeys so fascinating, allowing us to look back at the dawn of human society as well as at the way new cultures are formed through ever-flowing tides of complex and colourful exchange.

And that is what this writing is about.