A Treasure: Shahnamah

If you've got any interest in Central Asian stuff, go out of your way to the Asia Society Museum in New York City before May  2 to visit Muhammad Juki's Shahnama.   That would be 30-odd lovingly illustrated text-pages from the Iranian Book of Kings (King-Shah, get it?), created around the beginning of the 15th Century (jn what is now Afghanistan, but forget that).   It's a masterpiece in its own right, but more: when Babur, later in the same line,descended into the Ganges Valley and created the Mughal Empire, he took it with him; it generated a tradition of Mughal painting that extends virtually to this day.  There are some marvelous online resources (here is "Rustam slaying the White Div"), but there is nothing like a trip to the museum itself.  It's a small show and the pictures are small (they provide complimentary magnifiers), and while I can't pretend to have seen everything, this is surely one of the best in town.

Listening to Proust in Central Asia

It was Mrs. Buce's idea first. She bought the 39-disk set of Neville Jason reading excerpts (!) from Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (link); she loaded them on her Ipod. In an idle moment on the eve of my trip to Central Asia, I followed her example.

Flash forward to 3 o'clock on the morning of Saturday, September 13: I'm in a hotel room in Samarkand when I felt the first twinge of what became a Class-IV bout with Tamerlane's Tummy. I'll spare you the details, but I spent most of the next 36 hours either in bed or—well, mostly in bed. To keep me company, I fired up the Ipod and so, for the next day and a half, I drifted in and out of a troubled sleep to the stereophonic sonoroties of Jason's Proustian periods.

A complication was that I seemed to have the Ipod on shuffle, so whatever continuity there may be in the original seems to have been lost in delivery.

The odd—okay, the amazing—thing is that it worked, and indeed pretty well. I know that Proust is famously “complex,” but this is a characterization easily misunderstood. His sentences are coiled and serpentine; “great cathedrals,” I once heard someone say, “of commas and semicolons.” But he is not mischievously secretive like Joyce, or terminally opaque like Henry James. Once you uncoil, Proust makes his position is unmistakably clear—often poignant, sometimes savagely funny, and always penetrating or insightful. You can get it on the page, but in any event Jason gets it, and that's what makes these outtakes such good company in troubled times. Proust as a cure for a far-away gut ache, what a concept.

Leadership Secrets of Mao-tun

Mao-tun was the son of T’ou-man, Shan-yü of the Hsiung-nu, who faced off against the Ch’in dynasty in China some time after 221 BCE. To get his son out of the line of succession (in favor of another son), T’ou-man sent him as hostage to the Yüeh-chih, intending to attack the Yüeh-chih and expecting that his hostage son would be killed in retaliation. But Mao-tun stole a fast horse and escaped, to return home as a hero. His father was obliged to put him in charge of 10,000 horsemen.

Mao-tun soon attracted a band of loyal followers whom he trained to obey his every command without question. Mao’tun’s method included the use of stern tests. On the signal of his whistling arrow each follower was to fire at whatever Mao-tun pointed. After practicing in hunting Mao-tun took aim at one of n his favorite horses. Those who failed to fire were put to death. Next he took aim at olne of his consorts; and again those who had failed to fire were put to death. Finally he took aim at one of his father’s valuable horses and saw hhis command had been obeyed by all. Now satisfied with the loyalty of his men, Mao-ptun seized the next opportunity to aim his whistling arrow at his father, T’ou-man, who met his death in a hail of arrows.

—Thomas Barfield, The Perilous Frontier 33 (1989)

Mao-tun had himself declared Shan-yü. Not surprisingly, his step-mother and step-brother did not long survive the succession.

Some Stuff I Am Trying to Learn About Central Asia

Trying to get my mind around Central Asia. That would be: Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrghyzstan, Tajikistan (I suppose I could include Afghanistan, but it is not on my travel agenda).

• Kazakhstan: is the big one, in area. Ninth largest in land mass  in the world, just behind Argentina, ahead of Sudan. Mostly steppe, but a Caspian Sea border, lots of oil.  The word "Kazakh" is apparently related to the more familiar western "Cossack."  The locals like to tell you it means "free spirit."
  

• Turkmenistan: mostly desert, but plenty of natural gas. Only country I know of whose president is a dentist.

• Uzbekistan: biggest in population, and most complicated. Uzbeks, but also Russians, Tajiks (how many?), Koreans (Koreans?—yes, Stalin moved them out here) and others. Double-landlocked: a landlocked country surrounded by landlocked countries. Euphonious ancient names (Samarkand, Bukhara), but also a living monument to the failure of old Soviet environmental management (the Aral Sea, in an air shot, looks like a cancerous kidney).

• Kirgyzstan: the one whose prime minister tried westernizing, wanted  his nation to be the Switzerland of the east, and who wound up a math teacher in Moscow.

• Tajikistan: the one where they speak a variety of Persian. The smallest and poorest, the one with eight 20,000-foot mountains. The one that celebrated its post-Soviet freedom with a five-year civil war. The Afghanistan of the stans.
  
  Source: mostly Martha Brill Olcott, Central Asia’s Second Chance (2005)

Oh, and he "-stan" apparently the same Indo-European root that produces all those Greek "-mi" verbs. So, station, anastasia, instance. And, of course, "stand."