Culture switchboard

Humankind, all of it, is closely related not only through our common origin about three thousand centuries ago, but through constant remixing as groups migrated over and over again, seeking better living across deserts and seas. All this unwritten history is revealed by the words of our genes, whose alphabet was deciphered less than a century ago. This script is common to all life, and must have developed a few tens of millions of centuries ago. In sharp contrast, less than 35 centuries have passed since humans invented writing. The period immediately preceding this is a great mystery. There are material remains from immediately before written history: cultures, in all senses of the word, except for the existence of books and records. Kazakhstan is part of the region through which the recent past of human history flowed, and it was fun to trace connections as we travelled through this wonderful country.

The most recent layers of history are the easiest to peel away. The expansion of Rus towards the east in the 19th century has left its mark on the draining of the Aral Sea, the radioactive sector called the Polygon where nuclear tests were done, and in the ethnic composition of Kazakhstan. But it also left beautiful churches and a wealth of knowledge of natural history and the deep past of humanity. The layers before that are also easy to discern: the westward movement of nomads out of Xinjiang, bringing with them the Turkic language that replaced the Indo-European tongues previously used across the steppes, and the backward flow of Islam along their route.

Everything before that requires deep study. Fortunately more than a century of scholarship exists, and is easy to find today. Some of it surprised me. The cultural memory of Tengri-ism, the ancient Indo-European belief in the god of the sky and the goddess of the earth is reproduced in the colours of the mosques of Kazakhstan. Very often the domes are blue. Blue domes flourish across modern Almaty and Astana: a revival of the old ways. The original god of the sky, *Dyḗus ph₂tḗr, was remembered by the Greeks as Zeus. The Rigvedas remember the old deities as Dyaus, the sky, and the earth mother of Indra.

And horses? Where did this modern ship of the steppes come from? Genetics points to an origin 35 centuries ago, in the Volga-Don region. This points to the spread of this animal along with the horse drawn spoked chariots of war whose remains are found in the burial mounds of the Sintashta culture. The mobility of these horse-drawn chariots was a major advantage in wars against fixed settlements. I wonder whether the later name Purandhara, the destroyer of towns, by which Indra is sometimes known, has something to do with this. One remnant of nomadism in modern Kazakh life were rules of exogamy according to which “original” tribe you belonged to. This resonated with the notion of gotras in the Rigveda, and from which traditional exogamy rules of Indian cultures descend.

Somewhere in the middle of the last forty centuries of cultures ebbing and flowing across the grassy landscape of central Asia came the age of the Sakas. These golden warriors, as modern Kazakhstan calls them, are recorded across the histories of Asia and Europe. They are called Scythians in the west, after the description by Herodotus. Ancient Persians distinguished between different tribes of the Sakas: the warriors of Kazakhstan were described as the tribe wearing peaked caps, but another tribe was described as the people who drank houma. The name of the drink is cognate to the soma which appears a few times in the Rigveda. So the Indian contact with the Sakas is perhaps older than the events of 78 CE which marks the beginning of the Indian national calendar called the Saka calendar. By many accounts, the beginning of the trade routes now called the Silk Route started in the pax mundi imposed by Han China, the Saka dynasty called Kushans of India, the Parthian dynasty of Iran, and the Roman state.

The earliest travellers of these horizon-wide plains that we know of from their material culture are the pastoral nomads now called Yamanayas. Perhaps originating somewhere in the Volga-Caspian region, they and their culture travelled east on solid-wheeled ox-drawn wagons called ger, with tents that they called yurt. As the Yamanayas travelled, their language, now called proto Indo-European, PIE, beame the koine of the steppes, before fragmenting into other languages. The yurt are still visible across Kazakhstan. I sat in one in the ski-resort of Shimbulak and sipped a local aperitif, which I savoured as much as this connection with some of my ancient ancestors. It was interesting to sip a modern decendant of soma, sitting in a modern descdendant of the yurt, talking to The Family in a language which is a modern descendant of PIE.