Paper long abstract:

Prior to the founding of the Kitan Liao dynasty (907-1125 CE) by Yelü Abaoji (872-926), Kitan herds were mentioned in the Chinese histories, though the majority of textual data about the Kitan and their economy comes from after the founding of the dynasty. The Kitan people subsisted on goods produced from pastoral herds of animals which required movement of animals and people to supply the animals with sufficient grazing lands. Unlike their southern counterparts who generally preferred to hold court in their palaces in the capital except when out on tour, the Liao emperors were almost constantly on the move. Throughout the course of the year, the Liao emperor and his entourage moved to different regions of the empire, and the records of the dynastic history of the Liao, the Liaoshi, suggest that these differed with the seasons and were called "nabo" 捺鉢, a Chinese phonetic gloss of a Kitan word. The records found in the Liaoshi are problematic for research into the movements of the emperors because of the muddled nature of the records and the difficulty in connecting the names of places with modern geographic locations. This paper addresses the problem of compiling and editing data found throughout sources available from the Liao and contemporary Song dynasties (960-1279) and utilizes this to map the movements of the Liao emperors to explore the motivations behind the movement of the court, questioning whether the itinerancy was pastorally focused or concerned with the projection of power. An exploration of the nabo system, however, also complicates our understanding of the early origins of the ordo system made famous under the Mongol Empire, which scholars trace through the Kitan term glossed as aoluduo 斡魯朵 in the Chinese language sources back to sources as early as the Orkhon inscriptions. Therefore, this paper also addresses the problems involved in comparisons between the Kitan institutions and the famous Mongol ordos of later periods.

Paper long abstract:

The present paper offers a historical contextualization of Ḥāfiẓ Baṣīr within the Central Asian Sufi tradition based on close examination of the primary sources that includes Mīr Sayyid Muḥammad Sāmānī's Adhkār al-azkiyā, Maḥmūd b. Amīr Walī's Bahr al-asrār, Dūst Muḥammad b. Navrūz al-Kīshī's Silsilat al-ṣiddiqīn, Ḥazīnī's Ḥujjat al-abrār, Muḥammad al-'Ālim Ṣiddīqī's Lamaḥāt min nafaḥāt al-quds and Ṭāhir Īshān's Silsila-yi Khwājagān-i Naqshbandiya. Not only these sources are significant in depicting the historical account of one of our main characters, but they also play a key role in tracing the non-Aḥrārī lineage of the Naqshbandi Sufi tradition passing through Ḥāfiẓ Baṣīr that was active in the region of Khwarazm until the second half of the 18th century.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates the reused burials in the peripheries of the Bukhara Oasis in present-day central Uzbekistan. Around 200 burials have been excavated in this region between the early 1950ies and the late 1970ies. Conventionally, these burials near Bukhara are understood as burial mounds of pastoral nomads from the steppe, mainly because 1) these burials are located at the fringes of the intensively farmed river oasis adjacent to the desert steppe; 2) these burials are kurgan burials (i.e. burials with an aboveground mound), the construction of which has been adopted in the pastoral world of Central Eurasia as early as the Bronze Age (c.a. 4th to early 1st millennium BCE).

However, in this paper, I argue that kurgan burials around Bukhara have been adopted by both pastoralists and sedentary groups, through the analysis of the reuse of burials, the mortuary practice of which is still understudied in Central Asian archaeology. Based on the new archaeological data collected from my scientific excavations in 2017 and 2018, as well as the reassessment of published and unpublished reports, photos, and field diaries, the development of reused burials in the Bukhara region can be reconstructed. In the first stage (ca. 3rd century BCE. to 1st century CE), the skeletons of previous deceased were piled to the side of burial chambers, whereas the new tomb occupants were located in the middle of the vault. In the second phase (ca. 2nd to 4th centuries CE), the later entombed deceased was located in a new type of burial furniture—pottery ossuaries (i.e. bone containers), which are associated with the Zoroastrian belief among the sedentary residents in the oasis. Moreover, these wheel-made ossuaries are of good quality and must have been produced in the oasis. In the last phase (ca. 5th to 7th centuries CE), large ossuaries with the bones of the later deceased were found in or right beneath the kurgan mounds. Therefore, I argue that the reuse of kurgan burials, especially in the last two stages, indicates to the burial practice of settled population in the oasis commemorating their ancestors from the steppe; meanwhile, the borderland of oasis should not be considered as a dividing line between nomads and their sedentary counterparts but an interactive zone of both groups.