Steve Price

Hi Pierre

There's a rug website on which the author says that Yomud and Yomut are different groups, that it's possible identify the weavings of each group, and that the quality of the weavings produced by each is different. I've assumed that Yomud, Yomut, Yamoud, Yamut, etc. were simply alternative transliterations of the same word. Can you shed any light on this?

And while I've got your attention, what about the Pseudo-Chodor? The term conjures up visions of spies infiltrating Chodor (Chaudor?) communities and gathering intelligence for their patrons.



Regards

Steve Price

Pierre Galafassi

Hi Steve,
While scanning your post, my (brand new) Irony Detector has shot up briefly to 100 % and then stopped working. Made in China, I suppose.

A real historian could answer more competently your question about Yomud aliases. However, this Ignoramus has met about every version mentioned in your post and the authors were all clearly hinting at «our» Yomud tribe. I suppose that we can reasonably assume that there was only one Yomud tribe, which had its share of incompetent weavers.

Pseudo-Chodors uuh? Making tufted carpets perhaps? Your scenario is surely at least as credible as the average Rugdom theory. The villain & master spy could be this bloody rascal who ruled Bokhara around the first third of the nineteenth century, I never trusted him.
Regards
Pierre

PS: To end on a serious note about lost tribes. An ethnologist, French but who nevertheless seems quite sober to me (I shall have to dig out the reference now) claims that Turkmen tribes were pretty stable, despite the volatility of the individuals who composed it. The author insists that in the past few centuries only a couple of small Turkmen tribes fully disappeared, one of them wiped out by a Persian province governor.

Steve Price

Hi Pierre

The same author (on the same website) complimented you for your excellent essay, but gently chided you for calling the Uzboy a dried up river; said he was sure that you actually knew that it was never a river. In trying to chase down the facts on that, I found the following in a recent professional journal article.

First, the opening sentence, The Uzboy is an enigmatic dry river channel in Western Central Asia (Fig. 1).

Then, the first sentence of the next paragraph, Although some authors assert, without any conclusive arguments, that the Uzboy never was a real river, (Kes, 1991) and (Kes, 1997) clearly demonstrated that it was an important river and a western branch of the Amu Darya.

In addition, he believes that your referring to the Yomud, Tekke, Salor, Saryk and Ersari as tribes is incorrect, and that the Turkmen were never nomads. Both of these positions appear to be at odds with at least some of the modern anthropology literature (cf. J. Anthropol. Archaeol. 21: 443, 2002).

I raise these points just to emphasize how often rug-related misinformation is stated with great certainty on the web.

Regards

Steve Price

Pierre Galafassi

Hi Steve,

Since I only realized very recently that the Cretaceous is not a misspelled marine mammal, I wont debate with such a distinguished geologist about the Uzboy.

However, drawn by curiosity, I have looked for scientific papers on the topic and noted that the authors (geologists and archeologists) listed below seem to agree that during geological times (Quaternary) the Uzboy was indeed a river which reached the Caspian and that it was probably flooded at times, at least in its eastern part (south of Khiva), during some historical periods as well.
There is no unanimity however about when it was flooded for the last time and how far the water reached, although I found nobody, so far, claiming that it went further west than the Sarykamish basin.
From the very rare, very old and long-deserted ruins (mainly the Parthian Igdy kala) on the banks of the western part of the Uzboy one can infer that during the period discussed in the essay (16th to 19th century) it was about as dry as it is today.

By the way, since we all deserve a little fun, allow me to quote a Polish journalist called R. Kapuscinski : ..« A riverine civilization existed along the banks of the river from at least the 5th century BC until the 18th century, when the water which had fed the Uzboy abruptly stopped flowing out of the main course of the Amu-darya. The Uzboy dried up, and the tribes which had inhabited the river's banks were abruptly dispersed, the survivors becoming nomadic desert dwellers...». This well known reporter also claimed to have met Che Guevara at a time when the Che was already dead for a while.

Bibliography:
- Archeological Studies in Turkmenistan. G.A. Koshelenko, A.N. Bader, V.A. Gaibov.
- Physical Oceanography of the dying Aral Sea. P. Zavialov.
- The medieval Aral Sea crisis. V. N. Yagodin.
Preliminary data on chemical changes in the Aral Sea during low level periods from the
last 9000 years. L. Le Callonec, A. Person & al.
Histoire de l’Ouzboï, cours fossile de l’Amu-darya. R. Letolle.
The Iranian-Georgian branch of the Silk Road... M. Tezcan.

Steve Price

Hi Pierre

Are you telling me that "Cretaceous" isn't the misspelled name for certain marine mammals? I suppose the next thing you'll say is that there are no kangaroos on the plains of Austria. It's true that I was born yesterday, but I stayed up all night reading.

Amicalement

Steve Price

Pierre Galafassi

Hi Steve,

Well, everybody has a right to his opinion, but the 19th century travelers called them just that, "nomads". Except for the Göklan perhaps, the largest part of each tribe was not settled during the 19th century. Several knowledgeable visitors, among others general von Kaufman, governor of Turkestan, discussed in detail the job division of most Turkmen tribes in "tchomur" (settled) and "tcharva" (nomads). This division existed even inside many Turmen familly, with some members (mainly the younger or poorer) moving from pasture to pasture while others were remaining semi-settled.
Von Kaufman (1) stated that at the time of the fall of Khiva, most Yomud were nomads and that it often took very little for a tchomur to return to the status of tcharva.
Burnes (2) found that about all Merv Saryk where either nomads or semi nomads in 1832.

Besides, what relevance does it have from a ruggie point of view?
Best regards
Pierre

(1) See for example: E. Schuyler. Notes of a journey in Russian Turkestan. Vol. II p. 381 and H. Moser. Durch Zentral-Asien. p. 263.
(2) A. Burnes. Travels into Bokhara. Vol. II. p. 28

Steve Price

Hi Pierre

Relevance? There's a lot more about which to fantasize in the lifestyles of nomads than there is in those of villagers, and ruggies enjoy their rich fantasy lives. Other than that, who knows?

Regards

Steve Price

Pierre Galafassi

Good point Steve. Yes, our dreams are important in our appreciation of beauty.

Wendel Swan

Dear all,

While the public perception may be that “nomad” refers to someone who wanders almost aimlessly, the anthropologists use “pastoral nomads” to describe “societies specializing in animal husbandry requiring periodic movements.” That is the definition given by Thomas J. Barfield in his seminal book The Nomadic Alternative (1993). The term transhumance has essentially the same meaning.

Barfield describes many nomadic pastoralists in Southwestern Asia, Central Asia, the Far East (especially Mongolia), Europe and Africa. There are substantially differences in the distances traveled, the shelters occupied and the animals raised (sheep, cattle, horses, reindeer are among them), but they are all nomadic pastoralists.

Seasonal migration is an appropriate term, but such migrations are anything but haphazard movement. I know that most Persian pastoral nomads make seasonal migrations along rather well-defined routes to relatively fixed destinations or pastures. When camp is made, the shepherds routinely rotate the flocks among local pastures. Some nomadic pastoralists create buildings at their destinations. Those who dwell in tents may create limited permanent structures for use in seasonal returns.

Barfield mentions societies familiar to us (Bakhtiyari, Qashqai, Shahsavan, Mongols, Sami/Lapps, Zulu, Kazaks and Turkmen) as well as their ancient ancestors, but his vast topic does not always detail Which, Where and When, and that is particularly true of his references to Turkmen.

It is nearly impossible to know whether any given textile was woven by nomadic pastoralists or sedentary people. Textile format and function were often the same for both, plus we often do not know Which, Where and When. Even knowing the dates of border closures and forced settlements or conquests does not necessarily help.

Last, I feel that “nomadic” is too often misused for rugs and textiles. I have frequently heard it used as a synonym for “tribal” or even “geometric.” Pastoral nomadism is a complex topic with many variants, but it is not synonymous with tribal or geometric.

Wendel Swan

Pierre Galafassi

Hi Wendel,
Outstanding post, very interesting indeed!

Pierre