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One of my favorite history books is "Lost Enlightenment": amazon.com/Lost-Enlighten…
It's about science in the medieval Islamic world, but it's also about Central Asia, which was a flourishing, world-leading civilization that was mostly destroyed by war and conquest.
It's about science in the medieval Islamic world, but it's also about Central Asia, which was a flourishing, world-leading civilization that was mostly destroyed by war and conquest.
Lots of the people we know as "Arabic" scientists and mathematicians, like Al-Khwarizmi and Ibn Sina, were actually Persian Central Asians who wrote in Arabic...
Central Asia had these amazing, huge, rich cities that were centers of trade, art, and science. But they were largely isolated, not supported by large dense distributed agricultural populations. So they couldn't defend themselves against successive waves of conquerors.
First some brutal Arab generals, then Turkic conquerors, then the Mongols, then Tamerlane (the most destructive of them all) repeatedly starved, smashed, and genocided the great cities of Central Asia until the whole region declined into a backwater.
We now tend to think of places like Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, etc. as violent, poor backwaters - if we bother to think of them at all.
But that used to be the center of the world, and we owe much of modernity to the ideas produced there.
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But that used to be the center of the world, and we owe much of modernity to the ideas produced there.
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