As explained in the previous GeoCurrents post, the historical region of Khwarazm, located south of the (former) Aral Sea in Central Asia, was a major intellectual hub in late-ancient and medieval times, producing two of the world’s greatest scholars, al-Biruni and al-Khwarizmi. It also supported several powerful states based on its extensive irrigated agriculture, the rich fisheries of the Aral Sea (or Lake of Khwarazm), and long-distance trade. Yet it is now a largely ignored region characterized by a lagging economy, political tension, and extreme environmental degradation. Khwarazm’s current troubles will be explored in a later GeoCurrents post. This essay explores a more basic issue: where exactly is historical Khwarazm situated in the geopolitical framework of today? The answer to this simple question is more complicated that it might seem.
The Khwarazm region is clearly visible on satellite images, where it appears as green splotch of verdant farms set amid brown deserts and the desiccated salt-beds of the former Aral Sea. But how closely does this current oasis-like area correspond to historical Khwarazm? A map of the Khwarazm’s ancient fortresses seemingly indicates that the historical region’s core territory lay in the southeastern portion of the modern irrigated zone. A map of the cities of Khwarazm in the early Islamic period, however, shows that Khwarazm during this period largely corresponds to the modern agricultural area.
I had long thought that historical Khwarazm was largely coterminous with the modern “Autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan” in Uzbekistan. The Wikipedia article on the region, after all, tells us that the territory of Karakalpakstan“covers the classical land of Khwarazm, which in classical Persian literature was known as Kāt.” In actuality, Karakalpakstan covers less than half of this “classical land” (see the maps below). Much of Khwarazm is in what is now the Daşoguz region (province) of northern Turkmenistan, and a large portion is in Uzbekistan’s Khorazm (or Xorazm) region (province) (see the second figure posted below). Because of this political division, it is not easy to find the current population of historical Khwarazm. To do so, one must add the figures from Karakalpakstan (2,015,000), Uzbekistan’s Khorazm region (1,958,000), and Turkmenistan’s Daşoguz region (1,550,000), which yields a total population of around five and a half million people. Given the relatively small size of its cities, modern Khwarazm has a high rural population density, which can easily be appreciated by closely examining satellite images of the region.
It must be asked why such a coherent area would be geopolitically divided, split between two countries and, in one of those countries, between a supposedly autonomous republic and a regular region (province). The answer is found in the internal geopolitics of the Soviet Union. From 1511 to 1920, Khwarazm formed the Khanate of Khiva, ruled by Uzbek Khans. In 1873, this state was stripped of much of its territory and reduced to the status of a Russian protectorate. But it remained largely independent, as indicated by many maps made at the time (see below). In 1920, three years after the Russian Revolution, Khwarazm was transformed into the Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic, a first-order division of the Soviet Union. Three years later its status was downgraded to that of a “Socialist Soviet Republic” (SSR) and the next year it was dissolved, its land divided between the Uzbek and Turkmen SSRs and the new “Karakalpak Autonomous Oblast.” In 1936, the “autonomous oblast” was joined to the Uzbek SSR, which eventually became Uzbekistan. According to Wikipedia, “the history of the short-lived [Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic] remains murky and the way its government functioned is not largely clear.” It also unsurprisingly informs us that “its officials fervently opposed the delimitation plans of the Khorezmian Republic (which had to be carried out under Stalin’s orders) but in the end they were forced to concede.”
The ostensible reason for the Soviet division of Khwarazm was the ethnolinguistic differentiation of the region. According to often-abused Leninist principles, each major ethnic group or nationality in the Soviet Union was supposed to have some measure of cultural and political autonomy. But by the early twentieth century, Khwarazm was no longer culturally homogenous and was, as a result, divided. This is a complicated story, however, that needs some unpacking.
As discussed in the previous post, ancient Khwarazm had its own Iranian language, which gradually yielded to Persian in the early Islamic period. Somewhat later, as the military power of Turkic-speaking pastoralists grew, their dialects began to spread. After the Mongol conquest of 1219-1221, Khwarazm came under the rule of the Chagatai Khanate, named after, and initially ruled by, the second son of Genghis Khan. Under the patronage of this powerful state, a new Persianized Turkic literary language emerged, which was generally called “Turki” by its speakers and later deemed “Chagatai by Western scholars. This language gradually differentiated into two modern tongues, Uzbek* and Uyghur. Formal Chagatai continued to be employed as a literary language, however, until the early twentieth century. Its final flourishing occurred in the Khanate of Khiva, based in Khwarazm. As noted in the Wikipedia article on the language:
The reign of Muhammad Rahim II [of Khiva] marked the peak of a cultural revival, during which “more than a hundred works were translated, mostly from Persian into Chagatai Turkic.” Muhammad Rahim II introduced printing Khiva in 1874. He was also “a munificent patron” and wrote [Chagatai] poetry under the pen name Feruz.
Although Persianized Turki (Chagatai/Uzbek) became the common language of Khwarazm, pastoral nomads speaking non-Persianized Turkic dialects continued to infiltrate, raiding and often settling. In the Daşoguz region, one of their tongues, Turkmen, was established as a minority language. In the northern periphery of Khwarazm, the ever-shifting channels of the Amu Darya delta created an unstable environment well suited to a combination of semi-nomadic herding, farming, and fishing. Here pastoralists from the north, speaking a dialect closely related to Kazakh, settled in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They would come to be known as the Karakalpak people, their language labeled with the same term.
One could therefore argue that the Soviet political division of Khwarazm was instituted to reflect the region’s ethnolinguistic divisions, yielding a Karakalpak-speaking region in the north and east (Karakalpakstan), a Turkmen-speaking region in the center (Daşoguz in Turkmenistan), and a core Uzbek-speaking region in the southeast (Khorazm in Uzbekistan). Significantly, although all of these language are Turkic, they belong to different branches of this large family.**
Such a view, however, is fundamentally misleading. Under Stalin, the theoretically autonomous areas of Soviet minority groups were effectively stripped of their autonomy and were in many cases re-engineered to prevent disfavored peoples and regions from gaining too much power. It was probably for this reason that the original “Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic” was disassembled and divided between what would eventually became Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The Daşoguz region, for example, had a large Uzbek majority when it was assigned to the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic. It took aggressive “Turkmenization” programs, under both the Soviet Union and independent Turkmenistan, to gave it a Turkmen-speaking majority. Yet up to this day, roughly a third of the people of Daşoguz still speak Uzbek as their mother tongue. Uzbek probably remains the majority language of the larger cities of this mostly rural region. Interestingly, some language maps portray the settled portion of Daşoguz as Turkmen speaking while others portray it as Uzbek speaking (see below).
However the processes of ethno-linguistic change and geopolitical machination occurred, the common language and culture of Khwarazm was largely erased, along with its standing as discrete unit of political geography. This undermining of the identity of Khwarazm would eventually be accompanied by the weakening of its economy and ecological foundation, as we will see in the next GeoCurrents post.
* The naming of these languages has a confusing and contradictory history. Historically, “Uzbek” referred to a Kipchak Turkic language, closely related to Kazakh, that was spoken by nomadic pastoralists who conquered much of the agricultural zone of Central Asia. Most of their descendants adopted the Persianized Karluk Turkic language of the majority population, variously called “Turki,” “Sart,” or, for its literary form, “Chagatai.” The original Uzbek language, however, continued to be spoken by small grounds of pastoralists. In the early Soviet period, the majority Karluk language was renamed “Uzbek,” while the original Uzbek language essentially disappeared due to the decline of nomadic pastoralism in the region.
** Turkmen is an Oghuz Turkic langue, belonging to the same branch as Turkish and Azerbaijani. Karakalpak is a Kipchak Turkic language, belonging to the same branch as Kazakh and Kyrgyz. Uzbek is a Karluk Turkic language, belonging to the same branch Uyghur.