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Description
In the city of Tashkent, a lot was changing in the year 1000. For many generations, they had been part of the Samanid Empire, an ancient and distinguished Persian dynasty. But the 10th century had seen the Samanids start to crumble while new kingdoms sought to overthrow them. One of the most powerful of these newcomers was the Karakhanid Khanate, a Turkic polity whose leaders converted to Islam in the mid-10th century. Just a few decades later in the year 996, they conquered the city of Tashkent with little resistance from the Samanids. Tashkent was a thriving Persian city, renowned for its incredible pottery workshops. As the Karakhanids conquered Tashkent and other cities like it, they gradually left behind their nomadic lifestyles of the steppe. They wanted to take full advantage of these urban trading hubs on the Silk Road as well as the intellectual culture and political infrastructure that the Persians had developed.

But what did it mean to adjust from a nomadic life to a sedentary one? How did the influx of Turks affect the Persian and Sogdian inhabitants of Tashkent, and how, in turn, did their rich culture influence the ways of their conquerors? We know very little about the way this transition played out for ordinary people. There is evidence for the big picture: Some cities grew in power under the Karakhanids, while others began to diminish. Tashkent was one of these older cities which gradually became eclipsed by new centres of power. The khans themselves maintained their nomadic residences outside the city for several generations, but as their people moved into the cities, so too, eventually, did they. But when it comes to the details of day-to-day life, very little comes down to us in written sources. Archaeology is crucial for reconstructing an image of what life might have been like for people in this rapidly changing city.

Because the Karakhanids were Muslims, it was very rare for them to depict human images in their art. Images of women are even harder to come by. However, there is one fragment of pottery from an archaeological dig that gives us a fleeting glimpse into the world of a Karakhanid woman. Found in the ancient city of Taraz but thought to be imported from Tashkent, it depicts a young woman looking through a window. Her image was originally part of a much larger design circling the edge of a bowl, but today, she is the only part that survives. She looks out the window with her head slightly turned to the right, her half-lidded gaze averted from the viewer. Her hair is arranged in curls that fall down her neck in plaits. Because her hair is uncovered, she is likely unmarried. A birthmark on her jawline suggests that, perhaps, her portrait is inspired by that of a real woman. She is dressed in a luxurious silk kaftan with trefoil designs. Underneath it she wears a white shirt with an unusual fan-shaped collar and a thin necklace. She gazes languidly out from a lancet window, its lintel decorated with eight-pointed stars.

What can this single image tell us about the lives of women in the early Karakhanid Khanate? Her kaftan is Turkish in style and made of brocade or damask, with trefoil designs embroidered onto it. These designs are linked in ancient Turkish art to Umai, the goddess of fertility. The high quality of her kaftan suggests that she and her family are wealthy. The fan-shaped collar of the white silk shirt she wears underneath it has few artistic parallels, but does seem related to designs of shirts that Turkish wear men in murals from previous centuries.

While her clothing demonstrates the influence of the Turks on Tashkent, her hairstyle has roots in a different culture. The Sogdians were an Iranian people who had migrated to this area a few centuries earlier, drawn by the lucrative trade of the Silk Road. The woman's curled and braided hairstyle hearkens back to Sogdian art of the 6th through 8th centuries. Because her face is also portrayed in a Sogdian artistic style, the artist may have been trying to convey that she was ethnically Sogdian. Given how much the Karakhanids adapted to local culture, however, it's also possible that she was a Turkish woman who was adopting local styles. Either way, she was a wealthy and fashionable young woman whose tastes represented the mixing of cultures that the Karakhanids initiated in Tashkent.

The other part of her portrait that tells us something about her life is the window. Before they conquered the cities of the Silk Road, the Turkic tribes who made up the Karakhanid Khanate were nomadic people. They lived in yurts and travelled on horseback. Women could hold high ranks in their society. The khatun, the wife of the khan, was second only to her husband in power. Turkish women played key roles in the economy, diplomacy, politics, and even the military of their tribes. Moving into cities and taking on the urban, settled lifestyles of their subjects meant grappling with new ideas about what "home" meant, and what the role of women was in that setting. Unlike the portable yurts of the steppe, the houses of Persian suburbs were built of clay bricks and stood forever in one place. They were beautified by gardens and closed off from the street with courtyards and outer halls. Lancet windows like the one in the pottery fragment belonged to the settled world, far from the nomadic ways of Turkish grandmothers.

Islam, too, brought with it ideals of women as belonging to the home and not to the outside world, though the extent to which this was ever enforced in the Karakhanid Khanate is hard to determine. The 11th century writer Yūsuf Balasaguni expounded upon the importance of keeping women in the home to stop them from being tempted towards infidelity on city streets. His most famous work, the Kutadgu Bilig, is noted for its attempt to balance nomadic Turkish values with the values of settled Islamic society. It includes this verse of warning:

Keep women at home and be strict with them,
They do not have the same appearance and essence.
Do not let strangers into the house, or women from the house -
How langour will lead them astray!

Balasaguni's opinion is only one among hundreds that must have proliferated among the Karakhanid elite. The integration of the Turks' traditional religion of Tengrism with the cosmopolitan international religion of Islam must have been an incredibly complex process with a constant flux of push and pull between the two ideologies. Later medieval sources suggest that women in Turkish khanates freely went through the streets of their clean and well-kept cities, which were well-stocked with amenities like bathhouses for women as well as men.

The woman in the window of Tashkent cannot share her thoughts with us. Is she a Sogdian woman, long since accustomed to urban life but eager to try out the latest Turkish fashions? Or is she a Turkish woman, newly settled into her family's first permanent dwelling, imitating the hairstyles of her neighbours while displaying her heritage through her clothing? Perhaps she was from a mixed marriage, heir to both Sogdian and Turkish styles. With so few images of people, let alone women, dating to the Karakhanid period, it is hard to know exactly where she fits. What we do know is that she represents a time of monumental change in Tashkent. As Sogdian and Turkish lifestyles, artistic traditions, and religious values came together, women like her represented the cosmopolitan nature of life on the Silk Road.

I knew nothing about the Karakhanids before reading an article about this pottery fragment. I really enjoy learning about places and periods of history I didn't know about before through this project. Amazingly, this is my first picture set in Central Asia! There was so much going on in this region a thousand years ago.

This was a challenging picture to draw. Thank you to SachiiA for help when I was working on the face, and to norree for help with the shading at the end. Because gardens were so important to medieval Islamic cultures, I researched plants that would be plausible to grow in the garden and bloom in early spring. On the left are peach blossoms, on the right are almond blossoms, and along the bottom are daffodils. The daffodils are narcissus tazetta, one of the oldest species of daffodil in the world.

Learn more on the website: womenof1000ad.weebly.com/woman…

Others in the series include...

The Royal Dancer of Gao (Mali)
Bharima (Bangladesh)
Gunnborga (Sweden)
The Parrot Keepers of Wind Mountain (New Mexico)
The Rice Keepers of Yamashiro (Japan)
The Riders of Holda (Germany)
The Initiate of Schroda (South Africa)
The Traveller of Moxos (Bolivia)
The Maize Farmer of the Illinois River Valley (Illinois)

Prana (Cambodia)

Description
In the city of Tashkent, a lot was changing in the year 1000. For many generations, they had been part of the Samanid Empire, an ancient and distinguished Persian dynasty. But the 10th century had seen the Samanids start to crumble while new kingdoms sought to overthrow them. One of the most powerful of these newcomers was the Karakhanid Khanate, a Turkic polity whose leaders converted to Islam in the mid-10th century. Just a few decades later in the year 996, they conquered the city of Tashkent with little resistance from the Samanids. Tashkent was a thriving Persian city, renowned for its incredible pottery workshops. As the Karakhanids conquered Tashkent and other cities like it, they gradually left behind their nomadic lifestyles of the steppe. They wanted to take full advantage of these urban trading hubs on the Silk Road as well as the intellectual culture and political infrastructure that the Persians had developed.

But what did it mean to adjust from a nomadic life to a sedentary one? How did the influx of Turks affect the Persian and Sogdian inhabitants of Tashkent, and how, in turn, did their rich culture influence the ways of their conquerors? We know very little about the way this transition played out for ordinary people. There is evidence for the big picture: Some cities grew in power under the Karakhanids, while others began to diminish. Tashkent was one of these older cities which gradually became eclipsed by new centres of power. The khans themselves maintained their nomadic residences outside the city for several generations, but as their people moved into the cities, so too, eventually, did they. But when it comes to the details of day-to-day life, very little comes down to us in written sources. Archaeology is crucial for reconstructing an image of what life might have been like for people in this rapidly changing city.

Because the Karakhanids were Muslims, it was very rare for them to depict human images in their art. Images of women are even harder to come by. However, there is one fragment of pottery from an archaeological dig that gives us a fleeting glimpse into the world of a Karakhanid woman. Found in the ancient city of Taraz but thought to be imported from Tashkent, it depicts a young woman looking through a window. Her image was originally part of a much larger design circling the edge of a bowl, but today, she is the only part that survives. She looks out the window with her head slightly turned to the right, her half-lidded gaze averted from the viewer. Her hair is arranged in curls that fall down her neck in plaits. Because her hair is uncovered, she is likely unmarried. A birthmark on her jawline suggests that, perhaps, her portrait is inspired by that of a real woman. She is dressed in a luxurious silk kaftan with trefoil designs. Underneath it she wears a white shirt with an unusual fan-shaped collar and a thin necklace. She gazes languidly out from a lancet window, its lintel decorated with eight-pointed stars.

What can this single image tell us about the lives of women in the early Karakhanid Khanate? Her kaftan is Turkish in style and made of brocade or damask, with trefoil designs embroidered onto it. These designs are linked in ancient Turkish art to Umai, the goddess of fertility. The high quality of her kaftan suggests that she and her family are wealthy. The fan-shaped collar of the white silk shirt she wears underneath it has few artistic parallels, but does seem related to designs of shirts that Turkish wear men in murals from previous centuries.

While her clothing demonstrates the influence of the Turks on Tashkent, her hairstyle has roots in a different culture. The Sogdians were an Iranian people who had migrated to this area a few centuries earlier, drawn by the lucrative trade of the Silk Road. The woman's curled and braided hairstyle hearkens back to Sogdian art of the 6th through 8th centuries. Because her face is also portrayed in a Sogdian artistic style, the artist may have been trying to convey that she was ethnically Sogdian. Given how much the Karakhanids adapted to local culture, however, it's also possible that she was a Turkish woman who was adopting local styles. Either way, she was a wealthy and fashionable young woman whose tastes represented the mixing of cultures that the Karakhanids initiated in Tashkent.

The other part of her portrait that tells us something about her life is the window. Before they conquered the cities of the Silk Road, the Turkic tribes who made up the Karakhanid Khanate were nomadic people. They lived in yurts and travelled on horseback. Women could hold high ranks in their society. The khatun, the wife of the khan, was second only to her husband in power. Turkish women played key roles in the economy, diplomacy, politics, and even the military of their tribes. Moving into cities and taking on the urban, settled lifestyles of their subjects meant grappling with new ideas about what "home" meant, and what the role of women was in that setting. Unlike the portable yurts of the steppe, the houses of Persian suburbs were built of clay bricks and stood forever in one place. They were beautified by gardens and closed off from the street with courtyards and outer halls. Lancet windows like the one in the pottery fragment belonged to the settled world, far from the nomadic ways of Turkish grandmothers.

Islam, too, brought with it ideals of women as belonging to the home and not to the outside world, though the extent to which this was ever enforced in the Karakhanid Khanate is hard to determine. The 11th century writer Yūsuf Balasaguni expounded upon the importance of keeping women in the home to stop them from being tempted towards infidelity on city streets. His most famous work, the Kutadgu Bilig, is noted for its attempt to balance nomadic Turkish values with the values of settled Islamic society. It includes this verse of warning:

Keep women at home and be strict with them,
They do not have the same appearance and essence.
Do not let strangers into the house, or women from the house -
How langour will lead them astray!

Balasaguni's opinion is only one among hundreds that must have proliferated among the Karakhanid elite. The integration of the Turks' traditional religion of Tengrism with the cosmopolitan international religion of Islam must have been an incredibly complex process with a constant flux of push and pull between the two ideologies. Later medieval sources suggest that women in Turkish khanates freely went through the streets of their clean and well-kept cities, which were well-stocked with amenities like bathhouses for women as well as men.

The woman in the window of Tashkent cannot share her thoughts with us. Is she a Sogdian woman, long since accustomed to urban life but eager to try out the latest Turkish fashions? Or is she a Turkish woman, newly settled into her family's first permanent dwelling, imitating the hairstyles of her neighbours while displaying her heritage through her clothing? Perhaps she was from a mixed marriage, heir to both Sogdian and Turkish styles. With so few images of people, let alone women, dating to the Karakhanid period, it is hard to know exactly where she fits. What we do know is that she represents a time of monumental change in Tashkent. As Sogdian and Turkish lifestyles, artistic traditions, and religious values came together, women like her represented the cosmopolitan nature of life on the Silk Road.

I knew nothing about the Karakhanids before reading an article about this pottery fragment. I really enjoy learning about places and periods of history I didn't know about before through this project. Amazingly, this is my first picture set in Central Asia! There was so much going on in this region a thousand years ago.

This was a challenging picture to draw. Thank you to SachiiA for help when I was working on the face, and to norree for help with the shading at the end. Because gardens were so important to medieval Islamic cultures, I researched plants that would be plausible to grow in the garden and bloom in early spring. On the left are peach blossoms, on the right are almond blossoms, and along the bottom are daffodils. The daffodils are narcissus tazetta, one of the oldest species of daffodil in the world.

Learn more on the website: womenof1000ad.weebly.com/woman…

Others in the series include...

The Royal Dancer of Gao (Mali)
Bharima (Bangladesh)
Gunnborga (Sweden)
The Parrot Keepers of Wind Mountain (New Mexico)
The Rice Keepers of Yamashiro (Japan)
The Riders of Holda (Germany)
The Initiate of Schroda (South Africa)
The Traveller of Moxos (Bolivia)
The Maize Farmer of the Illinois River Valley (Illinois)

Prana (Cambodia)