The Turkmen only required that their culture remain intact with the bare
minimum of resources, and those being chiefly sheep, goats, and the wood
they found all over the world, for them to survive, not marginally but
Royally in what can be called nothing less than the wasteland of Earth.
They lived in real comfort in dwellings that resemble nothing more than a
woman's breast. Their encampments looked like breasts dotting the landscape
as if here was nourishment for the land. The land provided pastures for
their sheep and by summering them at high altitude their wool was famous all
along the Silk Road. There were many wealthy Turkmen khans who controlled
vast herds and many long knives.
It is so simple a fact as to be obvious, that a nomadic herding society
cannot exist in a world where rule is by law and property rights are granted
to individuals by powerful organizations called governments. This is the
nexus of the problem for these two societies. The onslaught of civilization,
with its literacy and legalities, has carved up the whole world into
"countries, states, and regions". These things don't really exist; in fact
there are no lines drawn in the sand between countries. Sure a fence can be
raised and property rights protected. Herein lies the problem. A free
ranging society that depends on good pastures and unimpeded access cannot
flourish in the face of national boundaries and modern military forces. The
Turkmen were routed in 1882 by the Russian military who used artillery and
rifle shot to subdue this last fierce remnant of the descendants of Able,
"whose blood cries from the ground".
I dream of riding free over trackless fields of green grass and thinking to
myself, God! What a wonderful world! A man bonded with his horse, his
hunting bird, his favourite hound, and his women. How I cringe at the pale
comparison I make to the worst of them!
Turkmen
collectors don't stand apart from their possessions, they fondle them and
caress their soft exteriors lovingly with their hands. We collectors all
long for their lost lives, our imagination about their freedom and for
their free Love in ancient pre-islamic time.
One might ask what did it take to be a Turkmen. It took the enculturation of
millennia of experiments into those few truly necessary skills required to
reign supreme across the abysmal depths of Asia. These included the 'Zen'
required to fire an arrow from a bow held by a man in complete harmony with
his mount and its motions. He must subconsciously subdue all the chaos that
is created by riding a horse to concentrate only on bringing the bow, with
its ready arrow, into resonance with the target. This is in fact exactly
what is required to shoot a wild hare with a bow and arrow from horseback!
These skills were tested once ever year or two in great hunts were all the
tribes would congregate and set out with nets to corral the game and give
both young and old horsemen a chance to show their skills and compare them
one to another.
It has been theorized that it was under just such
circumstances that Genghis Khan fell from his horse possibly splitting his
liver. Through this evaluation and comparison process a mobile force was
established that could shoot with deadly accuracy from any number of
difficult positions and who, with long curved knives, could easily kill
anybody they might touch. These men rode rough shod over the best Europe
could muster until a Jesuit priest acquired the secret of gunpowder from
those horse mounted nomads who had stolen the secret from the Chinese. Sir
Francis Bacon was supplied with the formula for gun power in code from
another Jesuit priest, John De Carpini, who had travelled to the Great Khans
Court.
Ironic isn't it that the nomads would give up the secret recipe for a
powerful explosive chemical reaction whose energy could be controlled to
hurl a small lead ball at fantastic velocities sufficient to kill them all.
In conclusion the horse mounted Turkmen nomad wasn't significantly different
from many of our own Native American Societies, especially those horse
mounted ones in our western regions. Native warfare in some cases had
evolved into bouts between rival chiefs with 'coup' being far more important
than the actual killing of ones opponent. These early yet advanced societies
tended to be simple bi-pedal ones and not as mobile as later Plains Indians
who'd acquired wild horses, let loose from Spanish missions from the 15th
to the late 18th centuries. The Plains Indians also acquired sheep from
those Spanish Missions and almost overnight began weaving their gathered
wool into fine garments of great cultural and utilitarian significance.
After the introduction of Anatolian kilims and a few Turkmen weavings to
these same Indians in the 1880's, their repertoire of designs blossomed
overnight.
It is my firm belief that the incorporation of mythic designs into the
durable media of woven and piled weavings resulted in the stable
transmission of the most poignant and necessary information for each and
every nomadic society. What we so blithely relegate to the category of
'floor covering' is in reality the sacred documents of a previous and
flourishing alien way of life.
Every time a numb and dumb Westerner walks unknowingly across the surface of
one of these sacred documents his soul takes another blow in hell.
James C. Allen
Jim Allen Antiques
Photo courtesy: Russian Ethnographic Museum St. Petersburg with help
from my friend Thomas Cole.
More ethnographic photos: Photos
of Central Asia by Thomas Cole
