Archives: Central Asia

archives: central asia

6 Versteegh, Pidginization and creolization. The case of Arabic, Amsterdam and Philadelphia 1984; Kees Versteegh, The Arabic language, New York 1997; Michael Zwettler, The oral tradition of classical Arabic poetry. Its character and implications, Columbus OH 1978; Charles A. Ferguson, The Arabic koine, Language 35/4 (1959), 616–30. Muhammad al-Sharkawi

Archives: Central Asia Most archives in Central Asia were established in the Soviet period on the basis of existing collections of documents from the tsarist administration and earlier Central Asian states. These are now the national archives of Kazakhstan (Almaty), Kyrgyzstan (Bishkek), Tajikistan (Dushanbe), Turkmenistan (Ashkhabad), and Uzbekistan (Tashkent). There are also important collections relating to Central Asian history in St Petersburg, Moscow, Orenburg, Omsk, and Astrakhan in the Russian Federation, and in Tbilisi in Georgia. The most important non-Soviet archives are the Xinjiang provincial archives in Ürümqi, which are normally closed to foreign researchers, and the Afghanistan National Archives in Kabul. The latter miraculously survived the Soviet invasion and subsequent civil war intact but have not yet been used extensively: their contents apparently relate primarily to the period after the accession of Abd al-Ramn Khn (r. 1881–1901). In addition to these state archives, members of religious and academic lineages often possess private archives of manuscripts and documents relating to property and descent (DeWeese), and there are several important manuscript repositories in the region, most notably that of the al-Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent (Semenov; Yusupova and Jalilova).

The largest post-Soviet archive is the Central State Archive of the Republic of Uzbekistan, in Tashkent. This contains all the records of the Turkestan GovernorGeneralship (1867–1917) and the govern­ ments of the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and Soviet Uzbekistan (1917–91), which are mostly in Russian, together with documents from the chanceries of the khnates of Khiva and Khoqand and the so-called Qsh-beg (chief minister’s) Archive of the emirate of Bukhara, most of which are in Persian or Chaghatay written in Arabic script (Agafonova and Khalfin; Bregel; Troitskaya; Wilde). The latter collections, together with those in the Navoiy Library in Tashkent, and the provincial museums in Bukhara, Khiva, Khoqand, and Samarqand, constitute one of the largest archives in the Islamic world, after the Ottoman archives, although few documents in them date from before the mid-twelfth/eighteenth century (Tashev and Welsford). During the Soviet period, the collections in Central Asian archives were rearranged and distributed along “national” lines. This led to numerous inconsistencies, and materials relating to cities and districts in one state are often found in the archive of another. In all Central Asian archives, the holdings are divided between the tsarist and Soviet periods. The former were reorganised in the 1940s and 1950s, and the typewritten opisi (catalogues) that allow historians to navigate them were created in that period. The catalogues for Soviet-era materials follow a similar pattern but were created somewhat later. Apart from the national archives of the various republics, each province has its own archive, although this usually contains only material from the Soviet period. Some individual collective farms have also preserved their own archives. There are

archives: central asia also municipal archives in Almaty and Tashkent and Communist Party archives in each of the Central Asian capitals, although the latter are usually closed to researchers. The contents of these archival holdings range widely, from vaqf-nmas, q registers, and tax statistics, to the private papers of scholars and bureaucrats. Most, however, consist of materials generated by or for the state itself, most commonly in its tsarist or Soviet manifestation. This means that they follow consistent forms—from petitions to internal memoranda or correspondence between officials—using particular patterns of language and address, or, in the case of Arabic-script documents, particular legal and religious formulae. Soviet-period documents contain strong ideological inflections and political jargon. The documentation available, particularly for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is rich enough to permit detailed reconstructions of the social, political, economic, and cultural history of Central Asia in this period. This is an “archival revolution” that is still in its early stages but that promises much (Sartori).

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Bibliography

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