Place · oasis city · Turkmenistan
Merv
The great Khorasan oasis on the Murghab, at the junction of the routes from Iran, Bactria and the Oxus, and at times the largest city in the world. It held Buddhist monasteries in the early centuries CE, then Nestorian Christians, then one of the major libraries of the Islamic world.
- Function
- Landscape & environmental change
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 37.660, 62.190
Worth knowing
An Indian Buddhist text in Sanskrit on birch bark was found in a stupa at Merv, and the monk An Shigao's circle — the first translators of Buddhist works into Chinese — came out of this Parthian world. Chinggis Khan's son destroyed the city in 1221 and it never recovered.
Connections (3)
- Trade routeBalkh
Merv and Balkh are the two great oases of the Khorasan and Bactrian routes, about six hundred kilometres apart across the Oxus, and both were Buddhist before they were Islamic. A Sanskrit birch-bark manuscript was excavated from a stupa at Merv; Balkh's Nava Vihara was large enough that its administrators, the Barmakids, went on to run the Abbasid caliphate from Baghdad. The road between them carried Indian doctrine west as readily as it carried goods.
- TransmissionBaghdad
The Barmakid family that dominated the early Abbasid administration came from the Nava Vihara at Balkh, and it was Barmakid patronage that brought Indian physicians, astronomers and the Sanskrit texts to Baghdad in the eighth century — the Sindhind, the Charaka and Sushruta traditions, the numerals. A Buddhist monastic family from the Oxus, converted and risen in Baghdad, is the actual mechanism by which Indian science entered Arabic.
- Route adjacencyTarōn
Whether or not anyone founded a settlement in Tarōn, the road existed. Merv on the Murghab was the hinge of the overland route between India, Iran and the Mediterranean, and anyone travelling from the north-west of the subcontinent toward Armenia in the second century BCE would have gone through it or its neighbours — the Indo-Greek and then Kushan world reached this far, Buddhist establishments are attested at Merv, and Indian goods and people demonstrably moved along the line. The route's plausibility is not the same as evidence for the settlement, which remains a single late text's claim.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Merv”. Aurel Stein’s reports; Susan Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road; the International Dunhuang Project.
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