Quotes About Central Asia

Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.

The original home of the Aryan race appears to have been somewhere among the mountains and lofty table-lands of Central Asia. The word 'Arya,' meaning the high or the excellent, indicates their superiority over the neighboring races long before the beginning of history.

Genghis Khan roared out of the steppes to conquer all of central Asia; within a few decades, the Great Khan's descendants ruled over a group of empires comprising more territory than any dynasty before or since.

the conquests of the Achaemenid and Hellenistic dynasties encouraged commercial and intellectual exchanges reaching from central Asia to India to the western Mediterranean. In the East, the expansion under the Han and Tang dynasties had similar catalytic impacts within China. The intellectual residue left by these exchanges shaped the cultural traditions of the Persian, Indian, Chinese, and Mediterranean worlds.

We must move away from domain control to domain denial, since our only motive to be on the ground in the Greater Middle East and Central Asia is for smackdown or disruption purposes. (In retrospect, that is how we should have handled Afghanistan after 9/11.)

The medieval Islamic world, from Central Asia to the shores of the Atlantic, was a world where scholars and men of learning flourished. But because we have tended to see Islam as the enemy of the West, as an alien culture, society, and system of belief, we have tended to ignore or erase its great relevance to our own history.

The United States is the most powerful nation on Earth and it just can't walk away from the Middle East and central Asia and the Horn of Africa.

He squatted on his haunches, and I joined him. Muscovites, with the insistent air of urbane sophisticates, like to note that the pose is not native to Russia. Balancing yourself on your heels, often for hours, to wait or talk is a custom of the Caucasus and Central Asia, but one that Russians at some point ages ago seem to have taken as their own.

The most consequential by far was the bubonic plague, which began in Central Asia in the 1330s and spread to Europe in the following decade.

In an effort to minimize evaporation, Central Asians came to dig these channels deeper and deeper and thus reduce the area exposed to the sun. They also lined them to prevent loss through seepage—both of these being techniques that modern Soviet engineers ignored, with disastrous consequences.

Nomad horsemen from central Asia, who depended on the 'delicate grassland ecology

By the middle of the eleventh century a Turkish dynasty, the Seljuks, had emerged as sultans in Baghdad, and by its end the Islamic world, from Central Asia to Egypt, was largely ruled by Turks.

In two and a half years' trekking across central Asia, I'd become attuned to the late autumn conditions when the hazards of winter can blow in under the cover of darkness.

The evidence points to central Asia as man's original home, for the general movement of human migrations has been outward from that region and not inward.

A successful, secure connectivity of the transnational links among South and Central Asia, and China, via Afghanistan, would revive the country's historical and natural hub position in the region. The sooner this happens, the better for the country

This upheaval came while the region was still recovering from the shock of the Islamic revolution in Iran, which radically reshaped the strategic map of the Middle East and Central Asia.

A similar semianarchy burst out in parts of Central Asia and the Balkans in the 1990s, when the communist federations that had ruled them for decades suddenly unraveled. One Bosnian Croat explained why ethnic violence erupted only after the breakup of Yugoslavia: "We lived in peace and harmony because every hundred meters we had a policeman to make sure we loved each other very much."33

One doesn't have to invoke dominance to explain why Genghis Khan inseminated so many women that his Y chromosome is common in Central Asia today; it's enough to observe that he killed the women's fathers and husbands.

In 2008, Putin's message was, 'We aren't like a Central Asian republic, we aren't going to build a personalistic regime, we will have institutions.' This is all abolished now. The very idea of a governing party and party career, as you have in China, that didn't work.

oldest folk-music tradition in Europe. Yoik is shaped, in part, to convey a sense of place through the composition of its sounds. Along with the Sami, Tuvan throat singers from Central Asia and some Inuit groups who

Bakhchisaray was formerly the capital of the Crimean khanate and once an important crossroad of the Silk Road, where traders met from across the Black Sea, the steppes of Central Asia, Russia, and eastern Europe.

In inventing [General Juan Manuel de] Rosas' self-justification, I have taken the liberty of drawing almost exclusively on the words of Tony Blair, and the various self-justifications he produced to defend his foreign policy adventures with George Bush in the Middle East and the Central Asia.

In the non-Greek stories, Persia, Egypt, even China, Central Asia, in oral traditions and written literature, anyone who fights Amazons admires their courage and beauty, and they want to be allies of the Amazon; they don't wanna kill them.

Pushed by Casey, American scholars and CIA analysts had begun in the early 1980s to examine Soviet Central Asia for signs of restiveness. There were reports that ethnic Uzbeks, Turkmen, Tajiks, and Kazakhs chafed under Russian ethnic domination. And there were also reports of rising popular interest in Islam, fueled in part by the smuggling of underground Korans, sermonizing cassette tapes, and Islamic texts by the Muslim Brotherhood and other proselytizing networks.