the ‘outside’ other 17
especially this which they may have regarded as the most civilized and
which, as a consequence, was radically diff erent from their own.^10
By the mid- and late sixth-century, Semender was the northern-
most bastion of the power of the Sassanian shahin-shahs against the
“wild and martial nomads.”^11 Th e Sassanians built a fortifi ed line in
Bactria, specifi cally in the Merv oasis, which they regarded as a barrier
against the Hephtalites and, aft er their annihilation in the mid-sixth
century, of the Turks.^12 Decades aft er the fall of Sassanian Persia to
the Arabs in the mid-seventh century, Ibn Khordâdhbeh noted that
Khosrois (sic), i.e., the Sassanians aft er the sixth century, had “blocked
their boundaries from fi ve sides.” Ibn Khordâdhbeh described barriers
blocking the access of those coming “from the land of the Turks,” as
well as of those “unexpected visitors” from “the land of the Khazars
and Alans.”^13 To R. Frye, those barriers embodied a “wall psychology”
most typical for the mentality of the sedentary elites in Central Asia
and for the Sassanians.^14
Th. Barfi eld focuses the attention on an important regularity typical
for the steppe Eurasia and mainly concerning the relations between
China and the northern “barbarians”. According to him, each time
the control over the border zone was taken by strong and centralized
empires, a concern with limiting access to the borderland appeared
which was directly linked with the idea of drawing a sharp distinc-
tion between the sedentary society and the nomads. Th e latter was
accomplished by various means including most oft en erection of walls,
setting up armed garrisons in special fortresses and establishment of
an extremely strict regime regulating the free access and movement
of the northern “barbarians”. Such diff erentiating measures provoked
the ‘answer’ of the nomads who, in return, oft en reacted by organiz-
ing centralized polities in order to have a chance in the search of a
benefi cial agreement in the new situation, in which the confl ict with
a potentially hostile and powerful sedentary world was inevitable. Th e
Middle Kingdom (= China) tried to reduce to the possible minimum
the contacts with the northern nomads by using the Great Wall and
(^10) For interesting notes in that same direction see, Badalanova-Pokrovska 1995,
159–166. 11
Pletneva 1976, 29.
(^12) Christian 1998, 253; Frye 1977 (not available to me).
(^13) Ibn Hordadbeh 1986, 135 (paragraph 78).
(^14) Frye 1996, 227.