ΟNE of the purposes of UNESCO, as proclaimed in its Constitution, is 'to develop and to increase the means of communication between peoples and to employ these means for the purposes of mutual understanding and a truer and more perfect knowledge of each other's lives'. The History of the Scientific and Cultural Development of Mankind, published in 1968, was a major early response on the part of UNESCO to the task of enabling the peoples of the world to have a keener sense of their collective destiny by highlighting their individual contributions to the history of humanity. This universal history itself now undergoing a fundamental revision has been followed by a number of regional projects, including the General History of Africa and the planned volumes on Latin America, the Caribbean and on aspects of Islamic culture. The History of Civilizations of Central Asia, hereby initiated, is an integral part of this wider enterprise.

It is appropriate that the second of UNESCO's regional histories should be concerned with Central Asia. For, like Africa, Central Asia is a region whose cultural heritage has tended to be excluded from the main focus of historical attention. Yet from time immemorial the area has served as the generator of population movements within the Eurasian landmass. The history of the ancient and medieval worlds, in particular, was shaped to an important extent by the succession of peoples that arose out of the steppe, desert, oases and mountain ranges of this vast area extending from the Caspian Sea to the high plateaux of Mongolia. From the Cimmerians mentioned in Homer's Odyssey, the Scythians described by Herodotus, the Hsiungnu whose incursions led the Emperors of China to build the Great Wall, the sixth-century Turks who extended their empire to the boundaries of Byzantium, the Khitans who gave their name to ancient Cathay, through to the Mongols who erupted into world history in the thirteenth century under Genghis Khan, the nomadic horsemen of Central Asia helped to define the limits and test the mettle of the great civilizations of Europe and Asia.

Nor is it sufficient to identify the peoples of Central Asia simply with nomadic cultures. This is to ignore the complex symbiosis within Central Asia itself between nomadism and settlement, between pastoralists and agriculturalists. It is to overlook above all the burgeoning of the great cities of Central Asia such as Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva, which established themselves in the late Middle Ages as outstanding centres of intellectual inquiry and artistic creation. The seminal writings of the philosopher scientist Avicenna (a native of Bukhara) and the timeless masterpieces of Timurid architecture epitomize the flowering of medieval culture in the steppes and deserts of Central Asia.

New discoveries continue to widen and deepen our knowledge of the prehistory of mankind throughout the world. The study of ancient civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia considerably extended the temporal limits of history and explained the origin of some integral components in the complex evolutionary process in Europe. Archaeology in the twentieth century has once again pushed back the frontiers of our knowledge of world prehistory and brought to light numerous centres of ancient cultures and civilizations hitherto unknown. The new ideas and methods to which it has given rise have also made their contribution to a theory of world history viewed as a complex pattern linking the general with the particular. Broad similarities are reflecting global tendencies or being studied against the background of considerable regional diversities, while studies of particular regions and peoples are adding to the common store of world culture.

The need to synthesize the results obtained from the study of particular regions, macro-regions, with their comparative typological features is widely recognized and one outstanding example of this type of work is the General History of Africa published by Unesco.

The present publication is devoted to another macro-region of the Old World-namely, Central Asia. Situated in the very heart of the continent, this region has played a major role in the cultural-historical processes of various epochs. The role and importance of the various peoples of Central Asia are often inadequately represented in university courses, to say nothing of school text- books. The present work is aimed at filling this gap.

As a rule, the chapters devoted to the ancient history and cultures of the particular countries belonging to the region have been written by scholars working in these countries. The editors have tried to take into consideration the contributions of different authors and present the material in a way that reflects the results of individual scholarship in an international spirit. To elucidate the history of the peoples in this area more completely, the authors of some chapters use the data in adjacent regions which have close cultural contacts, especially with Siberia, Iran and eastern Asia. Since the completion of the drafting of this first volume many new discoveries in the region have confirmed most of the suppositions made on the great role played by Central Asia in the history of world civilization and on the close links existing between different cultures inside the region. The present volume deals with the ancient period in the history of civilizations in Central Asia, when the earliest human cultures emerged and determined to a considerable extent the later developments of local cultures and peoples. At the same time, the main trends in historical developments, namely, the steady progress in the cultural evolution as a general rule as well as regional diversities, become evident even in the case of these most ancient times.

**Contents and Sample Pages**