I think this is the comprehensive history providing the reader with a sense of how civilisations rise and fall. However this book is not an easy read but fascinating as I found this is rather a scholarly work with impressive arguments and cited linguistic details. Most impressive were the detailed arguments for transforming the peoples of the Central Eurasian States from generic “barbarians,” the description most of us grew up with, to a detailed collection of identifiable ethnic, tribal, national or regional groups.
We can also read about the history of what the author terms 'Central Eurasian (CEA) Culture Complex,' which, geographically speaking, spread from Manchuria and the Korean Peninsula (i.e., Puyo-Koguryo kingdoms) in the East to as far as the Pannon Plain in the West, and in some respects even beyond those frontiers, is audaciously and wildly demonstrated.
One of the central themes connecting diverse peoples in this vertical-horizontal study is the presence of the oath-sworn guard corps (Latin 'comitatus') that gradually grew in number and formed the heart of CEA states until the adoption of world religions in the Middle Ages. Yes, the raison d'etre for commerce along the Silk Road could be maintaining the steady flow of luxury goods so as to reward comitatus’ services which played no small part of the CEA empires.
However this Orientalist scholar may have cast his net far too wide. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the last two chapters, concerning 19-20th centuries, which are way too sketchy, overly generalising, at times repetitious and even off tangent. And additional maps would have been most appreciated as I often did not know where events were occurring.
