I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains,
And with my hand turn Fortune’s wheel about
—Christopher Marlowe,
‘Tamburlaine the Great’
Central Asia has been a recurring subject in geopolitics, as Eurasia in geostrategy and energy in geoeconomics. Hardly any other region of the world has been, both overly and overtly, fascinated by cartographers, geographers, geopolitics and geologists alike as Central Asia. It is known to sages of ages, of diverging orientations, of intuitions, of circumstances and civilisations differently for atypical and odd reasons. Ibni Bttuta, the 14th century Moroccan traveler-writer, called it Turkestan (the land of Turks) and Rudyard Kipling, the British imperial great gamer-and epic-writer, dubbed it the ‘Back of Beyond’. To the Greeks and the Romans, it itches the images of classical ‘Transoxiana’ (world beyond the Oxus River or Amudarya); to the English Elizabethans, it reminds of ‘the Tartary’; to the Arabs, it fascinates ‘the Mavarayunneher’ (the land between two rivers—the Syrdaya and the Amudarya). To the enlightened Occident it was known as the barbaric Orient. The Soviets called it ‘the Middle Asia’ and the Eurasianists, such as Mackinder and Brzezinski, lineated it ‘the Central Eurasia.’
