Imperialism at the edge: Central Asian empires on the borderlands during Antiquity – FRONTIER

Where to draw the boundary of an empire? In the context of Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Northwest China), which combines the steppe and the oasis world, the territorial cohesion of the great empires is based on a policy of intense and multi-scalar expansion, as well as on the emergence of large exchange networks. Nevertheless, the centre-periphery approach only partially accounts for the notion of frontier – here understood as a zone of contact with or without a specified boundary line –, namely its manifestation, perception and permeability, culturally and materially as well as geographically. This project thus proposes to address this issue by focusing not on the centre, but on the borderlands of the Central Asian empires between the 5th century BCE and the 5th century CE.
This period saw the emergence and establishment of vast empires in Central Asia (Achaemenid, Hellenistic, Kushan, Qin and then Han) distinguished by the intensity of their material and commercial interactions. The attention of historians and archaeologists has been particularly focused on the core of these empires, as well as on the manifestations among the elites of the multiculturalism created by these exchanges.
However, the expansion of empires implies a territorial anchorage to be constructed intellectually and materially, in the form of religious politics, the evolution of royal ideology, diplomatic networks, the control of trade and migration routes through the establishment of surveillance spaces, but also petroglyphs.
Based upon a documentary corpus of more than 300 archaeological sites, of about 1,000 Chinese texts and nearly 6,000 petroglyphs, the FRONTIER project combines archaeological, architectural, epigraphic, numismatic and rock art (petroglyphs) data. It aims, through the study of objects, of new textual data and of settlement patterns, at (re)defining an imperialism in the frontier zone.