Leibniz Discovers Asia   |   Science of Culture   |   c.v.

The Caucasians:
Central Asia in the European Imagination

Michael C. Carhart

I. How did “white” people become “Caucasian”?
Much of the credit for labeling “white” people as Caucasian is due to a young woman from Georgia remarkable for her youthful beauty. Captured in one of the Russo-Turkish wars, she was brought to Muscovy where she died young, of disease. In death she was more useful to scientists than in life. The flesh was removed from her skull, which could then be measured precisely. From Moscow her skull was sent to St. Petersburg and from St. Petersburg to Blumenbach at Göttingen, who acclaimed it as the most perfectly proportioned human skull. Blumenbach took its beauty as evidence that humanity originated on the southern slopes of the Caucasus Mountains. As humanity spread out from there it was transformed by environmental factors that effected changes in stature, color, and bone structure. Following Peter Camper and L. T. Sömmerring, Blumenbach concluded that the races most “deformed” from the Caucasian original were the Mongolic and Ethiopian (African) peoples. Also deformed but to a lesser extent were Malay and native American peoples.
In the mid-nineteenth century, T. H. Huxley attributed the “Caucasian mystery” to “intellectual hocus-pocus.” In fact Blumenbach did not pull the term out of thin air, nor was he unique in considering the Caucasus to be the original location of humanity. The designation Caucasian was formed in the process of scientific discussion, and Blumenbach’s system did not acquire authority over night. Over the course of twenty years in the late eighteenth century scientists discussed and debated different schemes of human origins. C. Meiners proposed a variant of Blumenbach’s thesis in 1786, placing a second major branch of humanity in the Altai Mountains, but by 1793 he was forced to abandon any speculation about the original location and retreated to the traditional division of humanity into two branches, black and white. In the second half of the eighteenth century heavyweights like Haller, Linnaeus, and Buffon participated in the discussion, as did a host of lesser names from England, France, Germany, and Italy. By the early nineteenth century Blumenbach’s model was still standing and was gaining support from other disciplines such as the linguistics of J. C. Adelung and Franz Bopp, the discoverer of the Indo-Germanic language group.

II. Central Asian Anthropology
But why the Caucasus? Blumenbach said the proportional beauty of the inhabitants of the southern Caucasus was attested by “a cloud of witnesses” who had traveled through that region and central Asia in the recent past. I consider briefly the reports of medieval European travelers like Giovanni de Piano Carpini and William of Rubruck, also Chinese (Faxian, Hui Chao) and Muslim (Ibn Battuta) accounts, but the bulk of Europe’s knowlege was known from explorers from the seventeenth to the ninteenth century. Scandinavians like Bering and Laxmann were employed by the Czars as the Russian empire expanded southward and eastward. Germans were invited to colonize the Volga valley just as they were in Pennsylvania, and scientists like D. G. Messerschmidt, R. Forster, and the Great Northern Expedition of Gmelin and Steller evaluated and classified the flora, fauna, and culture of central Asia, Siberia, and even Alaska. By the early nineteenth century when Alexander von Humboldt traveled to Siberia the foundation had been laid for a thorough understanding of the locations, customs, and identities of the dozens of ethnicities inhabiting the steppes, mountains, and valleys of central Asia.

III. Central Asia as the source
These travelers also had a wealth of knowledge to draw on, the bulk of it compiled by humanists and philologists looking for the earliest traces of Greco-Roman culture. Recent discoveries by paleoanthropologists suggest that the peoples of Europe migrated northward out of Africa in the paleo- and neolithic eras. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries however the Europeans were thought to have originated in the vast reaches of Central Asia. The Mongols and Huns thundered out of Asia to terrorize Roman and medieval Europe. The Avars, Bulgars, and Magyars also wrecked destruction in the early middle ages before settling down in Pannonia and the Balkans. But so did the nations considered to be more civilized, Celts and Goths, Italics and Greeks. L. C. Valckenaer traced the origin of the ancient Greeks to Central Asia where they were the neighbors of their barbarian adversaries, the Scythians and Sarmatians.
    Like my first book, this is a project of anthropology and philology. It illustrates how scientists and scholars combined ancient authors and modern travel literature to construct an image of the primitive mind and the migration of human nations. Its purpose is to show that, although we in the twenty-first century are only rediscovering the myriad ethnic groups in Central Asia through military intervention and petroleum exploration, in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe knew with surprising depth and precision the location, identity, customs, and languages of Central Asia before they were subsumed by the Russian Empire.


                         Leibniz Discovers Asia   |   Science of Culture   |   c.v.

© M. Carhart