City Plans of Turkistan and Bukhara: Analyzing Materials of D. G. Messerschmidt’s Expedition

Introduction. The article analyzes some handwritten city plans of Turkistan and Bukhara contained in materials of the traveler D. G. Messerschmidt. Goals. The work examines who and when investigated the plans, analyzes their different versions, and resumes when they were compiled. Materials and methods. The study focuses on D. G. Messerschmidt’s handwritten cartographic depictions of Turkistan and Bukhara housed at St. Petersburg Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg, Messerschmidt Collection). The drawings have been compared to another plan of Turkistan discovered at the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire (Moscow). In terms of methodology, the work rests on the principles of historicism and objectivity, with due use of chronological and comparative historical method tools. Results. Our analysis of D. G. Messerschmidt’s plans of Turkistan from two different Russian archives shows the one from the compiler’s personal collection served a source for the copy made by K. Miller. The plans of Turkistan and Bukhara have neither scale nor orthographic elements that would further emerge in Peter the Great’s era. Depictions of towers, houses, and captions resemble ones traced in cartographic works of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The paper suggests the plans were created by a member of Fyodor Skibin’s diplomatic mission upon the latter’s return from Turkistan (the capital of the Kazakh Khanate) via Bukhara to Tobolsk in 1695. So, the copies of these plans may have been made for D. G. Messerschmidt during a visit to Tobolsk as part of his Siberian expedition in 1719–1721. The article involves a variety of topographic, cartographic and archaeological materials to explain all the available inscriptions on the plan of Turkistan, interprets the objects and their designations. Conclusions. The article is first to compare the plan of Bukhara from the Messerschmidt Collection to subsequent ones, including some ethnographic research materials pertaining to the designated city. It also attempts a number of explanations and interpretations for a variety of identified inscriptions. The considered plans from the Messerschmidt Collection secure further important insights into the two capital cities of Central Asia in the late Middle Ages.

1. Sources

2. City plans of Turkistan and Bukhara compiled during D. G. Messerschmidt’s expedition. At: Archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg Branch. Coll. 98. Cat. 2. File 18. P. 1. (Former call number: Cat. 1. File 41). (In Russ.)

3. City plan of Turkistan compiled during K. Miller’s expedition. At: Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire. Coll. 122/1. File 4. (In Russ.)

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