The Last Tarkhan: Nezak and the Final Hephthalite Resistance Against the Umayyad Caliphate - Paperback
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In the autumn of 709 CE, a ruler known as Nezak Tarkhan crossed the Oxus River and declared war on the most powerful empire in the world. He was the last dynastic heir of the Hephthalite tradition that had governed the mountain principalities of Tokharistan - ancient Bactria, the land between the Hindu Kush and the Oxus - for two centuries. His opponent was Qutayba ibn Muslim, the most capable Arab commander of his generation, operating under the mandate of the Umayyad Caliphate to transform the unstable eastern frontier into a permanent imperial province. What followed was one of the most consequential military campaigns in the history of Central Asia.
The Last Tarkhan tells the full story of Nezak Tarkhan's revolt and its suppression - from the deep history of the Hephthalite Empire and the Buddhist civilization of Bactria through the mechanics of the 710 CE campaign, the mountain standoff at Shab-e-Khum, the betrayal that ended it, and the execution that closed two centuries of Hephthalite political independence. Drawing on Arabic chronicles, Tang dynastic annals, Bactrian documentary evidence, and the numismatic record of the Nēzak Sāh coinage, this book recovers a forgotten world at the intersection of empire - and the extraordinary man who made one last, brilliant, ultimately unsuccessful attempt to preserve it.
Maurice Neilson grew up in County Antrim and has spent much of his adult life researching the frontier zones where ancient civilizations met, merged, and destroyed one another. His particular fascination is the post-Sasanian world of the Iranian east - the mountain principalities, Buddhist monasteries, and Silk Road cities that the early Islamic expansion encountered and transformed in the seventh and eighth centuries. He came to the story of Nezak Tarkhan through a long engagement with the numismatic evidence of the Hephthalite dynasty, whose silver coins he regards as among the most eloquent physical documents of the late antique world. He has written widely in the fields of ancient and medieval history and regards the recovery of the pre-Islamic Central Asian world as one of the most important and most neglected tasks in modern historical writing. The Last Tarkhan is his most ambitious work in the field.
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