Trade and immigration brought with them diverse peoples, who helped shape Central Asia's traditions. Alfred Bühler, a noted expert on the subject, believes that the ikat technique probably originated in India or China and, through the spread of Buddhism, possibly became known in India, East, Central and West Asia, Arabia and Egypt by the early 7th century (1).

Very little archeological evidence exists to substantiate the early history of ikat weaving in Central Asia. Better documented is the pivotal role of Jews in the textile production and trade of the region. Prior to the 8th century, a well-established network of Jewish merchants from North Africa to Southern India facilitated the distribution of cloth and finished goods and the supply of precious dyestuffs such as indigo, which was not indigenous to Central Asia. Indigo began its journey in the hands of Baghdadi Jewish merchants living in India, passed over the mountain passes and across the steppes via Afghanistan on the pack animals of Herati Jewish traders and finally arrived at the workshops of Jewish dyers in Bukhara (2). Because Islam mandated greater tolerance towards minorities than was usual in the West, Jews had settled in Central Asia in great numbers. In the Bukharan crafts community they were recognized for their dyeing skills.

Because it is a foul-smelling process, dyeing was restricted to specific areas of the city. Cold dyeing, practiced by Jews, and hot dyeing, practiced by Tadjiks, the most numerous and ancient inhabitants of the oases, took place side-by-side in the same neighborhoods. Although all craftsmen were respected for performing a necessary role, dyers, who handled unclean substances, were on the lowest rung. Both technical knowledge and social status were passed from father to son, and marriages were usually contracted within the same occupation class, assuring that selected crafts remained the specialty of certain ethnic groups.

Other craftspeople included the Uzbeks, the dominant political group in Central Asia, and some hundred different groups of people with shared Islamic roots, of which the most important were the Kazakhs, Kirghiz, Karakalpaks, Turkmens, Persians, Arabs, Tartars and Kalmucks (3). When archeologists collected manuscripts in the regions between 1902 and 1914, some were written in no less than 17 languages and 24 different scripts, dramatically illustrating the region's diversity (4). Records document the late 18th and early 19th century immigration of different groups of skilled silk weavers to Bukhara, but ikat weaving was not associated with any single group. It was the very mixture of nationalities, skills and tastes in Central Asia that is believed to have given birth to sumptuous silk ikats (5).

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(1) Johannes Kalter, ed., Uzbekistan: Heirs to the Silk Road (Thames and Hudson, 1997), 218.
(2) Kate Fitz Gibbon and Andrew Hale, Ikat: Splendid Silks of Central Asia: the Guido Goldman Collection (Lawrence King Publishing in Association with Alan Marcuson Publishing, 1999), 178.
(3) Kalter, 11.
(4) Ibid., 31.
(5) Gibbon and Hale, 61.