While reading the wikipedia bio’s of Helena Roerich and her son George de Roerich, I was astonished to notice the lengthy period of time they spent travelling and exploring Central Asia. Today the word ‘explorer’ has a rather trivial meaning, but in the past it did mean something quite profound.
The history of Russian explorers exploring, mapping out and documenting previously unknown things about the regions of central Asia is fascinating because these were upper class extremely well educated and classically trained individuals with artistic and philosophical backgrounds, who also became experts in Asian languages and set off on great quests for many years at a time, to explore places that were otherwise uncharted and unknown.
The Roerich family (of Nicholas Roerich fame) set off as a family on an ambitious journey through Central Asia for 4? years! They were all extremely skilled in different ways with George being an expert in Oriental studies from Harvard, including mastery of Sanskrit, Pali, Classical Chinese, Mongolian, Persian and Tibetan. He also became an expert in Tibetan Art making significant contributions to the western knowledge of Tibetan history and art, purely through his explorations.
This is something people used to do: gather bold brave experts and fund them on grand voyages to uncover hidden treasures and knowledge.
Of this lengthy and challenging journey, Roerich later said “The expedition headed by Professor Nicholas Roerich, organized by the Roerich Museum in New York and International Centre of Art ‘Corona Mundi’ had as its main task creation of the unique pictorial panorama of the lands and nations of Inmost Asia. The second task, was research of the possibilities of the new archaeological excavations, and thus, preparation of the ways for the future expeditions in this region. The third task was research of the languages and dialects of Central Asia, and gathering a big collection of objects, that depict spiritual culture of these nations. Central Asia has been a cradle and a meeting place of many Asian civilizations, and inaccessible mountain valleys till our days preserved many invaluable linguistic and ethnographic materials, which can help to reconstruct the past of Asia.