Plausibility Check: Non-Nomadic Empire in Central Asia?

Could a settled/sedentary empire have controlled Central Asia, or is it always doomed to be dominated by Horse Nomads in pre-modern times?

The empire doesn't have to be local or based there - Persia/Iran managaging to keep control of it works too - but that would be cool.

There are some OTL examples of settled/sedentary peoples in Central Asia - the Oxus Civilization, some cities founded along the Silk Road - but they all were either way too weak and small to really control anything or they were crushed by Horse Nomads.
 
Pre-modern meaning before 1500?

China controlled large parts of Central Asia at various points in history before 1500. So did the Achaemenids and the Sassanids. PoDs for a strengthening of Han or Tang control are plenty, and so are Sassanid-wanking ones.

You want an autochtonous empire?
Thing is, dry places like Central Asia either got dominated by steppe nomads, whose political horizon was, so to speak, wider. Or, when that doesn`t happen, and option 3 (see below) doesn`t happen, either, then the sedentary societies, often separated from one another by large tracts of desert or by the highest mountains of the entire planet, tend to their most "natural" political form, i.e. the city state. These city states created federations of their own throughout classical antiquity, of which we know very little. (The Chinese called them something with Kang, Kang-li or Kang-ju, I don`t know exactly.) Geographical conditions didn`t render themselves to either of these city states growing to such power heights as to control all the other.

Then there is the initially traumatic and catastrophic option 3, which is sedentary societies getting uprooted by climate change or other disasters and going "on the move", i.e. developing an interim nomadic lookout, forming a space-filling empires, but coming from a sedentary cultural background. Just like more traditionally nomadic groups, such empire-building groups adapted to sedentary society to a great extent often. The one big example that comes to mind for option 3 are the Kushans. One might argue that the Hephtalites were another example, but I don`t know about that.
 
Top