Arianna Hamilton

Chapter 7 notes

10/21/10

Networks of Communication and Exchange, 300 B.C.E.–1100 C.E.

I. The Silk Road

a. Origins and Operations
i. The Silk Road was an overland route that linked China to the
Mediterranean world via Mesopotamia, Iran, and Central Asia. There were
two periods of heavy use of the Silk Road: (1) 150 B.C.E.–907 C.E. and
(2) the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries C.E.
ii. The origins of the Silk Road trade may be located in the occasional trading
of Central Asian nomads. Regular, large-scale trade was fostered by the
Chinese demand for western products (particularly horses) and by the
Parthian state in northeastern Iran and its control of the markets in
Mesopotamia.
iii. In addition to horses, China imported alfalfa, grapes, and a variety of other
new crops as well as medicinal products, metals, and precious stones.
China exported peaches and apricots, spices, and manufactured goods
including silk, pottery, and paper.
b. The Impact of the Silk Road Trade
i. Turkic nomads, who became the dominant pastoralist group in Central
Asia, benefited from the trade. Their elites constructed houses, lived
settled lives, and became interested in foreign religions including
Christianity, Manicheanism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and (eventually)
Islam.
ii. Central Asian military technologies, particularly the stirrup, were exported
both east and west, with significant consequences for the conduct of war.
c. The Indian Ocean Maritime System
i. The Indian Ocean maritime system linked the lands bordering the Indian
Ocean basin and the South China Sea. Trade took place in three distinct
regions: (1) the South China Sea, dominated by Chinese and Malays; (2)
Southeast Asia to the east coast of India, dominated by Malays and
Indians; and (3) the west coast of India to the Persian Gulf and East
Africa, dominated by Persians and Arabs.
ii. Trade in the Indian Ocean was made possible by and followed the patterns
of the seasonal changes in the monsoon winds.
 iii. Sailing technology unique to the Indian Ocean system included the lateen
sail and a shipbuilding technique that involved piercing the planks, tying
them together, and caulking them.
iv. Because the distances traveled were longer than in the Mediterranean,
traders in the Indian Ocean system seldom retained political ties to their
homelands, and war between the various lands participating in the trade
was rare.
d. Origins of Contact and Trade
i. There is evidence of early trade between ancient Mesopotamia and the
Indus Valley. This trade appears to have broken off as Mesopotamia
turned more toward trade with East Africa.
ii. Two thousand years ago, Malay sailors from Southeast Asia migrated to
the islands of Madagascar. These migrants, however, did not retain
communications or trade with their homeland.
e. The Impact of Indian Ocean Trade
i. What little we know about trade in the Indian Ocean system before Islam
is gleaned largely from a single first century C.E. Greco-Egyptian text,
The Periplus of the Erythrean Sea. This account describes a trading system
that must have been well established and flourishing when the account
was written. The goods traded included a wide variety of spices, aromatic
resins, pearls, Chinese pottery, and other luxury goods. The volume of
trade was probably not as high as in the Mediterranean.
ii. The culture of the Indian Ocean ports was often isolated from that of their
hinterlands. In the western part of the Indian Ocean, trading ports did not
have access to large inland populations of potential consumers. Even in
those eastern Indian and Malay peninsula ports that did have access to
large inland populations, the civilizations did not become oriented toward
the sea.
iii. Traders and sailors in the Indian Ocean system often married local women
in the ports that they frequented. These women thus became mediators
between cultures.
II. Routes Across the Sahara
a. Early Saharan Cultures
i. Undateable rock paintings in the highland areas that separate the southern
from the northern Sahara indicate the existence of an early Saharan
hunting culture that was later joined by cattle breeders who are portrayed
as looking rather like contemporary West Africans.
ii. The artwork indicates that the cattle breeders were later succeeded by
horse herders who drove chariots. There is no evidence to support the
earlier theory that these charioteers might have been Minoan or
 Mycenaean refugees. But there is also no evidence to show us either their
origins or their fate.
iii. The highland rock art indicates that camel riders followed the charioteers.
The camel was introduced from Arabia and its introduction and
domestication in the Sahara was probably related to the development of
the trans-Saharan trade. Written evidence and the design of camel saddles
and patterns of camel use indicate a south-to-north diffusion of camel
riding.
iv. The camel made it possible for people from the southern highlands of the
Sahara to roam the desert and to establish contacts with the people of the
northern Sahara.
b. Trade Across the Sahara
i. Trade across the Sahara developed slowly when two local trading systems,
one in the southern Sahara and one in the north, were linked. Traders in
the southern Sahara had access to desert salt deposits and exported salt to
the sub-Saharan regions in return for kola nuts and palm oil. Traders in the
north exported agricultural products and wild animals to Italy.
ii. When Rome declined (3rd century C.E.) and the Arabs invaded North
Africa (mid-7th century C.E.), the trade of Algeria and Morocco was cut
off. The Berber people of these areas revolted against the Arabs in the
700s and established independent city-states including Sijilmasa and
Tahert.
iii. After 740 the Berbers found that the southern nomads were getting gold
dust from the Niger and other areas of West Africa in exchange for their
salt. This opened their eyes to a great business opportunity. A pattern of
trade developed in which the Berbers of North Africa traded copper and
manufactured goods to the nomads of the southern desert in return for
gold. The nomads of the southern desert, for their part, exchanged their
salt for the gold of the Niger and other West African river areas.
c. The Kingdom of Ghana
i. The kingdom of Ghana was one of the early sub-Saharan beneficiaries of
this new trans-Saharan trade. The origins and early history of Ghana are
obscure. The first description we have is the eleventh century account by
al-Bakri, who described a city of two towns, one a Muslim merchant town
and the other the capital of an animist king and his court.
ii. After 1076 Ghana was weakened by the invasion of the Moroccan
Almorovids. Even after the Almorovids retreated from the south, Ghana
never recovered its former wealth and status.
III. Sub-Saharan Africa
a. A Challenging Geography
 i. Sub-Saharan Africa is a large area with many different environmental
zones and many geographical obstacles to movement.
ii. Some of the significant geographical areas are the Sahel, the tropical
savanna, the tropical rain forest of the lower Niger and Zaire, the savanna
area south of the rain forest, steppe and desert below that, and the
temperate highlands of South Africa.
b. The Development of Cultural Unity
i. Scholars draw a distinction between the “great traditions” of ruling elite
culture in a civilization and the many “small traditions” of the common
people.
ii. In sub-Saharan Africa no overarching “great tradition” developed. Sub-
Saharan Africa is a vast territory of many “small traditions.” Historians
know very little about the prehistory of these many “small traditions” and
their peoples.
iii. African cultures are highly diverse. The estimated two thousand spoken
languages of the continent and the numerous different food production
systems reflect the diversity of the African ecology and the difficulty of
communication and trade between different groups. Another reason for the
long dominance of “small traditions” is that no foreign power was able to
conquer Africa and thus impose a unified “great tradition.”
c. African Cultural Characteristics
i. Despite their diversity, African cultures display certain common features
that attest to an underlying cultural unity that some scholars have called
“Africanity.”
ii. One of these common cultural features is a concept of kingship in which
kings are ritually isolated and oversee societies in which the people are
arranged in age groups and kinship divisions.
iii. Other common features include cultivation with the hoe and digging stick,
the use of rhythm in African music, and the functions of dancing and mask
wearing in rituals.
iv. One hypothesis offered to explain this cultural unity holds that the people
of sub-Saharan Africa are descended from the people who occupied the
southern Sahara during its “wet period” and migrated south the Sahel,
where their cultural traditions developed.
d. The Advent of Iron and the Bantu Migrations
i. Sub-Saharan agriculture had its origins north of the equator and then
spread southward. Iron working also began north of the equator and spread
southward, reaching southern Africa by 800 C.E.
 ii. Linguistic evidence suggests that the spread of iron and other technology
in sub-Saharan Africa was the result of a phenomenon known as the Bantu
migrations.
iii. The original homeland of the Bantu people was in the area on the border
of modern Nigeria and Cameroon. Evidence suggests that the Bantu
people spread out toward the east and the south through a series of
migrations over the period of the first millennium C.E. By the eight
century, Bantu-speaking people had reached East Africa.
IV. The Spread of Ideas
a. Ideas and Material Evidence
i. It is extremely difficult, sometimes impossible, to trace the dissemination
of ideas in preliterate societies. For example, eating pork was restricted or
prohibited by religious belief in Southeast Asia, in ancient Egypt, and in
eastern Iran. Because Southeast Asia was an early center of pig
domestication, scholars hypothesize that the pig and the religious
injunctions concerning eating the pig traveled together toward the west.
This has not been proved.
ii. Another difficult problem involves the invention of coins. In the
Mediterranean world, the coins were invented in Anatolia and spread from
there to Europe, North Africa, and India. Chinese made cast copper coins
—was this inspired by the Anatolian example? There is no way of
knowing.
b. The Spread of Buddhism
i. The spread of ideas in a deliberate and organized fashion such that we can
trace it is a phenomenon of the first millennium C.E. This is particularly
the case with the spread of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam.
ii. The spread of Buddhism was facilitated both by royal sponsorship and by
the travels of ordinary pilgrims and missionaries. In India, the Mauryan
king Ashoka and King Kanishka of the Kushans actively supported
Buddhism. Two of the most well-known pilgrims who helped to transmit
Buddhism to China were the Chinese monks Faxian and Xuanzang. Both
have left reliable narrative accounts of their journeys.
iii. Buddhist missionaries from India traveled to a variety of destinations:
west to Syria, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, as well as to Sri Lanka, southeast
Asia, and Tibet.
iv. Buddhism was changed and further developed in the lands to which it
spread. Theravada Buddhism became dominant in Sri Lanka, Mahayana in
Tibet, and Chan (Zen) in East Asia.
c. The Spread of Christianity
 i. Armenia was an important entrepot for the Silk Road trade. Mediterranean
states spread Christianity to Armenia in order to bring that kingdom over
to its side and thus deprive Iran of control of this area.
ii. The transmission of Christianity to Ethiopia was similarly linked to a
Mediterranean Christian attempt to deprive Iran of trade.