The Silk Road The Indian Ocean Maritime System Routes Across the Sahara

1. 300 BCE – 600 CENetworks of Communicationand ExchangeTracy Rosselle, M.A.T.Newsome High School, Lithia, FL The Silk Road The Indian Ocean Maritime System Routes Across the Sahara The Spread of Ideas

2. The Silk Road The first of several periods of heavy trade along the Silk Road began around 100 BCE, but archaeologists and linguists studying peoples across Central Asia think they engaged in long-distance movement and exchange from at least 1500 BCE. Although most people did not travel the entire length of the Silk Road, caravans took more than four months to traverse the 2,500 miles between the western part of Central Asia (say Bukhara in modern-day Uzbekistan, east of the Caspian Sea) and the capital cities along the Yellow River in northeastern China. It was a social system as well as a trading network: ideas spread east and west just as agricultural products and manufactured goods. The goods were meant primarily for the wealthy elite … but sometimes the ideas and customs affected entire societies.

3. From Iran to China … from China to Iran, and well beyond The Silk Road • Cities such as Samarkand and Bukhara grew and flourished in Central Asia, often under local princes. • The Chinese were especially interested in the better breed of horses from the west, but they also brought in new plants and trees, and food items such as alfalfa, wine grapes, pistachios, walnuts, sesame, coriander and spinach. • Traders heading west from China brought peaches, apricots, cinnamon, ginger and other spices … and of course silk. Who traveled the routes? Merchants, monks and musicians … dancing girls and camel pullers.

4. The Silk RoadThe Sasanid Empire, 224-600 • Cities in Iran during the Sasanid Empire were essentially military installations meant to secure the safety of long-distance trade. • Farmers in the Middle East began experimenting with new items from India and China that would significantly gain in importance over the coming years: cotton, sugar cane, rice, citrus trees, eggplants and more. • Religion became politicized when Sasanids intolerantly made Zoroastrianism their official religion and the rival Byzantines declared Nestorian Christians heretics (Nestorians believed Mary was not the mother of god but of the human Jesus, who had a dual human-divine nature)  Nestorians sought refuge under the Sasanid shah and became missionaries along the Silk Road, where they competed for converts with Manichaean missionaries (Manichaeism is derived from Zoroastrianism and emphasized the struggle between Good and Evil).

5. The impact of the Silk Road • The peoples living along the Silk Road were influenced by the dynamic interplay of missionaries seeking converts to Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism. • Steppe customs, meanwhile, spread to foreign lands. The saddle and later the stirrup – most likely Central Asian inventions – made mounted warriors very effective  led later to armored knights in medieval Europe and superior Tang cavalry in China. Although it’s an invention often credited to the Chinese, Bulliet says the earliest evidence of the stirrup comes from the Kushan people, who ruled northern Afghanistan in the 1st century CE.

6. The Indian Ocean Maritime System • A multilingual, multiethnic society of seafarers established economic and social ties extending from East Africa to southern China and all the lands in between. Trade took place in three distinct regions: 1) Chinese and Malays dominated in South China Sea; 2) Malays and Indians dominated from Southeast Asia to east coast of India; and 3) Persians and Arabs dominated from west coast of India to the Persian Gulf and east coast of Africa. 2 1 3

7. The Indian Ocean Maritime SystemIn contrast to Mediterranean sailors: • used triangular (lateen) sails and normally did without oars. • could cover long distances entirely at sea thanks to monsoon winds. • did not establish colonies that maintained contact with their home cities  distances were greater and contacts less frequent, so trading outposts were rarely independent of local political powers but sometimes socially distinctive.

8. The Indian Ocean Maritime SystemMigration to Madagascar • An early chapter in Indian Ocean history was discovered by modern linguists: an Indonesian people migrated to Madagascar about two thousand years ago (probably in several legs, not straight across the intervening 6,000 miles of Indian Ocean). In the 400s, Africans crossed the 250 miles of the Mozambique Channel, and the two peoples began interacting. Important food crops brought from Southeast Asia and eventually introduced to Africa include the banana and the yam. Madagascar is the fourth-largest island in the world, and about 75 percent of its native animal species – including various types of lemurs – live nowhere else on the planet.

9. The Indian Ocean Maritime SystemFreaking over frankincense • Products in demand from Africa included exotic animals, wood, ivory and the aromatic resins valued as frankincense and myrrh. • Pearls came from the Persian Gulf, copper from southeastern Arabia, spices and manufactured goods from India and Southeast Asia (including pottery transshipped from China). • Despite the diversity of the highly valued items, the overall level of trade would not have approached that of the more compact Mediterranean. Scrubby trees like this frankincense tree, grown in northern Somalia and southern Arabia, produce a resin that was prized for its uses in religious ceremonies, medicine and aroma therapy. It was also used to mask the smell of rot.

10. The Indian Ocean Maritime SystemDistance and cultural diversity • Identifying specific mariners as Persian, Arab, Indian or Malay obscures the fact that they were often of a richer cultural mix. • Coastal areas often became home to a more cosmopolitan reality as seafarers and merchants took wives in port cities, where their families became bilingual and bicultural. • Gone for long stretches, these men then carried the influence of the various cultures to which they were exposed to other ports throughout the region.

11. Routes across the Sahara • The Sahara Desert isolated sub-Saharan Africa from the Mediterranean world. • It used to be much less dry, becoming the vast desert it is today from about 5000 BCE to 2500 BCE. • Travel between the shrinking number of grassy areas became more and more difficult, so that by 300 BCE it became the province only of desert nomads who could negotiate the difficult routes. Northern Africa is sometimes referred to as part of Afro-Eurasia, because its history and culture are much more closely aligned with the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern civilizations than with sub-Saharan Africa.

12. From a trickle to a stream • Trade over the trans-Saharan caravan routes went from a trickle to a significant stream after domesticated camels were introduced from Arabia. • The routes through the sprawling sand dunes, sandy plains and exposed rock of the desert linked two different trading systems: • In the south, traders focused on taking mined salt to the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, while items like edible pal oil and kola nuts were brought from the equatorial forest zone to trading centers along the desert’s southern edge … while the farmers of the Sahel – the desert’s southern borderlands – played a key “middleman” role.

13. The way of the Romans • In the north, Roman colonists supplied Italy with wheat and olives … and adopted the culture and manufactured goods of the Romans … until trade declined dramatically after the third century CE (along with the Roman Empire itself) and farms were abandoned for the nomadic lifestyle. • The most important African network of cultural exchange from 300 BCE to about 1100 CE had less to do with trade, however, than it did with migration. • Some time around 1500 BCE, farmers in the Niger and Benue River valleys in sub-Saharan West Africa began migrating south and east, probably to escape a population explosion as people to the north of them moved out of the Sahara Desert, which was becoming drier.

14. Bantu (“people”) • These early African peoples shared certain cultural characteristics and spoke the Bantu family of languages. • They farmed, fished, had domesticated goats and dogs, and crafted pottery and cloth. • The Bantu migration proceeded for 2,000 years or so as these people moved farther and farther south into areas of Africa formerly occupied by nomads. • Around 1000 BCE they began producing iron tools, and they used these in conjunction with their slash-and-burn farming technique, in which a patch of forest is cut down and burned so that the ashes are mixed with the soil to create a fertile garden area. This technique, though, leads to only short-term land fertility … and thus necessitates further migration within a few years.

15. Bantus bring cultural unity • Around 500 BCE the Bantus were aided in their migration pattern by the introduction of banana cultivation (brought to Africa via the Indian Ocean trading network), which enabled them to expand into heavily forested areas. • The Bantu migrations from 400 BCE to 1000 CE took Africa’s population from about 3.5 million to 22 million. They spread agriculture throughout much of Africa. Today, more than 500 distinct but related languages can be traced back to the Bantus. • Thus, the Bantu migrations and their intermingling with preexisting societies produced the evolution of Pan-African traditions and practices – a broad cultural unity called “Africanity” by anthropologist Jacques Maquet.

16. A “small traditions” culture • This cultural unity, however, was masked by great diversity among the heritage of local peoples. • In large part because of its isolation from the rest of the world and the challenges of its geography (from semiarid steppes to savannas covered by long grasses and scattered forest .. from tropical rain forest to raging rivers with many cataracts), a “great traditions” culture did not emerge (i.e., no common written language [Africa has more than two thousand distinct languages!], legal system, religion, ethical code or philosophy). • Instead, sub-Saharan Africa developed a “small traditions” heritage based on local customs and beliefs … shaped by the broad sweep of the Bantu migrations.

17. The spread of ideas • Ideas as well as goods can travel via trade and folk migration … but in the absence of written records, historians often don’t know for sure how (or whether) a specific idea got from one place to another or if it was independently hit upon in more than one location (e.g., domesticating pigs, coins in China, African iron). • Two ideas we can trace: the spread of Buddhism and Christianity. • These two religions (along with Islam, which arose later) remain to this day important belief systems for much of the planet … but in neither case did the diffusion rely on a single ethnic or kinship group.

18. Buddha or bust • Although the Mauryan ruler Ashoka promoted Buddhism early on, the Buddha’s teachings reached China, Southeast Asia, Korea and ultimately Japan as merchants, monks, missionaries and pilgrims crisscrossed India, followed the Silk Road or hopped on ships cruising the Indian Ocean. • Different lands preserved or adapted Buddhism in different ways: Sri Lanka and large parts of Southeast Asia neighboring India embraced Theravada Buddhism, while the Mahayana school was preserved most everywhere else from Central Asia to China and East Asia. Buddhist caves near Turpan, China, reveal the spread and influence of Buddhism beyond its birthplace of India.

19. Christianity, trade and politics • We’ll tackle the post-Roman development of Christianity in Europe in a couple of weeks, but it also spread in the crosscurrents of trade and politics to places like Armenia and Ethiopia. • In Armenia, which is in eastern Anatolia where imperial powers vied for control of a place where Silk Road traders linked up with Mediterranean counterparts, Christianity superseded Zoroastrianism after the invention of a written Armenian alphabet – which helped facilitate the wider spread of Christianity in the early fifth century.

20. The merchants of Axum • In what came to be named Ethiopia, merchants in the kingdom of Axum traded from the port of Adulis on the Red Sea, strategically located to become a key part of the India  Mediterranean economy. • Exports: ivory, frankincense, myrrh, slaves. • Imports: textiles, metal goods, wine, olive oil. • In the fourth century, Axumite rulers adopted Christianity, possibly from the Egyptians … and remained committed to the Egyptian form of Christianity (often called Coptic, from the local language of the day) even after it was surrounded by Islamic influence and cut off from the heart of Christianity in the Mediterranean. Later Europeans identified Ethiopia as the “hermit kingdom” and the home of Prestor John, the legendary Christian king said to rule in the Orient amidst Muslims and pagans.

21. Sources • The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History (Bulliet et al.) • Traditions & Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past (Bentley & Ziegler) • World History (Duiker & Spielvogel)