Step Fourteen

Everything that I have ever talked about as important in travelling the Silk Road really seems to boil down into one thing: BE A SOGDIAN.

Who were the Sogdians? Historically, we've got these people who came from the land between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya rivers, centred around Samarkand although with this really decentralized political system. They were Zoroastrians - that we know - but not as intensely purist as the Sassanians next door. They were traders first and foremost, they settled parts of China and managed to become high up people in Chinese government and bureaucracy, and they translated TONS of texts. The way I see it, we've got four distinct ways we can look at the Sogdian contribution to the history of the Silk Road.

Way the First: Sogdians as religious connoisseurs. I use the term cognizant of how loaded it is, with its implications of "picking the best" - but what I'm really using it to say is that, like connoisseurs of cheesecake pick out what they think is best, the Sogdians picked out what they thought was best about certain religious traditions, and I'm not using the word to make value statements about religions. There. Now that that's out of the way: on to the main point. The Sogdians, whether at home between the rivers or in their colonies in China, somehow managed to incorporate a ton of different religious traditions into Zoroastrianism.

We've got evidence of the usual run of Zoroastrian practices (although Lerner, Marshak, and Feng are all pretty quiet about what exactly those practices ARE), along with some Hindu goddess worship, and some Nestorian Christianity creeping in there, and some Manichean teachings, and I'm guessing we might see a lot of Buddhist influence if we look at later history, maybe some Islamic influence, and definitely some Confucianism or Daoism when we get into China. The Sogdians were able to pick and choose when it came to religion, which, as I've delved into before, results in Good Things. With the exchange of ideas comes the exchange of technology, the exchange of goods, the exchange of alliances, all of which are essential to success on the Silk Road - all of which ARE the Silk Road.

Way the Second: Sogdians as traders. And traders of ideas as well as everything material! But, really, traders.  LOOK AT THEIR LOCATION! It was totally prime for interaction with everyone. Between the Persians and Romans/Byzantines on one side, the Chinese on the other, Bactria and India below them and the riches of the steppes above, the Sogdians had it made. Not only that, but because the bulk of their civilization was between two rivers, they had a great wealth of resources of their own (presumably) with which to start up trade. And trade they did - trumping even the Sassanians, who were pretty powerful and awesome and stuff. Not only were they the chief go-betweens between EVERYONE, they also made a huge contribution to trade relations in general: the Sogdian language was the language of trade all along the Silk Road(s). Not only did they facilitate the actual progress of goods and technologies and ideas along the trade routes, they facilitated the interactions between traders of all cultures, so that we can probably say with a great degree of accuracy that Silk Road trade was a Sogdian enterprise.

Way the Third: Sogdians as cultural puzzle pieces. The Sogdians knew that the best people to trade with are people you know, so they accordingly set up lots of colonies along the Silk Road routes, and, in doing so, created a ton of microcosmic Sogdian worlds in the heart of places like China. In China they were particularly successful, managing to maintain their cultural identities to the extent that we can tell from their last names that they were still identifying with their homeland, even after so many generations that China really WAS their homeland. They also got in really tight with the Chinese government - one particular family managed to produce a bunch of high-ranking officials and military officers and even some imperial bodyguards and horse-breeders.

To me, this is characteristic of the Silk Road itself:  the interactions of different cultures to the point where they weave together to form a distinct tapestry where the warp and weft can still be distinguished. The Sogdians, in their ability to both integrate into Chinese society and keep their own distinct cultural heritage alive, are essentially personifications of the entirety of the Silk Road. I know this is a big claim. I'm not sure if I actually can make it, but I'd like to.

Finally, Way the Fourth: Sogdians as translators. I've already talked about the Sogdian language as the language of trade, but that's not the only awesome thing that they managed to do linguistically. They translated Buddhist texts primarily, according to Feng, but this seems to me to just be indicative of what was probably a larger translation effort: the Sogdians are the reason that a variety of religious and historical and political theoretical traditions made their way along the Silk Road. The Sogdians provided one of the main vehicles for the progress of knowledge along the trade routes, a common language, and then actively ensured that the knowledge was IN that language so that it COULD travel.

The Sogdians were just...essential. Could there have been a Silk Road without them? Somehow, I feel that the things that they did were done to a lesser extent by different peoples, and while there might not have been a giant presence, there probably would've been the same sort of thing, and we'd have a Silk Road. But would it be at all the same? As I see it, the best and only way to success on the Silk Road would be to follow Step Fourteen and be a Sogdian. 

Step Thirteen

So one thing we've seen time and again in history is that religions travel well. Religions seem to travel better than language (Jews stayed Jewish when they moved out to Eastern Europe, but they dropped the Hebrew and Yiddish grew up), or food types, or anything, really, except tangible goods. And even then, I'll bet that Jesuit missionaries were pretty frequently shipwrecked or robbed somehow along the way but still managed to spread their religion.

In my ongoing quest to be the best/most successful Silk Road-er ever, I think this is an important lesson to learn. And I think that the story of Xuanzang, or at least as Sally Hovey Wriggins tells it, is an excellent case study to support this point.

So Xuanzang is this Buddhist monk who decides to contravene a direct order from the emperor and head out on what turns into a sixteen-year walk, all the way to India, with the interest of re-discovering Buddhism. He's a profound Mahayana Buddhist (not surprising), and he's wondering how to reconcile Mahayana beliefs with Theravada texts that he's been reading (to his profound consternation), and what better place to do that than in Theravada Buddhism's home? So off he goes, and it's quite a story.

Amidst all the miracles (which are all pretty cool - Xuanzang's biographer had quite the dramatic flair, even if everything is 100% true and accurate) and all the flattering state visits and all the 'Oh heavens. These people are rather strange. Nice, but straaaaaaaaannnngggge...' moments, Xuanzang discovers more than just an obscure part of his religious roots: he discovers the power of religion.

His monk's garb gets him lots of help along the way, as do his institutional ties, but his personal practice is what really gets things done. In every conflict that he has with a ruler, for instance, the demonstration of his dedication to his principles or his Awesome Buddhist Arguing Skills or his stick-to-his-guns attitude where Mahayana and Theravada clash manage to let him come out on top in some way or another, but I want to look at this on a more fundamental level.

I want to take Xuanzang's journey and say that being religious was the only way he could travel at all, really. Looking back to some readings from last week/the week before/some time that was not very far away but is also not now, there's this story of the first Buddhist missionaries being merchants! Which was framed as this way to show that Buddhism was tied to commerce, but I want to say that it really shows that commerce was tied to Buddhism, which is a pretty minute distinction, but one that I feel is important. It's not that Buddhism went where commerce went, it's that commerce grew where Buddhism was present and BECAUSE of Buddhism.

I don't think it's anything inherent to Buddhism - I'm sure any other religion could have done the same thing - but I think that Xuanzang' story shows just how much Buddhism dragged commerce along with it.
Xuanzang left China with essentially nothing, and ended up with massive amounts of presents and things, given by King A for Kings B through B-prime. This is a form of goods exchange - the kings he visited gave him presents back in exchange for these, and he heads off every time to see someone else and give and get presents. Really awesome presents, too.

Furthermore - and finally, I guess - the information exchange that we see between trade partners is the same information exchange we see here. Xuanzang is learning about Theravada Buddhism (and teaching about Mahayana, something that I think is super important given his route through the Himalayas and the interesting contents and origins of Himalayan Buddhism), but he's also learning about all the petty kingdoms - and the not-so-petty ones, and the nomadic tribes, and India itself. Xuanzang ends up becoming an advisor to the emperor when he gets back, and all because he has this wealth of information about lands previously shrouded in mystical mystery. And the trade relations between India and China really start happening once the emperor has this adequate information about India and once all the various Indian rulers have this adequate information about China. Commerce followed on Xuanzang's heels (sometimes so close it was essentially in his shoes), as commerce follows on the heels of religion in general.

Things Xuanzang has taught me: that Step Thirteen should be Be a religious pilgrim - you get to explore the world, get presents, get political clout, and get credit for starting commerce. 

Step Twelve

Imagine, Matrix-style, that you've got a rid pill and a blue pill between which you have to choose. One of them is BE WARLIKE AND CONQUER EVERYBODY and the other is BE TRADERS AND GET CONQUERED BY EVERYBODY. Weighing the pros and cons, I would have totally picked the former - and then I read Liu's article on interaction between nomadic and sedentary socities.

Liu uses the Yuezhi-Kushan (whose identities are shrouded in layers of fog, which she does a pretty fair job of unraveling) as a model for other nomadic societies, talking about their widespread influence in East and Central Asia and through to the Hellenistic Afghanistan area. My first thought: "AHA! These are those awesome steppe traders that Christian was talking about!" because Liu gives them credit for being the first real users of the Silk Road.

The most interesting thing, though, is the contrast between the survival of cultures - I'm going to broad-brush-strokes it as a continuum from the Xiongnu through the Yuezhi-Kushan through the Bactrians.

How much do we know about the Xiongnu? I read an interesting article last week about their depictions in Chinese histories, and, frankly, we have very little either than those Chinese records on which to base our reconstruction of Xiongnu society. The Xiongnu were a crazy society that Han China (and all the other dynasties, it looks like Liu is suggesting) really hated, largely because the nomadic warrior-types were always trying to conquer China proper. Really aggressive, not much trading potential, angry-angry-angry people.

What about the Yuezhi-Kushan? Liu does a great job of explaining how they spread out through nomadic migratory practices to vaguely invade lots of places from China to India, and to keep really strong trade relations, especially with China, for whom they provided horses and jade and other stuff for the war against the Xiongnu. The Y-Z had terrible problems with the X as well, it seems, although after the majority of them (which may have just been people who spoke the same language rather than sharing a culture) migrated to India's side of the continent they stopped extensive trade with the Chinese. What we know about the Y-Z is fragmentary, and highly mixed up with all the other cultures around them, but it's definitely more than just entries in Chinese historical catalogues.

And, finally, the Bactrians, along with all the other people in India's side that the Y-Z happened to "conquer". Liu doesn't go into depth on their identities, but there seems to be very little controversy and very much really diverse information - from archaeological to written sources. We seem to know a lot more about them than about the vaguely conquering-types or about the really-seriously-we-want-your-kingdom-conquering-types.

So, my hypothesis! Liu talks about how sedentary societies tend to exert an extremely powerful influence on the nomadic societies which invade them, to the point where we really have no idea what, say, Mongol culture really looked like. Or Xiongnu. So it seems to me that, when deciding between red and blue pill, we should be looking at cultural survival.

The Yuezhi-Kushan spread out through EVERYONE, and in doing so a lot of their customs and religions became those of the people they conquered-ish. One particularly striking example is the introduction of Buddhism to China, which was done by KUSHAN missionaries. This is about as close to an explicit statement of assimilation as you're likely to get - the Buddhist practitioners in India/Afghanistan/that area converted large enough segments of the conquering population to send them back home with the good news.

Why DO conquering nomads end up getting subsumed into the lifestyle/practices/belief systems of their sedentary conquerees? Liu doesn't give much of an answer, but the question is one that I think is really important to our study of history. Furthermore, she implicitly sets up a pattern but does not derive from it a rule to hold next to other societies, and nothing I've yet read suggests any reason for cultural assimilation nor any rule that we can broadly apply and see how it fits.

So, for now, I'm going to have to be content to say that Step Twelve is to be traders and get conquered by everyone - you make tons of money and, really, you end up being the only one who people accurately remember.

Step Eleven

If there's one lesson that we can learn from the western regions of China during the two Han dynasties, it's that consistent mortal enemies provoke progress and innovation.

I'm reading a section of the History of Civilizations of Central Asia ("The Western Regions under the Hsiung-nu and the Han"), and while there are a bunch of good things to take from it that apply very specifically to a Silk Road journey, there's definitely this really big emphasis on the awesome things that went down in the Walled City-States of the Western Regions (WCSWR) as a result of the conflict between the Hsiung-nu and the Han.

My big questions: When the Hsiung-nu were in charge, how did they affect the culture of the WCSWR? Are these "northern barbarians" somehow connected to Christian's idea of steppe nomads who really began the Silk Road? When did the Silk Road begin to affect the WCSWR? Pre-Buddhism, what did the WCSWR religion(s) look like, and, when Buddhism finally came in, how did it take on the local flavour? It's a ridiculously intriguing section of history.

Ma and Sun, the authors of this section, devote a lot of time to history gleaned from Chinese records (without really mentioning the inherent bias of Chinese sources, which bugged me a little), and then really focus on archaeology - and their interpretations actually look scholarly. After having watched the Riddle of the Desert Mummies documentary, I was a little sketched out about using archaeological data, but Ma and Sun have restored my faith in the method.

They make a few convincing arguments about what society looked like, main exports, and that sort of thing, and draw some interesting conclusions about coins especially, but the pervading theme seems to be this implicit statement that the Han Chinese wouldn't have innovated as much in the WCSWR without the constant pressure of the Hsiung-nu. Which makes me wonder if looking at discrete units of history is really all that helpful?

We've already talked about cultural exchange on the Silk Road and the difficulties of dealing with that, but for me this article raised an even bigger issue. An existential crisis, possibly, about history itself. My question really is, after reflecting on the evolution of WCSWR society, can we talk about a history of a particular area or group? Because as I see it, if all of these cultures are influencing each other, then in order to understand A, we have to understand how C and B affected it, and in order to understand that in the fullest sense, we have to understand where C and B were influenced and D and E and F and G and...and...

Can you even rightly write about a complete picture of history? In order to look at one specific people in one specific place at one specific time, we have to understand not only their history, but the history of their interactions - direct or indirect - with other cultures, which means you have to know the history of those other cultures so that you know who indirectly affected your first guys. That's like...a lifetime of work to pull together all of that data, and then you have to set about interpreting it and understanding it.

And then if you apply Ma and Sun's idea of innovation as a result of specifically the clash of cultures, the issue gets even more complicated. They do a really good job of chronicling the issues between the Hsiung-nu and the Han to describe how the Han affected the culture and society of the WCSWR, but what happens if you look at the people interacting with the Hsiung-nu to understand the things that they brought to the table? What happens if you look at the direct interaction between the people of the WCSWR and their sometimes conquerors? What happens if another player gets added to the mix - trading partners along the Silk Road, for instance?

I feel like understanding this one section of the world in this one specific time period suddenly got a lot more complex than the potential hazards of interpreting archaeological evidence. And I wish I had answers to my questions - even the basic ones. I think the only concrete thing I can glean from these mental calisthenics is the idea that Step Eleven should be cultivate consistent mortal enemies to provoke progress and innovation. 

Step Ten

Ward H. Goodenough, that man with the most wonderful name in the world, wrote an article on Culture for the Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology. Caveat emptor: I did not read all of it before composing this bog post, which will really be yet another semi-coherent criticism of what I consider to be the failings of people significantly more educated than I.

Within the first few pages, Goodenough handily dismisses 19th century attitudes towards culture and moves on to 20th century conceptions. He starts with Franz Boas, who was a proponent of the idea of "distinctive" cultures whose differences could be explained by (a) environmental conditions and (b) "the accidents of history" - so, essentially, an early Jared Diamond. He explains that, according to this theory, "People at the crossroads of communication have benefited from new developments being transmitted from many different places". I stopped there, stuck a little star in the margin, and wrote "STEP TEN: TRY TO AVOID INFLUENCE IN THE INTEREST OF FUTURE ANTHROPOLOGISTS", because something I've been getting through all these readings is that, because of cross-cultural exchange, it can be really, really hard to tell who-developed-what and what-things-looked-like-before-these-other-guys-came-into-the-picture.

So I keep reading, and Goodenough remarks that "The diffusion of customary practices is now known to be a highly selective process", which to me negates the whole point of cross-cultural exchange. If a culture could pick how another culture influenced it, I think a lot of them would choose realities a little different from how things turned out.

The question that I think Goodenough negates in this section is of what, if anything, do we know about cultures that were completely subsumed? Christian's steppe peoples, for instance, are a bunch of cultures/a cultural structure that he can only barely reconstruct, and, if you take him at his word, he's one of the first people to acknowledge their existence. If they could "selectively" decide which Chinese or Indo-Aryan or whatever other culture would "diffuse customary practices" within their society, would they have chosen the route that left them a teensy, pale footnote in what we actually, concretely know about the Silk Road(s)? We know next to nothing about them, which to me suggests that, since Christian posits that they were "at the crossroads" of trade, they "benefited from now developments being transmitted from many different places" and thus lost their singular identities.

I shouldn't really attach a value statement to the process by using words like "lost" or "subsumed". My problem is just that I feel Goodenough dismisses very real evidence about smaller communities in favour of looking at bigger cultures who COULD be selective about what they took from others.

In my interpretation, Step Ten should still be Try to avoid influence in the interest of future anthropologists, although arguably it's mapping cross-cultural contact that makes the discipline of history so alive and wonderful. But I rest on the idea that my steps are MINE: for this day, this year, this age when cultural preservation is very present on people's radar screens, and they are for me: for the Western world that has exerted, at many times, an undue negative influence on cultures it deems less "advanced" than itself.

Step Nine

Reading A Concise Introduction to World Religions and some discussion thread comments from my Science Fiction class has made me really seriously think about language some more. The religion textbook tells me that Judaism doesn't really approve of translating its scripture out of Hebrew, and that Islam pretty much says you aren't reading the Qur'an if it's not in Arabic, and I'm sure if I flipped through, I'd find that the original language of sacred texts is important to some extent across the board. An interesting aside to this is traditionally that in both Judaism and Islam, religion is not a part of your daily life, but your daily life is a part of your religion, meaning that your language is incredibly important to your culture.

To me, this makes perfect sense. Why else would SF authors create new languages that usually fail completely because they don't sound exotic, just silly? Why else would Tolkien have created full grammars and dictionaries for at least two languages and probably more for his fictional Middle Earth? As any avid reading of SF and Fantasy can tell you, language is one of the main things that sets cultures apart. 

And as anyone remotely familiar with Overused Shakespeare Quotes can tell you, "That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet". I prefer to agree less with a 14-year-old lovestruck girl and more with Hubert H. Humphrey, who said that "In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be."

So, putting these ideas together: language is inherently tied into the very deepest parts of who we are as individuals and who we are as societies and, perhaps more importantly, how we relate to other individuals and other societies. 

It's because of this linkage that we can use the knowledge of a language to tell us things about the societ(y/ies) that use(s/d) it - especially with reference to religion. And here I feel like CEL dropped the ball. They do devote a nice, tidy page to Language and Religion, but really all they do is give examples of

a) religions that tie writing/language as a whole to a divinity or divinities

and

b) types of religious writing/language.

I want to know how the structure of Sanskrit can tell me about the devotional practices of Brahmins in 14th century BCE India. I want to know how learning the different words for "prayer" can help me understand the different approaches to the practice in different cultures. I want to know, I think most relevantly for this discussion, how the learning the languages of the Silk Road(s) would have helped a traveller to understand the cultures with which s/he was interacting. I want to know how language helped spread religions around, and spread animosity towards religions around. 

Step Nine is thus very clearly Tie the languages you learn to the cultures you meet. Because language is not a static thing, and language can obviously tell us so much about religions and cultures and societies, maybe, I think, even more so than archaeological records.

Step Eight

So I've been reading some sections of The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language, and I'm seriously getting the vibe that language is much too important of an issue to be relegated to a single step. Therefore, I present Further Arguments on the Importance of Language, alternatively titled Step Eight: You're not just changing the gene pool, so prepare yourself accordingly.


According the CEL (which is an acronym I just made up now, either because I am an incredibly lazy typist or an incredibly clever/witty person in general), languages are fascinatingly complex. One of the main ideas here is that of this language called "proto-Indo-European", which is supposed to be this foundational languages from which 55 languages sprung. I didn't read anywhere about a foundational language called "proto-everything-that's-not-Indo-European", but, for the sake of this post, let's just assume that there is one.

And let's assume that we have access to a time machine - one of my most cherished desires - and that, furthermore, we are fully functional crossbreeds of the historical linguist and the classic philologist (BIG NOTE: those disciplines apparently clash over the value of the historical record vs. the value of direct structural analysis, but CEL's experts have determined that the two are complementary). So, with our handy-dandy time machine, we had back to travel along the Silk Road(s) in the party of, say, a Genoese trader.

The question I have is, with a good knowledge of proto-Indo-European and any other proto-languages, would we be any better equipped than your average Genoese trader to deal with the different peoples and language groups we'd encounter?

I'm looking at this huge long process of scholarship that has led to the development of grammatical treatises and an alphabet and vocabulary for proto-Indo-European, and there's a big part of me that doesn't see the practical value in it. I suppose one could say the same thing about any number of scholarly disciplines - astrophysics, for instance, does not affect my daily life in any way - but all the examples I can think of have SOME bearing to SOMETHING in reality. I guess linguistic archaeology is something like regular archaeology, in the sense that it really ends up being knowledge for knowledge's sake, but, thinking like a traveller of the Silk Road(s), I think I would much rather understand a culture's history than understand that their language came from the same basic root as mine.

But I digress. What we're looking at here is the importance of language, and I want to bring this back to Christian's idea of EXCHANGE rather than TRADE. The CEL makes the point that sometimes it's really hard to tell the relationship between languages because the markers that would put them in the same family might only be there because of a cultural exchange - like all the French words and grammatical structures in English from way back in the Norman Conquest. To what extent, I wonder, are languages part of the Silk Road exchange - and not just, like I mentioned in Step Seven, to learn other languages, but to INFLUENCE them.

If I look at the CEL's handy map of language group distribution, I can see a ton of points of interaction between languages. The majority of the Silk Road(s) didn't include speakers of Indo-European languages, which means a massive amount of interplay not only between, say Indo-Iranian and Italic languages, but also between the Indo-European languages and other entire FAMILIES of languages.

And when you break down the Uralic languages (for which, sadly, the CEL does not have a nice little chart), or the Caucasian languages, or the Palaeosiberian or Altaic or Chinese languages, or the languages that don't fit into any of those like Korean or Japanese, you're talking a massive number of possible interactions, if you do the whole thing where you multiple <number of things> by <number of thing> to get the possible permutations of those things?

I feel like this has two major implications for journeying the Silk Road(s).

One: whatever you do, whoever you meet, they will be influencing your language and you will be influencing theirs.
Two: Step Seven is significantly easier said than done.

And implication number two brings back the question - would knowledge of proto-languages help your plight in  any way? Because if so, I feel like yet another alternative title for Step Eight would be be a linguist. 

Step Seven

So I'm sitting here figuring that Seven is an Important Number and should thus have something vaguely scholarly attached to it, when my computer pops up with a reminder that I have programmed into my calendar: Practice Sanskrit. Languages are not my forte. But doing anything with Buddhist or Hindu studies really requires at the very least Sanskrit, and other languages are pretty helpful. Islamic studies'll take Arabic, but I figure: ONE new alphabet at a time, right?

And I'm having my little pity party as I pull out my practice notebook and my list of words and phrases to transliterate, and suddenly it strikes me: for anyone travelling the Silk Road(s), language would've been an issue, too.

I mean, for starters, even if Christian is wrong about the pastoralists, you've still got quite the large difference between people in different cities. Think about India! Or pre-colonial North and South America! Or England for most of the Middle Ages! The idea that people who are essentially next door neighbours can't understand each other takes on huge significance when we look at it from the perspective of people who lived significantly further apart, and probably had a bare minimum of common cultural practices to provide some context for conversation. And when you update the issue to the heyday of the Silk Road, when there really were only a few giant cohesive routes stretching from the Mediterranean to the Gobi Desert, well. You've got quite the conundrum.

What I want to know is: were there translators? I mean, aside from buying slaves/indentured servants along the way and hoping that
a) they spoke your language
b) they were fluent enough in their own language to function as an interpreter
c) they knew the language of your next destination
AND THEN: would you sell them when you got to your next stop and buy someone else who fit the criteria, but for the city after? And do the same coming back?

Would you communicate through signs? Body language is super different East to West, so would there be tons of miscommunication and offensive behaviour to one side or the other, and eventually gruesome death for ticking off the wrong person?

Because communication is important - not just for successful trade (although it's kinda key there as well) but also to avoid the kind of misapprehensions that come from poor communication. Orientalism is something that's come up a lot in modern scholarly work focusing on the world west of the Mediterranean, and where did Orientalism come from? The root of the problem, it seems to my untutored eye, is the lack of real communication.

And not just on the part of, say, Chinese national to Venetian dude. No, Venetian dude'll tell the rest of his trade caravan what Chinese national said, and a Genoese dude who splits from the party to head back early with a half dozen other guys + entourages, encounters a Ladakhi guy on his way back. And he tells this story to the Ladakhi, who goes on his way to wherever he's headed. He stops in an inn on the way and talks to a Buddhist pilgrim who's on his way to Bodghaya, re-telling the story. The Buddhist, in Bodghaya, stays with a Muslim who's on his way to Mecca for his own pilgrimage, and tells him the story one night when it's too hot to sleep. On his way to Mecca, the Muslim stops at the home of a distant cousin, a trader who's on his way to Venice, and recounts the story to him because they don't have much else to say to each other. The trader cousin gets to Venice, and is sitting on the quay watching the sunset one evening when a Venetian dude sits down next to him. They start to talk, and the trader cousin tells the Venetian dude his story, and the Venetian dude - the same one from the beginning - doesn't recognize the tale. Information getting ANYWHERE along the Silk Road must've been a massive and disgustingly confusing game of Broken Telephone, and a dangerous one, too.

The last time I played Broken Telephone, I didn't end up believing what I heard at the end because I knew that it was inevitably distorted. But trading information and stories along the Silk Road(s) was not a game, and nobody knew that everything would be inevitably distorted.

Obviously, miscommunication happens even when people speak the same language. But, really: how much worse is the situation when hundreds of languages are in play?

Therefore, logical Step Seven is hereby christened Learn some languages. Or hire an amazing translator who knows everything. 

Step Six

I figure that, at this point, it's a good idea to consider the notion of knowing where you're going. I really have no articles to quote or class notes that brought up this idea, but I've really been thinking about it, this concept of trip planning.

I'm a compulsive planner. I have lists upon cross-checked lists upon timed lists upon lists attached to detailed calendar sketches of what my days look like. I double and triple check all my meetings, visits-with-friends, class times, etc. When plotting my schedule this year, I made up about six tentative ones including sub-ins for each class in each schedule. I plan everything out in obsessive detail. But when I read things like Ernest Shackleton's South, the story of his journey to the Antarctic, or this fictional book about Marco Polo whose cover I can visualize but whose title and author escape me, there seems to be a lack of evidence of planning. And this piques my curiosity.

My question really is: is an adventure an adventure if you plan it out? And furthermore! Were the people travelling on the Silk Road(s) LOOKING for adventure?

For the first, I don't have an answer. I can't conceive of not planning an excursion of any kind - so for, me, I suppose, I would have to say that I certainly hope one can still have an adventure if one has a plan. Otherwise my life looks pretty boring from here on in. But at the same time, what makes even the adventure of a new school exciting is the unknown, right? That allure of the mystery of things, the unpredictable nature of them, the adrenaline rush of nerves, etc, etc. And is an adventure without the excitement really an adventure at all? Something several of my classes this semester are making me think much more consciously about the problem of definition, and this really isn't the place to get into a debate about what adventure IS, but one facet of the discussion applies, I think: the nature of something can vary incredibly based on one's vantage point.

In the case of the adventure of the Silk Road(s), I'd say that this idea of the allure of the unknown was definitely present - but perhaps not on the part of Christian's pastoralists or Xinru's religious pilgrims. The Silk Road history that I've read up 'til now has come from a largely European perspective, with overtones of Orientalism. In this sense, we can relate the feeling of adventure as the allure of the unknown to concepts of "the Orient" in Europe during the Silk Road's heyday: that the fascination with the Other was what drove a large part of Eastward-headed traffic on the Silk Road.

Obviously that's a sweeping generalization, but I think it's something worthy of consideration. That's what adventurers DO, right? They search for the adrenaline rush and therefore don't plan as obsessively as I do so that they can have that delicious prickle of newness and excitement. And so for Europeans headed out - for trade, yes, and potentially with religious goals in mind - was it a conscious decision to go on an adventure in search of the elusive and expansive unknown? Or was it simply that they had know way of knowing what exactly they were getting into, so they had no way to sketch out list after list after travel route after emergency contact information?

Either way, I think a valid Step Six might just be Figuring out how much you need to know about where you're going.

Step Five

Consider Religious Pilgrimage.
I want a button made up that says that. OR A T-SHIRT.

So I've been reading "Silk and Religion in Eurasia, C. AD 600-1200" by Liu Xinru. And in it she talks about the connection between religious traffic and silk traffic in the years stated. I have to say <criticism> that she doesn't extrapolate enough to effectively tie the two phenomena together </criticism>, but I will say that if she had, I think her argument might've been incredibly convincing.

The idea here is that silk has prized by at least Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism, so by tracking silk trade figures, we can track religious movement as well. I'm honestly not sure how successful that was, but what I DID get from this article was a great sense of the mobility of religion in the past - how Christians in Byzantium very quickly started buying Islamic silk, for instance - and the links between silk and politics or silk and religion - usually in the form of luxury laws or strict dress codes.

Silk was a massively huge part of the Big Three Religions of Afro-Eurasia (although let's not get carried away - various Chinese religions, things like Bon, Judaism...they were around, too, and I don't have the stats to pick a Big Three), which connects back to Christian's argument about how there was sort of a pervasive Afro-Eurasian culture. In this sense, I think he would be right: it seems like EVERYONE had use for silk, especially for their religious ceremonies.

Also for their political hierarchies, but that feels like a major tangent in her article, so I'm not really going to deal with it, fascinating thought it may be.

The silk routes, though - and this is awesome - were not, at the beginning, much populated by traders. The first Silk Road Navigators were pilgrims travelling in one of three cycles (Sino-Indian, Byzantine-European, Islamic World) and carrying silk for devotional purposes, for donational purposes, or to provide safe passage for themselves on behalf of higher religious officials who were using them as envoys (sometimes). So it seems as though one of the big things you need to do to be successful on the Silk Road is to be a religious pilgrim.

Although carrying that much wealth must've made you a target for bandits who were not of your religion, I suspect. The main point stands, though: silk was HUGE with religion, and the reason the silk trade started was because the different religious institutions wanted that to happen.

It makes me think: what would the world be like today if none of the religious traditions in the Afro-Eurasian area cared at all about silk? Would trade still have begun? If it did, would it continue as briskly for so long? Would silk have entered into our lives in the modern Western world? What far-reaching affects would the ripples in Time caused by THAT major of a difference have? I think we need to thank our lucky stars that we have some ancestors/distant cousins/people not even related to us, really that braved the terrors of the Road(s) for the love of god(s) or  a desire to devote part of their life/time/wealth to their religious practice.

What could WE do if we cared that much about the things that shape our society? What could WE do if we had something like religion that bound us together? (Because, let's face it: religion just isn't cutting it anymore.)

The answer to these questions will doubtless come upon the completion of Step Five: Consider Religious Pilgrimage

Step Four

Looking at David Christian's article from yesterday, because it's starting to become a bit of an obsessive thing to check on as many of his sources as I can (my Sanskrit homework is suffering, as, doubtless, are the people around me on the train who have to deal with my rustling of papers and thundercloud looks), I can say that while his pastoralist argument is a bit suspect, the argument that he's quoting from Frank and Gills is actually kinda cool.

Apparently, the main use of the Silk Roads was to establish and maintain a kind of inter-continental cultural construct, where everyone in above-the-Sahara Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia was tied together by common technology, common goods, common germs, and some interbreeding. Jared Diamond has a great book which I bought a couple of years ago and just never got around to reading, Guns, Germs, and Steel, which brings to bear on this issue. Diamond's idea is to "provide a short history of everything for the last 13,000 years" (9) without resorting to racial differences. He talks about the main connecting points of different civilizations and the main growth points of individual civilizations, giving reasoning for why each one has a different trajectory. Really, as he points out in his prologue, he's attempting to answer the question of why the distribution of wealth/power in the modern world is the way it is now, by going back to ask why human development took all its different courses which led it to the modern world.

Diamond is potentially relevant to studying the Silk Road(s), so I'ma have to give him a read, I suppose.

End of tangent. Essentially, what Christian is saying - and what I think the main point of his article might ACTUALLY be - is that there is some sense of unity to the Afro-Eurasian world during the heyday of the Silk Roads. What, exactly, did they share?
A preliminary, tentative list would include:
- livestock power in agriculture, transportation, and war
- the use of hides and wool
 - compound bows/crossbows
- armour in cavalry warfare
- the stirrup
- siege warfare
- gunpowder
- print and paper-making
- religious motifs (more on those later)
- silks/carpets/metals/ceramics/furs/livestock produce
- stylistic motifs
- languages
- periodic bacterial exchanges and therefore a shared/common immune system

And furthermore! The Afro-Eurasian area has a single history based on the development of these things, a history totally separate from that of the Americas, or sub-Saharan Africa, or Oceania, or, presumably, Europe. I don't know if I necessarily agree with the idea that trading together and thereby exchanging these technologies/techniques/ideas/goods necessarily means that we can talk about one comprehensive Afro-Eurasian history or culture, but, then, Christian isn't the one making the argument - he's just quoting. I think.

The interesting part, I think, is the religious motifs business. While the only one that Christian specifically mentions in shamanism (and of course he doesn't explain it - man, I just don't get this guy and how he got published. Maybe I should read his articles when not tired), it got me thinking: what are the things that religions have in common? In my World Religions class, we've been talking about theories about the origin of religion in general, trying to make broad statements about the history of religion and of religious studies. And the idea of these broad statements, of course, is that they apply to all religions. Is that what Christian is trying to say? I think yes. I think his main idea here is to explain that there are religious traditions - prayer, for instance, which is common in Hinduism/Islam/Christianity/Judaism/certain branches of Buddhism/Confucianism (in the form of ancestor respect rituals)/Shinto/Bon/and potentially other religions that I can't remember or don't know enough about to say - there are religious tradition that transcend boundaries, that every religion exercises slightly differently, but that somehow tie them together.

Now, I think that that's a far cry from saying that this relationship implies a common history and cultural evolutionary path, but I can agree that, especially through religious similarities, cultures can be tied together. In Mary Renault's The King Must Die (Greek mythology. Novelized. Love.), for example, Theseus and 13 other Athenian kids get trucked off to Crete. Some of them worship Poseidon, some the Earth-Mother, some random tribal gods, etc - but they realize along the voyage that they all share devotion to the Earth-Shaker in some incarnation, whether they have similar practices or names for him or whathaveyou, so they band together in this commonality of worship. And thus are a bunch of scared kids tied together. Cultures shouldn't be different, right? Or at least, in theory.

I suppose I'd have to read the original to come away convinced, but for now, I'm just going to say that an appropriate Step Four is to Rejoice in mixed heritage which allowed for the spread of ideas, technologies, religion, goods, and germs as it mingled the gene pools of Afro-Eurasia.

Step Three

It turns out that to dominate the Silk Road, you have to be a pastoralist (nomadic herder) - at least according to David Christian. In his article "Silk Roads or Steppe Roads? The Silk Roads in World History", Christian argues a bunch of different things, among them the idea that the established "civilizations" on which the historiography of the Silk Road focuses were not the only peoples to benefit from the trade route, nor, in fact, were they the dominant type of people. 

But first: there was definitely more than one Silk Road. This actually makes sense to me - there are about three dozen ways to get to my dorm room from the other side of campus, and I do sometimes feel like an adventurer figuring them out. And if I were a truly methodical person (alas, I am only a pretender to the title), I would have an ongoing map where I could plot out the routes with times and obstacles and places for potential SMC students (the bandits in this scenario) to lurk. I also don't have appropriate measuring tools, and the face of Devonshire Place seems to be changing almost daily - I blame the drunken parties for knocking over the giant vases - so imagining my route exponentially longer, harder, and more dangerous leads me, in a roundabout way, to think it's rather intuitive that there be several Silk Roads. 

So, all of these trade routes were miniature, according to Christian, as in not stretching from the Mediterranean into the heart of China. There were tons of inter-relationships going on in the areas that the Silk Road on my map sprawls through - as early as the 2000s BCE! And the majority of this exchange (Christian prefers the word to "trade" because "exchange includes ideas, diseases, and the inevitable procreation) happened between the agrarian settlements and some majorly badass pastorialans.

These horse-raising folk lived in the steppes of the Urals and the Himalayas and the Altais and the Karakorums and the Tianshans and the Kunluns and the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush and all the other mountain ranges that I'm missing and traded pretty far into Mesopotamia. In fact, Christian blames them for this idea that there was one mostly homogeneous Afro-Eurasian path of development and overarching cultural structure. But more on that in Step Four. There was a definite plus, it seems, in being a nomad, even if it meant you couldn't read or write and you didn't build cities (although you apparently stopped long enough to raise wheat every so often).

What I want to know is, if, as Christian painstakingly points out, it's super hard to merge the archaeological record of the pastoralists with the historical/textual record of the agrarians, how come it only takes him 26 pages to make his the-pastoralists-win argument (among like three others that all mixed together at times)? He provides a lot of "evidence", I'll give him that, in the form of quotes from lists of products and horse-raising statistics and draws a lot of conclusions about dates based on quantities of silk in places. As logical as it sounds - heaven knows the discipline of history ignores things all too often - I just don't feel justified in being convinced. Granted, I AM convinced, I'm just trying to figure out why I am. Maybe it's my soft spot for nomadic-horse-raising-kickass-warrior-types. Maybe I kept hoping his people of the steppes included the Tibetans, who were ridiculous horse-raising-kickass-warrior-types for a decent chunk of their history. Maybe I was sucked in by the romance of these people of the steppes galloping through the hills Lord of the Rings style, on a mission to bring mountain wool to the people of the cities/towns/villages and return with metallurgical objects. 

Anyways, maybe I'm only dubious of his research - that's it, I'm dubious of his research, not his conclusions - because he quotes himself so much. He's an interesting fellow - PhD at Oxford, in Russian history. Wrote lots of books - including a history of vodka. Is now really interested in "Big History" which is essentially the story of the ENTIRE UNIVERSE from Planck time onwards (the course description says from the Big Bang onwards, but I read some theoretical physics this summer, so I know that's impossible). So I'm not sure how he's qualified to do any of that? But he's been alive for a while. Lot's of independent research. 

Anyways: me becoming disillusioned is beside the point. If we take Dr. Christian at face value, and I stick with my original thoughts on the article, Becoming a Pastoralist is an absolutely perfect Step Three along the route that my map says is the Silk Road.

Step Two

It turns out that travel on the Silk Road involved ridiculous amounts of risk.

So I'm looking at this map of the routes, and there are a bajillion tiny names of places and snaky rivers and marvelously detailed miniature mountains. And I'm getting out my List of Places and Scenery, to mark everything off with some kind of awesome colour code (because what else does one do with new hi-liters?), and I'm realizing that there's no way that ALL of these Silky Tourist Attractions can be on the map.

It also turns out that you can't just GoogleMaps the Gobi Desert. 

Anyways: risk. After finishing my finicky labeling and hi-lite-ing, I just sat there, staring at this brightly coloured map that's now pinned to my bulletin board, and I thought, "There were no hi-liters in the early centuries of the Common Era". Which is beside the point, because there were other ways to mark key spots and I sincerely doubt that the traders had to know the location of, say, Lhasa. I Googled around until I found a map that showed me where the Gobi Desert (and a bunch of other places that I had to write in) was, and, let's face it, the early-CE equivalent of Google was wandering around the traders' haunts and inquiring very carefully and with liberal donations to drinking funds. And even then, how do you trust your sources?

I'm fairly certain that Google and its affiliates have not lied to me and I am safely assured that my map is accurate enough for my purposes, so the beginning of my journey rests on a firm foundation. But if I were a would-be trader -- I would of course first have to be reincarnated as a man, but I digress -- and I were setting out for the first time, I would have absolutely no certainty as to my foundations. Granted, I'm sure I would've had people I DID trust, but who would give away the secrets to this incredibly lucrative and already well-traveled trade route?

AND THEN. Just looking at all the deserts and the mountain passes and the distances between cities where BANDITS and ROCKSLIDES and ANIMALS and CARRIER DEATH and LOSS OF TRADE GOODS and LOSS OF SANITY and DEHYDRATION and STARVATION and I-DID-NOT-KNOW-THEY-TRADED-HERE-TOO and all the other traumatic possibilities of such an extended travel (getting swindled, running out of tea, losing one's second-best desert wear so that, upon meeting tribal cheiftans, one is ridiculously under-dressed and therefore subject to all sorts of terrible treatments)...

Major disincentive to going anywhere NEAR there.

And what happens if you get lost? If you stray so far off-track that you end up in Kathmandu and have no way of communicating your way out because you didn't MEAN to go to Nepal in the first place? What if you lose your maps? Carrying this one in my head is starting to look like a better and better plan.

Step One: start a travelogue

Step Two: get some maps