Final Project

So I wrote some stuff about Iran and Islam and Zoroastrianism and the 7th century CE.

http://iranianislam.blogspot.com/

[Note: due to technical problems, the videos, while scheduled to be posted at certain times, were only all finally uploaded by 11:45 PM on Tuesday the 5th. The actual content under the page "The Paper" was posted at 3:00 PM on the 5th, but, for some reason, pages aren't timestamped]

Sidestep

So I’ve been doing this whole steps-along-the-Silk-Road(s) thing, and it’s been getting more and more difficult, but it’s a fun challenge. This week, however, it’s just been...beyond trying. And I finally decided that, if this were a step along this Silk Road(s), it would be stop and rant about things every so often. I realize a lot of what I write here probably comes across as pretty rant-like, but this one, I assure you, is definitely the real deal.

Last week, I read an interesting article about the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan by a man with the wonderful name of Finbarr Barry Flood. And I must admit that I have very probably slandered him, because, while I still feel that his style was shoddy and his writing sub-par, my conclusion on his article was that he failed to convince me that the destruction of the Buddhas by the Taliban was entirely political and modern in nature. It is very clear to me now, though, that not only had he convinced me of these things, but he equipped me to be able to argue them.

I read first this week an entry from the Encyclopedia of Race and Culture Studies on UNESCO. It pretty much outlines UNESCO’s mandate to prevent racism and educate people to further the goal of the total elimination of racism. So far, so good. The next entry from the encyclopedia was on the UN, and was pretty much a history of anti-racism campaigns and projects.

With this in mind, I picked up my scanned pages of Art and Archaeology of Afghanistan, and started with an article entitled “UNESCOS’s Rehabilitation of Afghanistan’s Cultural Heritage Mandate and Recent Activities”, which brought me to the following questions1

1.       WHY is an organization mandated for the elimination of racism restoring art?

2.       Why do the ALREADY-DESTROYED Bamiyan Buddhas get all this huge international attention and SO MUCH money when it says at the very beginning of the article that the UNESCO working groups agreed to leave Bamiyan alone and tend to sites with more pressing needs?

For the first: I kind of ended the article being all “Well, cultural heritage, it’s like...you’re destroying someone else’s religion and stuff, so...UNESCO can totally get involved in that...I guess...

For the second: I thought and thought and still came up with 2+2=5, so I was already a little sceptical when I picked up the next article, “Afghan Cultural Heritage and International Law: The Case of the Buddhas of Bamiyan”.

Here beginneth the rant – which is pretty much a transcription of thoughts as they went through my mind as I read.

1.       So WHY do we care about iconoclasm? And where do we draw the line between suppressing one religion in favour of another? Also, if someone like ___ can write an article that’s all “Yeah, you guys are stupid – iconoclasm? This is all political”, then how can you honestly call yourself an educated author and just...stick with what appears to be the status quo opinion of popular media?

2.       HOW IS LOADED AND OFFENSEIVE VOCABULARY IN A SCHOLARLY PAPER ANY BETTER THAN “ICONOCLAMS”?!

3.       How can you commit a “crime against culture”?

4.       So this kind of invective is pretty anti-Islam, which is counter to UNESCO’s ACTUAL mandate to work to the elimination of discrimination based on race, gender, religion, etc. So that’s not cool, UNESCO-people-publishing-this-thing.

5.       Since when are 2 statues allowed to be referred to as “all Afghan cultural heritage”, and wince when are we allowed in scholarship to draw these giant generalizations?

6.       Okay, so, actually? Stop talking about this “Northern Alliance” as if it’s so great. I wrote a paper on the application of Just War Theory to Afghanistan, and, let me tell you, you only have to dig a little bit to discover that the “Northern Alliance” were fierce, bloodthirsty, ABSOLUTELY BRUTAL warlords. Acknowledge, please, that they were not the legitimate and superior government?

7.       Okay, so, I can see how a bunch of conventions were broken by the breaking of the Bamiyan Buddhas – nobody’s arguing that that wasn’t a “good” action or whatever. But, like, dude. Does that justify this harsh, loaded rhetoric?

8.       So because UNESCO says that the destruction of the Buddhas “affected everyone”, we accept that? Why so we just accept these pronouncements that often have, as the UNESCO encyclopedia article showed, TONS of scholarly disagreement surrounding them, and don’t ever (except that one time in 1964) have anything resembling scholarly consensus at their inception?

9.       This focus on “yay cultural preservation!” is weord, given that

a.       NOBODY CARED ABOUT CULTURAL PRESENTATION IN VIETNAM/Cambodie/etc – that was all about human rights violations

b.      AFGHANI CHILDREN ARE STILL STARVING. Like, I know the money and manpower donated for restoration was in addition to instead of taking away from humanitarian aid, but something about this big iddue we have with preserving some statues who aren’t exactly going anywahere, while the main problems of the region haven’t been solved or anywhere NEAR solved is...irksome. Terrifying. And doesn’t speak well for humanity.

IN CONCLUSION to my rant: I have no answers to these questions. But, knowing what I know about Afghanistan, and, thanks to Finbarr Barry Flood, what I know about Islamic iconoclasm and the interesting political position of Taliban Afghanistan, I can honestly say that I’m in the interesting state of confusion that is not knowing what “side” to be on. On the one hand, I am hugely saddened by the destruction of art, On the other, I’m all “well, they had no other choice!” On the one hand, I’m pretty supportive of actions to restore art and make people aware and proud f their cultural heritage. On the other, I don’t know if I can support UNESCO’s activities in Afghanistan. This sidestep is stop and rant a while because it seems to be the only thing to do, and I feel like ranting some more will probably help me come up with answers to my questions. Until then, I think I’m going to stay pretty confused.

Step Fifteen

The word "cosmopolitan" gets used as an adjective, but if we look to the original Greek, it's actually a combination of "cosmos" and "politas" - "citizen of the world". It's been appropriated as an adjective, like in reference to a city, where it can mean "Having the characteristics which arise from, or are suited to, a range over many different countries; free from national limitations or attachments." or "Composed of people from many different countries." (both OED Online)

Regardless of nitpicky details about parts of speech, I figure, when we're talking about cities anywhere along the Silk Road(s), and especially ones near the ends, we're talking about the latter definition. So when we're talking about Xi'an (Chang'an, on some maps), we're talking about a city that is ridiculously ethnically/culturally/linguistically/religiously/etc  diverse.

This was my thought process (with some help from the internet - I don't carry the Oxford English Dictionary around in my head, unfortunately) when I dug out my course outline in my attempt to write something that actually fit with the week's theme instead of just branching randomly and haphazardly from the readings.

And then I read some articles. Two really stuck out at me: Bundy's essay "Missiological Reflections on Nestorian Christianity during the Tang Dynasty" and the first chapter of a book by Edward Schafer - romantically entitled Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of Tang Exotics. I'm going to go with a tri-layered argument refinement process here, to boil down a concrete strategy for how to deal on the Silk Road once you reach your destination.

I would like to sum up Section One, before I begin it, with the phrase: "like the new Star Trek movie!" Bundy's focus on the Nestorians' awesome survival method reminded me so much of that movie, in an abstract sense, it was ridiculous. Basically, if you haven't seen it, J. J. Abrams, bless his heart, managed to craft this movie that satisfied both the hardcore Trek nerds (tribble in Scotty's office was such a nice touch) and made a whole new fanbase of people who found it a genuinely good movie without needing to know any Trek lore at all. How does this relate to the Nestorians? They were, essentially, J. J. Abrams. They kept, as far as I can tell from Bundy's article, the basics of their religion so that the original adherents stayed cool with it, while changing and revitalizing things to appeal to the whole new fanbase that they found in China.

So, really, the Nestorians and good ol' J.J. make the point that one should adapt to the times/places in which one finds oneself - to make whatever it is that one is both something that one can fully own, and something that can be equally owned by the other people of the time/place.

In the margins of the article, next to "Step 15: IT'S JUST LIKE STAR TREK!" is the scribble "although it kinda failed the Nestorians but wtvs." And I was pretty worried - was the one awesome argument that I'd found in Bundy's article totally called into question by the fact that the Nestorians were kind of subsumed into broader Chinese culture so that we have very little information about them at all - Bundy makes it seem as though he presents the bulk of the extant material in all of 11 pages - and so that they essentially disappeared as a cultural subset?

It turns out that Schafer is very helpful in answering that question with a resounding "No!" Schafer details an elegant, slightly disorganized (so much getting lost. So many delicious little tangents.) history of Tang China with reference to commerce and luxury items and traders and stuff. It's all really wonderful and opulent and happy and "oh, so traders liked to live here..." until he starts getting into expulsion edicts and the idea of making monastics of all religions disrobe and join secular society for tax purposes and then the revolts and killing of foreign traders and it all gets pretty terrifying.

The basic idea of Schafer's chapter, in connection with my lacklustre conclusion from Bundy, is that, in Tang China, particularly during the end of the dynasty, it was less about cultural survival and more about survival. Period. The Nestorians, then, did it right - they adapted as much as they needed to in order to survive, and if that meant not being foreign, and if that meant getting rid of monastics (which Bundy maintains were the backbone of the religion), and if that meant protecting your family from overzealous revolutionaries however you could, then you did it. I think, too often, in academia we forget about the nitty-gritty, the everyday life aspect of things, and we say "Gee, the Nestorians didn't do themselves any favours!" but what we really mean is "Gee, the Nestorians didn't do us any favours!" and we don't see that, on an individual level, they survived. Dying for your faith is all well and good, but if you can preserve your religion in quiet while preserving your life as well, then, you know, I'd vote for that.

Additionally, as the latter part of the Schafer's chapter makes very clear, whatever your culture was pre-Tang-blowup doesn't matter. Even if you had a strong, non-adaptive presence, after you're gone, they'll find their imaginations are more exciting than you ever were.

It's a sobering thought, that, even if you were really radical and strong and didn't adapt at all, you might not make a mark. And I think it makes the middle point a lot more important, because if even your culture won't survive, you might as well start to think about yourself as an individual/member of a family and get on weathering the storm.

Troubling lessons of the Silk Road(s) boiled down into Step Fifteen: Adapt, and you have a chance of survival. Because even cosmopolitan cities can decide that the world is just too big to include inside their walls, and the weeds that stick up beyond the grass are the ones that get pulled out. 

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 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 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 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.