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 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 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 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 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