Golden Age of the Silk Road
One of my chief complaints on modern Central Asian scholarship is its intense focus on the Great Game era and the modern politics of the Central Asian energy corridor, Afghanistan and the like. This stuff is important, but there is so, so much more to Central Asia just under the shifting sands, hidden in the caravanserais lurking between silk road oases. One fact about Central Asia you may not know is this: there would not have been anything approaching modernity were it not for Central Asia’s Golden Age. Yes, I realize that’s a pretty cut and dry statement. But it’s nevertheless true—again, there are lots of moving parts involved in this history, but ideas like this were no doubt critical to Europe’s advancement. For example: the idea of ‘zero’ and ‘irrational numbers’ was knowledge transferred along the silk road between the 11th and 13th centuries:
The astronomer al-Khorezmi wrote a book comparing the utility of Indian numerals (and the concept of zero) with all other contenders, while others mined Indian geometry, astronomy, and even calendar systems for good ideas. Earlier Central Asians had tested various alphabets, including ones from Syria and India. Several local languages opted for an alphabet deriving from Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. It is hard to imagine a more intellectually open region anywhere.
And that’s not all, the list of technology transfers between East and West via the Central Asian ecumene, which to my mind is a better description of what we call the Silk Road, is long. Algebra? Yup. Algorithms? Yup. We all know about gunpowder. Perhaps most of you know the stirrup came originally from China?
A few years ago a Chinese scholar claimed that it was China who made the West what it is, via the vector of the Pax Mongolica. And Joseph Needham’s masterful series on Chinese technological advances goes a long way to validating this claim. But it’s also fanciful. There were multiple inputs into Europe’s rise from backwater to global dominance: in the aftermath of the Black Death wages for peasants had to rise, the opening of the sea route via Africa occurred, the ‘discovery’ of the New World, the combination of gunpowder and metallurgy creating cannons, the fall of the Byzantine Empire, the Crusades, and the Renaissance awakening (in no particular order). But, there is a kernel of truth to the claim as well. The Pax Mongolica did expand Europe’s intellectual horizons—and of course there were the great Medieval explores like John of Carpini (probably the most courageous and hardy of them all, insanely overweight about 65 years-old, he road a mule–whilst sick–most of the way across the Steppe, which was literally terra incognita at the time, in winter), William of Rubruck, Odoric of Pordenone, and the master himself, Marco Polo.
Alas discovery is one thing, but practical applications are another: where would we be without gunpowder? Where would we be without paper? Where would we be without the stirrup? Or even the divine right of kings—a concept originating in China that spread to the West via Persia. In the end it was the rising hunger for spices, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, pepper and silk and all the assorted goods of the East—and then using the East as a place to offload the surplus goods of the West that gave rise to Europe’s dominance. But none of it could have happened without the trans-continental pollination that Central Asia provided.
And so, when I see an essay like this is a publication like the Wilson Quarterly, it makes me smile. This essay is a good introduction into medieval Central Asia and I look forward to the book he is writing.