Download PDF | (Routledge Worlds) Xinru Liu (editor) - The World of the Ancient Silk Road-Routledge (2022).
616 Pages
This volume explores human migration, communication, and cross-cultural exchange on the Silk Road, a complex network of trade routes spanning the Eurasian continent and beyond. It covers thousands of years of human history, from the 3rd millennium bce to the early 2nd millennium ce. Consolidating archaeological discoveries, historical analyses, and linguistic studies in one comprehensive volume, The World of the Ancient Silk Road brings to light diverse perspectives from scholars who have lived and worked across this vast region, many of which are published here in English for the first time. It contains extensive references of primary and secondary sources in their original languages and scripts. From Early Bronze Age cultures to the rise of regional Islamic empires, from the Mediterranean to the Yellow River basin, this multidisciplinary volume seeks to offer new insights and expand Silk Road studies to the Anglophone world. The World of the Ancient Silk Road provides an essential reference work for students and scholars of world history, particularly those studying the regions, cultures, and peoples explored in this volume.
Xinru Liu received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985. She is Professor Emeritus at the College of New Jersey. She has published extensively on topics related to the Silk Road, including Ancient India and Ancient China; Silk and Religion; The Silk Road in World History; and The Silk Roads, a Brief History With Documents. She has been teaching courses on the Silk Roads for more than thirty years.
CONTRIBUTORS
Benjamin Abbott is currently a PhD candidate in ancient history at the University of Pennsylvania. His primary research focus is on the early Seleucid empire and its formation. More broadly, his research focus includes the history and archaeology of Achaemenid and Hellenistic Western and Central Asia, race and ethnicity in the ancient world, and interdisciplinary approaches to the study and teaching of antiquity. Kazim Abdullaev received his MA in Renaissance studies from Gorky University (Nizhniy Novgorod), USSR, in 1975, and his PhD with distinction in classical archaeology from the Institute of Archaeology, Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Moscow, in 1986. His research interests include the archaeology and art of Central Asia of the Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic periods. He is Member-Correspondent of IsMEO and Senior Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Ancient World (New York University). Currently, he is Senior Fellow and Lecturer at Istanbul University, Department of Fine Arts. Craig Benjamin is Professor Emeritus of History at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, where he has taught big history and ancient Eurasian history. Craig is a frequent guest presenter at conferences worldwide, and the author of several books and numerous chapters and articles. His recent books include Big History: Between Nothing and Everything (2014); Volume 4 of the Cambridge History of the World (2015); Empires of Ancient Eurasia. The First Silk Roads Era 100 bce–250 ce (2018); The Routledge Companion to Big History (2019); and Traditions and Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past (2020). Wang Binghua graduated from the Department of History, with a major in archaeology, from Peking University, in 1960. He worked in the Institute of Archaeology of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region for forty years (1960–2000), acting as a researcher and chief archaeologist. He explored, excavated, and examined the sites of Lop-nor, Niya, Kongque He, valleys of Tianshan Mountain range, Turfan, Hami, and the Yili River valley. After retiring from the archaeological team in Xinjiang, he was invited to teach courses on the archaeology of Xinjiang at Renmin University, Beijing, till 2019.
Pia Brancaccio is Professor of Art History at Drexel University in Philadelphia, USA. She completed her PhD in South Asian Art and Archaeology at the Universita’ degli Studi di Napoli l’Orientale, Italy, and is a longtime collaborator of the Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan. Her research focuses on early Buddhist art in South Asia, with a special focus on the ancient regions of Gandhara and the Western Deccan. Her publications include The Buddhist Caves at Aurangabad: Transformations in Art and Religion (2010); Living Rock: Buddhist, Hindu and Jain Cave Temples in Western Deccan (2013); and Gandharan Buddhism: Archaeology, Art and Text, co-edited with Kurt Behrendt (2006), in addition to numerous articles in festschriften, conference proceedings, and academic journals (Ars Orientalis; Archives of Asian Art; East and West; South Asian Studies; Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies). Hamish Cameron is a lecturer in Classics at Victoria University of Wellington where he works on the history and geography of the Roman Near East, representations of imperialism in ancient Greek and Latin literature, and the reception of the ancient Mediterranean world in modern games. His book Making Mesopotamia: Geography and Empire in a Romano-Iranian Borderland (2019) examines how Roman geographical writers controlled their spatial descriptions to convey imperial perspectives.
Bruno Genito is Full Professor of Central Asian Art and Archaeology in the Asia, Africa, and Mediterranean Department at Università degli Studi di Napoli, L’Orientale (UNO), Italy. He has been Director of UNO’s Italian Archaeological Mission in Azerbaijan in collaboration with the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Institute of Archaeology of the Azerbaijan Academy of Sciences, Baku, since 2016. He has also been Director of UNO’s Italian Archaeology Mission in Azerbaijan since 2016, in Uzbekistan since 2008, and in Iran between 2003 and 2014. Berit Hildebrandt is an ancient historian and classical archaeologist whose research focuses on the topics of social, gender, cultural, and economic history, especially the production, trade, and uses of silk in antiquity. She has been teaching and researching at universities and museums in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the USA. She currently leads a project at Göttingen University, Germany, in collaboration with Professor Guy Bar-Oz, University of Haifa, and Dr. Orit Shamir, Israel Antiquities Authority, investigating silk, cotton, and other organic finds from the Late Byzantine/Early Islamic village of Nahal Omer in Israel. The project is funded by the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony/Germany in the framework of the “Niedersächsisches Vorab”/Research Collaboration between Lower Saxony and Israel. Minoru Inaba is a professor in the Department of Oriental Studies, Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University. He specializes in the pre- and early Islamic history of Afghanistan and adjacent regions. Recent publications include “Central Asia in the Eighth Century: Wukong’s Itineraries between China and India,” in D.G. Tor and M. Inaba (eds.) The History and Culture of Iran and Central Asia (2022); “The Narratives on the Bāmiyān Buddhist Remains in the Islamic Period,” in B. Auer and I. Strauch (eds.) Encountering Buddhism and Islam in Premodern Central and South Asia (2019); and “Between Zābulistān and Gūzgān: A Study on the Early Islamic History of Afghanistan,” Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology, 7 (2017).
Liu Jian is a senior research fellow at the Institute of World History, Chinese Academy of Social Science. Her research lies in the field of ancient Western Asian history, specifically Assyriology and Hittiology. She is the deputy secretary of the Center for Comparative Studies of Ancient Civilizations, Chinese Academy of History, and a member of the Chinese Society of Ancient and Medieval World History. Li Jinxiu is a senior researcher at the Institute of Ancient History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. She is the chief editor of series of the Eurasian Studies, Silk and Porcelain Road, and Translations of Eurasian Studies. Her major publications include Financial History of the Tang Dynasty, History of the Tang Institutions, and Studies of Documents from Dunhuang and Turfan. Ye Junshi is a lecturer of archaeology and museology at Ningbo University of Finance and Economics, and earned a PhD from Renmin University of China in 2018 for his research on ancient Silk Road history. The title of his PhD dissertation is A Preliminary Study on the History of Jingjue Kingdom and he has published several related papers in Chinese. Shoshin Kuwayama is an archaeologist in the field of Gandharan Buddhism in Pakistan and Afghanistan, having taken part in excavations at Thareli and Mekhasanda in the Mardan District during the 1960s, and directed the five-season excavations in the 1970s at Tapa-ye Iskandar, a 7th-century Hindu town, Sarai Khwaja to the north of Kabul. He is currently Emeritus Professor at Kyoto University. Xinru Liu received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985. She has published extensively on topics related to the Silk Road, including Ancient India and Ancient China; Silk and Religion; The Silk Road in World History; and The Silk Roads, a Brief History With Documents. She has been teaching courses on the Silk Roads for more than thirty years. Lin Meicun is a professor of archaeology at Peking University, Beijing. He is interested in Silk Road archaeology and ancient economic and cultural communications. His research covers a wide geographical area, from China to Eurasia, and a long historical period, from prehistory to the Medieval period. Luca M. Olivieri is Associate Professor in Archaeology of Gandhara at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and Director of the Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan (ISMEO and Ca’ Foscari). As an archaeologist he has been working in Pakistan since 1987. In 2016, he was awarded the title of Sitara-i-Imtiaz by the president of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. He has authored more than 170 scientific works, including several monographs, and serves as editor and member of scientific and editorial boards of several academic journals. Wang Peng is a PhD candidate at New Siberia State University, where he studied archaeology from 2012 to 2016. He is now an associate researcher of the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. His main research field is Bronze Age Eurasia. Renato Sala is a leading researcher at the Laboratory of Geoarcheology at the Al-Farabi Kazakh National University in Kazakhstan. He graduated in 1977 with a mathematical dissertation on General System Theory from the University of Turin (Italy). Since 1998 he has worked as Principal Investigator in various international scientific projects devoted to paleoclimatology, geoarchaeology, and cultural landscapes. He has written over fifty publications about these topics.
Armin Selbitschka is Professor (Chair) of Ancient Chinese History and Archaeology at Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU), Munich. He is interested in the social functions of material culture along the Chinese Silk Roads and the concept of the Silk Roads itself. He is currently working on a monograph on early Chinese notions of the afterlife. Liu Tao graduated from the Archaeological Department of Xibei University, China. He is a senior researcher at the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He participated in excavations and research at Zhouyuan, Shaaxi Province; the Wei Dynasty site at Luoyang, Henan Province; and the Tang and Song-era site at Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province. He joined Zhu Yanshi to lead the collaboration with Uzbek archaeologists for the excavations at Mingtepa, Uzbekistan. Daniel C. Waugh is Professor Emeritus of History, International Studies, and Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures at the University of Washington (Seattle). For many years he taught an introductory survey of the Silk Roads, and has lectured widely on the subject for general audiences. He was the founding director of “Silk Road Seattle,” a pioneering Internet-based educational resource. For more than a decade, he edited and wrote extensively for the general-interest annual The Silk Road. He has participated in summer institutes studying Buddhist art at the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, excavated Xiongnu graves in Mongolia, and traveled extensively along the Silk Roads. His photographs are being added to major webbased archives, notably ArchNet (at MIT) and the HEIR project (Oxford). Arielle Winnik is a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale University Art Gallery. She holds a Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College, an M.A from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, and a B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University. Her research focuses on textiles of the Byzantine and medieval Islamic Empires, and she has a particular interest in the meanings of these objects across transnational networks. Song Xian is a senior researcher at the Institute of World History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Specializing in Islamic studies, he has translated several important Arabic works into Chinese, including Al-masaalik wal-mamalik by ibn-Khurdadhbih, and published several monographs, including Ancient Persian Medicine in China. Zhang Xiaogui completed an art degree with a major in history at Beijing Normal University in 2000, before obtaining a PhD from Sun Yat-sen University in 2006. From 2006, Xiaogui has taught in the Department of History at Jinan University, Guangzhou, becoming a professor in 2015. He has published books and articles on ancient Zoroastrian history and culture on the Silk Road. Zhu Yanshi is the deputy director of the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He has conducted numerous excavations in China, including the Northern Wei City Ye. He led the joint project of the Institute of Archaeology, CASS, and the Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan to excavate the site of Mingtepa in Uzbekistan, 2012–2017. Jia Yiken (Jarkyn Tursun) is an associate professor at the Institute of Ancient History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Her research field is the history of nomadic people in the Mongolian plateau, circa 3 bce to 10 ce, and the history of the Qïrqïz people.
Lin Ying is Professor of Ancient World History at Sun Yat-sen University. She studied Medieval European history, Byzantine history and archaeology, and history of Sino-west contacts in Jilin University, Northeast Normal University, University of Athens, and Sun Yat-sen University. She was a visiting scholar officially sponsored by Dumbarton Oaks Library of Byzantine Studies and Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University, in 2000–2001. She has completed a research program funded by the National Social Science Fund of China on China and the Roman Empire: Centered on the Trade Contact via India during 2008 to 2014. She currently leads a program on Gold Coin Imitations and Industries of Luxury in Early Byzantine Times funded by the National Social Science Fund of China (2016–2019). Her research interest is economic and cultural exchange between East and West in ancient and medieval times, especially the diffusion of Roman-Byzantine culture to China and Byzantine numismatics. Ran Zhang is a research associate in the Department of Archaeology, Durham University. His research is now concerned with how ancient Chinese trade affected the maritime economy in the Indian Ocean and Europe from the 8th to the 19th centuries.
INTRODUCTION
The aim of The World of the Ancient Silk Road is to expand Silk Road studies from the field of Chinese studies to the stage of world history. The researches in the volume cover subjects such as communications, immigrations, transportations, and interactions among the various communities that resided and roamed around the Eurasian landscape from as east as agricultural China to as west as the Mediterranean. The focal historical period is from the mid-1st millennium bce to early 2nd millennium ce, the time that a communication artery formed via Central Asia, linking the Eurasian landmass into a commercial and cultural network. The volume, however, should start with the Bronze Age, that is, the 3rd and 2nd millennia bce, when human migrations associated with the development of Indo-European languages and with technological advances, including the domestication and harnessing of horses and camels as well as bronze metallurgy, enabled long-distance transportation that paved the future landscape of the Silk Road. To define the Silk Road as an academic field, this project intends to merge archaeological researches, studies of languages and scripts, and art historical analyses of all the participating regions into a historical narrative of human migration and communication, the means of transportations, and the dramas of various polities and religious movements involved in the premodern material transactions and cultural exchanges. Studies of material cultures and transactions across communities in distance and the propagation and demise of religions and ideologies have been the major interests of scholars involved in the researches of the Silk Road. However, most scholars have been focusing on a particular region or a couple of regions, a particular culture or a couple of related cultures, or, following their expertise in one discipline. Pooling the expertise of scholars of various fields and regions into a structured volume will provide insights into several poorly understood but nonetheless prevailed historical phenomena. One notable phenomenon is that many communities and peoples either surviving or having diminished from historical records in the great Silk Road scene spoke their distinguished languages. This volume could provide clues for understanding how the peoples of different languages communicated with each other, either for cooperation or for conflicts, and how one language dominated a region and pushed out other languages. The language landscape changed dramatically during the heydays of the Silk Road. The changes could have involved military conquest, but also migration and cultural assimilation, especially the spread of religious institutions. This collection of studies of the Silk Road gave us a unique opportunity to display the processes of certain major historical transitions and thus made it possible for authors of world history to incorporate stories from the Silk Road into a wider historical narrative. This project inevitably will encounter controversies in several academic fields. One example is the origin of the Indo-European languages, that is, the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language (PIE), which has been a question in debate for more than half a century. As the early Indo-European speakers, actually all early human communities, did not leave written records of their languages, reconstruction of the hypothesized PIE from modern speaking languages and from written records composed long after the supposed age of PIE incurs serious uncertainty. Whether the PIE speakers were herders, farmers, or hunter-gatherers has been under scrutiny by archaeologists, anthropologists, as well as life scientists. Scholars have been looking for which groups were responsible for the spread of Indo-European languages westward, the groups that have been assumed to be associated with horse domestication and the horse chariot, the fastest means of transportation before the coming of steam engine. The World of the Ancient Silk Road has to face the challenge of this fundamentally important question in human history, hopefully to add new information and insight and, possibly, more questions to the premise of the whole hypothesis. Looking to solve the debated issues and to discover sites buried under sands and later built-ups, archaeologists are employing new technology, including drone photo surveys and isotopes. New sites, especially those in the high time of the Silk Road, have been rapidly discovered around Afghanistan and Central Asia. Archaeological research in Iraq starts to recover; discoveries in Turkey, the South Russia steppe, and the Caucasus region continue feeding into the repertoire of cultural remains of ancient communications. Using DNA and strontium isotope enhances studies of human migrations and transferring technology such as horse domestication, breeding, and harnessing. The new technology provides new tools for archaeologists and historians. But meanwhile the inconsistencies between the data of new approaches and those of traditional methodology create new challenges as well as tensions among academics of various disciplines. This volume includes the advancements of the research and challenges in the progress, for the purpose of encouraging a new generation of scholars to explore further into the forgotten human past through interdisciplinary approaches. To set the stage displaying historical processes in the world of the Silk Road, it is mandatory to examine the developments of infrastructure of communication and transportation across a vast geographic area between the Mediterranean and the Yellow River basin covered by mountains, river valleys, deserts dotted by oases, forests, and marshlands. Communities of different cultures and languages resided, roamed, and interacted with people who spoke languages belonging to different linguistic families. Domestication of horses and the development of wheeled vehicles in the Bronze Age pushed road building to enable high speed transportation. Sometime earlier, the domestication of camels, dromedary, and Bactrian enabled transportation on terrains without roads, typically sand deserts where road building was impossible. By the late age of the Silk Road, toward the end of the 1st millennium ce, ships on the Arabian Sea and South China Sea took over the bulk of long-distance transportation. With the means of transportation, the movement of people and goods still needed the support of communities along the routes to proceed to their destinations. Settlements in oases and mountain valleys provided food and fodder for the travelers and also benefited from the transactions that took place in their localities and from payment of the boarding not only with goods from faraway lands but also information and knowledge of technology and culture. Therefore, settled niches often shaped the viable routes for caravans. However, climate changes and overexploitations of resources frequently moved human settlements and thus reshaped the routes of travel. In the last 4000 or 5000 years, the geographic landscape of Central Asia has not change largely, but pockets of ecological zones could be developed or abandoned. In the Kongquehe valley around Lop-nor, a Bronze Age culture that flourished from ca. 2000–1500 bce deserted the once lush lands nurtured by glacial water after the people cut down all the trees and thus deprived vegetation protecting the soil. More than a thousand years later, new settlements claimed the region with new technology and established powerful kingdoms and became trading depots for the Silk Road trade. In the Swat valley on the Indus, agriculture of double crops, rice and wheat, sustained a route to India, in a treacherous terrain for travel. The residents weathered changes of polities, climate, and religious incursions and never needed to abandon their homeland. The most formidable barriers of communications, though, were the different languages spoken by different communities. The landscape of languages has been changing constantly due to migrations and cultural mingling, but the changes could hardly be attributed to physical types or genetic features of the speakers. Four to five thousand years ago, various types of European-looking people and Eastern Asian appearances had entered inner Asia. Without any literary recording, Indo-European linguistic studies tried to associate language changes with physical types of mummies, that is, buried corpses dried in sands, and/or material cultures revealed by archaeology to pin down migration of certain Central Asian groups as speakers of certain Indo-European branches. However, this approach ignores the fact that those ancient communities could have spoken languages other than Indo-Europeans, and the search for the language affiliation with material cultures is far from scientific. In the last decade, studies of the Transeurasian languages gained momentum. An article published in Nature, “Triangulation Supports Agricultural Spread of the Transeurasian languages”, asserts the Proto-Altai could have been ancestry of Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages spread to Central Asia around 6811 BP; Mongolo-Tunguisic reached Mongolia ca. 4491 BP. Archaeological data demonstrate that the earliest people speaking Transeurasian language cultivated millet and raised dogs and pigs. Only after the language groups encountered western Asian, SinoTibetan, and pastoral communities the vocabulary increased with the addition of words such as rice, wheat, cattle, and so on.1 The new research provides a new approach to look into the ways ancient people explored nature and learned from each other. We nevertheless still have to recognize that we do not have the means to be certain of the languages of the peoples who lived outside the spheres of those civilizations that left us with written records during the 2nd millennium bce. By the 1st millennium bce, Greeks and Chinese started to provide some information about the people who lived in the space separating the ancient literary lands. The Persian empire rose on the Iranian Plateau in the 6th century bce and brought their own language, the Old Persian, which is a branch of Indo-European, and Elamite, a language not linked to any known language families, into writing with cuneiform script. The Persian kings employed scribes from all over their empire, especially those from the east coast of the Mediterranean, to take record for the administration. Educated people skillful at Aramaic treaded the royal highway to the east to work for the empire and to trade. Aramaic thus assume the role of official language de facto of the Persian Empire. Toward the later 1st millennium bce, the Silk Road trade was initiated by the migration of the Yuezhi/Kushans to Bactria and established the Kushan empire across Central Asia and South Asia, and the Han empire of China expanded its influence to Central Asia. Then, oases around the Tarim Basin started to use their languages, Iranian and Indic branches of Indo-European languages, parallel with Chinese, as administrative script. On the western part of inner Asia, Greek language and script as administrative language extended to caravan cities and trading depots, appeared alongside with Semitic languages in Aramaic script. This language landscape held on for several centuries till Turkish migrations and conquests from the Mongolia Plateau started from the 6th century ce. The Turkish language family has since gradually but steadily replaced Indo-European languages of all levels of the most part of inner Asia, except for a few communities such as Tajik. Islamic conquest starting from the 7th century brought in Arabic and spread Persian languages in Arabic script as religious and administrative languages, but never supplanted Turkish languages as local languages of Central Asia. Commercial transactions and imperial administrations both involved not only language but also writing. Communities on the Silk Road developed their written forms at different times, either created their own system, or borrowed from other languages. A writing system thus enhanced the spread of a certain language to make it the Lingua Franca of trade in the Silk Road communication networks. The Achaemenid Persian Empire used their own language – the Old Persian, or Arya, along with major languages spoken by peoples subjugated, that is, Elamite in the east part of the empire and Akkadian in the west part – to exclaim their legitimacy. As the Achaemenids did not have script to record their language before they ruled the vast empire, they borrowed the cuneiform of Babylonian language to write down the Arya. But neither the language nor the written form was an efficient tool of communication, not even just for bureaucratic bookkeeping. Eventually, the Aramaic language and its phonetic script became the most common tool of communication, for both the administration and trade. The spread of the Aramaic in the empire meant that the rulers, at least the first couple of generations, were illiterate, and therefore had to employ the people from the land where early Aramaic was spoken. Be they Jews or Babylonians, the literate workers arrived at many parts of the empire to perform the bureaucratic work and act as agents of the government. They scribed Aramaic for the imperial administration and traveled to far corners of the empire to trade, all facilitated by the imperial roads. The Persian satrapies Gandara and Hindush (in modern Afghanistan and upper Indus Valley) brought Aramaic to the northwest of the South Asian subcontinent. After the retreat of the Persian power from Central Asia, Sogdian city-states in the catchment of the Syr and Amu rivers adopted Aramaic script to write their own language. Aramaic, along with Greek, lent a hand to Indians to set their ancient languages, Sanskrit and various Prakrit, into phonetic written forms, Kharoshthi and Brahmi. During the first half of the 1st millennium ce around the Tarim Basin, the hub of the Silk Road trade, the language landscape, according to inscriptions excavated from oasis sites, appeared as this: Kroraina kingdom, Khotan kingdom, and Kucha kingdom, the major three powers around the Tarim Basin, used different Indo-European languages. As the territories of the three major kingdoms were shifting frequently, even oases in the same regime could be using different languages. The Khotanese used Kharoshthi script, but it was somehow different from that of the Niya, which was under the Kroraina kingdom. The language in Khotan was similar to the Iranian, and some scholars dub it “Khotanese Saka”. The language of Niya was Indic, similar to Gandharian. Kucha at that time wrote in Brahmi of Kuchean language, another Indo-European language. In order to trade or battle with other regimes around the Tarim, the kings and traders had to employ interpreters who could understand and read the documents of others. Buddhist missionaries were avid translators active in all the oases as they tried to convert local people who spoke their own languages. Several Buddhist documents written in two or three languages bear the evidence of the language skills brought by Buddhist education. In this context, Kucha was a significant center linking Buddhist activities from Bactria, Gandhara, to Central Asia and China. The most famous Buddhist translator, Kumarajiva, traveled around Kucha to study, and learned Sanskrit and Vedic literature in Kashmir. His mastering of Sanskrit enabled him to be the most efficient translator of Mahayana Buddhist texts into Chinese. Kucha hosted both Mahayana and Theravada Buddhist monasteries and learned teachers thus attracted young members of royal families of the kingdoms of Tarim Basin to study there. It was said princesses of kingdoms east to the Pamir Plateau had to study and graduate from there before pursuing their secular lives.2 That Buddhist monks were active in oases suggests the system of Buddhist education spread religious and secular knowledge to oases around the Tarim. The fact that there were stupas but not monasteries in oasis towns such as Niya could not negate the presence of Buddhist institutions. In early Buddhism, monks and nuns did not have permanent residence, but they had to gather around a stupa fortnightly to be disciplined and taught. In Central Asia, the monks in oases could have been taking adobe in their own homes, as the livable area of an oasis was limited. The special arrangement of residences for monks in oases created another kind of Buddhist institution. Buddhists also taught their faith using artworks, as a way to get around the language barriers. The artworks on stupas illustrated stories and doctrines efficiently. Buddhist institutions made an impact on politics and the economy, especially in terms of facilitating communications with those outside oases. The rapid constructions of Buddhist monuments and the abundant artworks associated with Buddhist institutions around the Tarim region during the period demanded supports from both traders passing through and residents living in oases. In short, the Buddhist religious institution was one of the important movers on the Silk Road, as Buddhists were the ones who overcame language barriers to get their culture across to other cultural domains. While Buddhist theology was the prominent driving force in the world of the Silk Road, Christianity, Islam, and other religions also participated in transactions of ideas and materials. Christian missionaries, both Nestorian, the sect deviated from the Byzantine orthodox, and Melkite who were loyal to the Byzantine court, traveled to Tang China via the Central Asia Silk Road. The Nestorian church, which won official patronage from the Tang government in the eighth century recorded their names in old Syriac, which evolved from Aramaic. Nestorianism lingered around East Asia till Mongol times, but did not make Syriac the universal language for the religion. Manichaeanism entrenched among the nomadic regimes in Central Asia, notably the Uyghur empire in the ninth century, and later entered the Mongol empire. Unlike nomadic empires before them, the Uyghurs built cities and created writing, thanks to their Manichaean mentors. They learned Aramaeo-Syriac script to record their Turkic language and created a rich literature.3 This script was adopted by the Mongol empire as one of writing system, then inherited by the Manchus later on. Religious propagation involved expansive area of Afro-Eurasia into the world of the Silk Road. Christian religious institutions and later Islamic infrastructure in Egypt brought textile industries, both wool-linen and silk, made in the Nile valley into the networks of textile markets and supply chains to Anatolia to the east and West Europe to the east. Islamic traders ventured further east especially on sea to the coasts of China and the Pacific islands. The world of the Silk Road was a constantly changing landscape. The natural environment – climate, the terrain, the flora and fauna – varied with time, caused by their own dynamics and by human intrusions. Human explorations of the landscape shaped not only populations but also their way of production and reproduction, their ethical identity, and cultural traits including religion and language.
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