Going Global, 1500 Years Ago
ANNETTE ON THE ROAD Fancy Products and Ideas Travel in the "Dark" Ages
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I’m a PhDed historian, a former tenured professor of history. I don’t rant about politics. I write knowing that we can’t understand today without deep dives into history. American history teaching is bloody awful, an inch deep and a mile wide. You don’t have to know “everything” (which is rubbish anyway). I welcome readers from across the political spectrum to discover the amazing worlds of academic and public (museum) history, which challenge us all—yes, me, too. More about Non-Boring History, and me:
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Today’s post takes us to a museum, and on a rare detour to a subject that’s completely out of my comfort zone as a plain old PhDed historian of early American and modern British history.
As with all Annette On the Road posts here at Non-Boring History, in which I take you to find history aimed at the public, I’m wearing my “member of the public” hat . I depend on museum historians and archaeologists to help me understand subjects new to me. And, boy, is today about things new to me
In November, Hoosen and were in London, and took in a temporary exhibit at the British Museum. Silk Roads focused on Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean, during a period long known in English history as the “Dark Ages”, the bit after the Romans left, and before we got Peak Middle Ages. How much did I know about this time and these places? Postcard, please. I can fit everything I know on the back, and still have room for the stamp.
Why did this exhibit appeal to me? Thank you for asking!
I didn’t, Laing.
Tough noogies! We’re going there! It matters to you, reader, I promise, because I’m also showing what history is.
The Very Model of a Modern Historian
Back in the late 80s, this Brit entered a PhD program at the University of California, Riverside (just like UC Berkeley, really, only with easy freeway access 😁). I planned to specialize in British history (I know this makes no sense for a Brit to study British history in California, but hey, I’m weird), or maybe 20th century US But I was quickly sold on early American history (then known as colonial America).
Soon I learned of an exciting development in the field: Early American historians had decided to stop pretending that the rest of the world doesn’t exist. Early American history cannot be understood in a bubble. As a Brit who lived in the US, this made sense to me! People didn’t get off wooden ships after a miserable transatlantic voyage and go, “Hand me a hot dog and a baseball cap! I’m American now!”
I dived right in. Over the next twenty years, I found myself studying people who traveled thousands of miles across the Atlantic (not always in one direction). Among them? Enslaved Africans, Church of England missionaries, ordinary English people seeking wealth in land (or even just homeless and starving English people who were offered a free meal on a ship, only to find themselves in the middle of the Atlantic yeah that happened). I also met the people who made unbelievable amounts of money from Atlantic crossings, even if they never left London or Virginia.
All of those who crossed the Atlantic carried baggage, even when they arrived with no goods to declare. That’s because they brought with them ways of thinking as well as doing, like religion, foods, music, and art.
I also got fascinated by 18th century long-distance shopping, which appealed to a twentysomething from a modest background in Scotland and England who was temporarily drawn into California’s 80s booming mall culture. In the 18th century, rich British Americans shopped. Boy, did they shop. And they anticipated online shopping when they ordered luxury goods to be shipped from London, including expensive clothes, china plates, books, and carriages, sourced not only from London, but from around the world, as far as China. They bought stuff like this. Look closely:
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Until I saw Silk Roads at the British Museum, I had never seriously considered that long-distance trade and exchange of all kinds, from luxuries to people trafficking, from new religions to huge scientific ideas, might have been going on for many, many centuries before Atlantic crossings began.
I mean, I knew a little about the Portuguese sailing all over the place in the 15th century (the 1400s) in nifty long-distance ships called caravels, to Africa and India for profitable products, including spices, gold, people, and sugar (ooh, wait until I tell you about the sugar factory the Portuguese set up off the coast of West Central Africa!) But I’d always thought of these Portuguese expeditions as a dress rehearsal for the Atlantic trade, not simply the latest innovation in long-distance trade that had been going thousands of years.
As for the exhibit title, Silk Roads? China, right? I would have to clone myself to get up to speed on something that far outside my usual historical fields. Or maybe there was a better way, a crash course for the public? Silk Roads.
Silk Roads. Plural.
Silk Roads tells us that there wasn’t just “a” Silk Road, bringing silk from China. There were many Silk Roads, a tangle of them, and they carried a huge variety of things all over the Old World.
Yes! Long before the Internet and container ships, long before modern economists and their boring ideas about free trade and tariffs, there were the Silk Roads. By popular demand, this long-distance transportation network brought a steady stream of handcrafted knick-knacks for people with more money than sense, like a booming medieval Etsy.
In turn, these imports and exports inspired local artists everywhere to make cheap knock-offs to satisfy popular demand.
And make no mistake: The Silk Roads didn't just bring artsy-fartsy stuff. They also brought books, and intellectuals with heads stuffed with knowledge and ideas. And people to do profitable crappy work while not being paid.
The British Museum wants us to think about all this. That’s why their temporary exhibit Silk Roads stops us in our tracks at the door, greeting us with this message:
Okay, yes, there’s some bloke in the way (not my long-suffering spouse Hoosen, who has more hair). Let me just transcribe the text from the wall, and the silent conversation I had with it:
British Museum: What do you imagine when you think of the Silk Road?
Annette (at the time): Not much, TBH. Not sure I care. Camels?
British Museum (imagine a hinty, seductive voice): Spices. Camel Caravans Crossing Desert Dunes . . .
Annette: Yeah, but do I get a point for thinking camels? Actually now I’m thinking of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s Road movies with Dorothy Lamour.*
*I swear I’m not that old. I was a young fan of Bing and Bob in the late 70s, and you don’t hear that every day.
Ahem. Back to the museum text:
British Museum (using that “anyone? anyone?” voice that teachers use when fishing for answers): A Single Path Linking “East” and “West” [?]
Annette (feeling very uncertain): I guess? I’m thinking China and the Mediterranean, pretty much. Is that not right?
British Museum: The Reality Offers So Much More
Annette: What, like a free set of steak knives? Seriously though. Does it? Does it really? What a clickbait line. Do I actually care about this? Help me here, British Museum, because I just splashed out US$60 on tickets for me and Hoosen, and I need to know this wasn’t an expensive mistake.
Annette’s Aside: Crowds
I don't often come to the British Museum because it gives me a headache. I find it overwhelming in its size, its huge collections acquired (sometimes paid for) from around the world, its vast range of times and places covered, and because it’s more ancient and medieval than I care about. Also, visiting a temporary exhibition in a London museum early in its run was a really bad idea, I knew that. I knew it would be crowded. Maybe not “Tutankhamun in 1972”-level crowded, when—as I witnessed in person as a tot- half of Britain formed a jawdropping queue on the British Museum’s massive forecourt. But on this day, the crowding was still pretty grim. However, I had no choice: The exhibit was only on until the end of February, 2025, and I am not rich and live faraway. It was now or never.
Hoosen and I realized too late that we’d arrived at the Museum during a school break for all England, and the entire British Museum was slammed. “I thought it wouldn't be as busy, on a weekday in November” I said plaintively to the attendant in the ladies’ loo, hoping for sympathy. “It's always like this now,” she said briskly. After twenty-five years of keeping the British Museum loos in pristine condition, she would know.
The permanent exhibits in London’s national museums and galleries are indeed free. But Hoosen and I coughed up cash because I had come to see Silk Roads, which charged admission. I now hoped that paying would separate us from the riff-raff. Sadly, we are the riff-raff, only sixty bucks poorer.
It wasn’t just the crowds that started my British Museum funk. Once in the Silk Roads exhibit, I was face to face with subjects, names, places, that were all desperately unfamiliar. See, this is why I'm sympathetic to my non-historian readers. We’re all ignorant about lots of things. And the more we know, the more we realize we know bugger all. The people who know least are often the most confident.
But it was going to be hard to learn while crowds jostled me. The visit was a frustrating and uncomfortable experience. I was one of many people in the crowd challenged by shortage of seating. I know London museums are waiting for young hip people, but we old farts turn out, and we need help.
Silk Roads was staged in one large high-ceilinged room, with no clear path through a maze of glass cases. We often found ourselves crowded into tight corners to try to peer at objects, and read labels, before being shunted aside by tall blokes with no shame. With no frame of reference, and deeply compromised concentration skills thanks to the crowds and my aching knees, I struggled to concentrate on the story the British Museum was trying to tell. Mostly I failed, wielded my smartphone, and just prayed my photos would make sense of it all later. I wasn’t optimistic.
But now that I sit here in my comfy study at Non-Boring House in the snowy American Midwest, looking at my photos from London, I see that Silk Roads was one of the most mind-blowing museum exhibitions I’ve seen in years. If only I had realized at the time. Hint: Don’t blame yourself if you find a museum exhibition confusing. It’s probably not you.
The Silk Roads: Not Your Usual Camels and Deserts
Silk Roads has made me realize that Atlantic trade across the ocean between Europe, West Africa, and the Americas was not the first step to a modern global world. In fact, the 18th century trade was basically a johnny-come-lately massive extension of the Silk Roads, one that that finally brought the Americas into the circle of global trade in stuff, people, and ideas that stretched back thousands of years, plus involved a lot more people, and not always willingly.
The Silk Roads were indeed much more than one road, one trail, from point A to Point B. They were about much more than the single luxury product of silk. The Silk Roads are better imagined as an almost-worldwide web made by people crossing continents. The Silk Roads even touched a lonely backwater called England, your first hint that I wasn’t as much out of my depth as I had assumed!
People traveled the Silk Roads for thousands of years. The story is very long, too long to tell properly, so Silk Roads was deliberately limited to one short part of it, a mere five hundred years (Americans? This is also a hint. Stop the bloody survey classes in schools and colleges). Surely, I thought, Silk Roads would focus on the five hundred years leading to the transatlantic trade that finally linked Europe, Asia, and Africa with the Americas, the Old World with the New?
But no. I was flattering myself that Britain and America would end up as the center of this story. The period the curators chose was one in which the British Isles were the back of beyond, and America was completely unknown to the rest of the world.
(FYI, when Columbus turned up in the Bahamas, people were happy to trade with him. Indigenous peoples in America had been trading stuff with each other for thousands of years. That’s because when someone shows up with pretty/useful/interesting stuff that’s new to us, human beings gather round, wallets at the ready.)
Silk Roads focused on the five hundred years that, the curators said, best defined the Silk Roads: AD 500 to AD 1000.
But wait! That can’t be right! That’s Europe’s Dark Ages! Or rather, what we used to call the Dark Ages, as if everything shut down after the Roman Empire left, and didn’t light up again until the late Middle Ages. These days, however, medieval European historians know that a lot was going on during the “Dark Ages”, which they now call the early Middle Ages. And something else: this is a great reminder that not all history centers on Europe. Cough. China. Cough.
I need that reminder, because I’m a historian of early America, who typically thinks she's all that because she works hard to persuade people that American history matters, and because she was also a minor pioneer in showing that American history stretches across the Atlantic.
It only took one little object in Silk Roads to put me firmly in my place.
A Little Buddha
This little Buddha, by itself, looks like a souvenir we could pick up in the kids’ pocket money area of the British Museum gift shop. But it was made more than a thousand years ago in what’s now Pakistan. Archaeologists found it in the remains of a building constructed around AD 800, in Sweden.
Yes, Sweden.
How the heck did a Buddha figurine get to Sweden in the AD 800s or even earlier?? Well, it did. Over two or three hundred years, this little Buddha wandered far from home in pockets and camel packs, from the Swat Valley, Pakistan, an early home of Buddhism, all the way to Sweden, where, to my knowledge, Buddhism never really took off, because if it had, we might have Buddhist chants instead of ABBA.
How did the Swedes who acquired this little Buddha understand it? Maybe they just saw it as a cute, exotic object, possibly with spiritual power. Or maybe it was a dust collector in Ingrid’s hut. Or maybe Bjorn got into Buddhism in his hippie phase. Most importantly today, how did this little figurine end up in Sweden by AD 800?
This one object tells us a lot about the power, the reach, of the Silk Roads. Most people 1,500 years ago were not cut off from a wider world. The Silk Roads are a big reason why, for better or for worse, like it or not, we now inhabit a shrinking world. And we always have.
This story isn’t about a one-way influence, or one-sided exchange. The Silk Roads are not all about China exporting silk. They were a network with many branches, and people and goods going in all directions. The Silk Roads were an (almost) worldwide web. They still are. Only now America’s involved big time, and the “roads” are filled with trucks and planes and ships, not camels.
Let’s see how all this took off.
China? Hi! I’m your neighbor, Japan!
Little Japan scored a big coup when it took the initiative to send diplomats to much bigger Tang-era China in AD 630. AD 630! The early 7th century! Mind-blowing, isn’t it? And this wasn’t a one-off: Fifteen groups of diplomats traveled on official business from Japan to China over the next 250 years or so, all set on exchanging stuff and ideas.
Make no mistake: Japan may have broken the ice, but China was the big player in this relationship. Little Japan was keen to hook up with its much larger neighbor, and to bring home from the Chinese anything that might prove useful at home.
One of the first histories of Japan, the Nihon Shoki (meaning, um, History of Japan) was written in the 700s AD in Chinese. That’s because Japan’s diplomats and rulers went, “Ooh, writing! Cool. We’ll just borrow that from you, China, cheers! Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that.”
From this little history book, we learn that Japan was first officially introduced to Buddhism in AD 552 thanks to knick-knacks made in China, like this small figurine. Sorry it’s a bit dark—so was the exhibition hall.
But this handmade Buddha must have been too expensive for practically every Japanese. So how did Buddhist images spread through Japan? How about as cheap knock-offs given as gifts by Japanese royalty to ordinary people, which is becoming a bit of a theme at NBH?
Royalty the world over give gifts like this, not just to be nice, but to win and retain the public’s support:
Empress Shotoku, who ruled Japan between AD 764-70, was convinced she won a war thanks to Buddhist gods. So she enthusiastically ordered one million (yes, one million) little souvenir wooden pagodas to be made and sent, free, to her subjects. And inside each one were FREE Buddhist mantras, written in Chinese. This not only increased the Empress’s subjects’ interest in Buddhism, but also in learning written Japanese, which was all in Chinese characters. Even today, a Japanese person can sort of make out some of the meaning of written Chinese, even though the spoken languages are very different. How cool is that?
China? Meet Korea! Korea? Meet Expensive Goodies!
Korea as we know it wasn’t yet a thing in AD 600. But Silla was the biggest state on the Korean peninsula, and after it made an alliance with Tang dynasty China, Silla rulers cheerfully set about conquering all their little neighboring kingdoms.
Just like Japan’s rulers, Silla Korea’s leaders were happy to borrow objects and ideas, whether made in China, or imported from elsewhere via China. Royal graves in Silla Korea were increasingly stuffed with gold jewelry, because gold had come to mean power, an idea borrowed from China.
Yet the hippest gold jewelry of all, in Japan as well as Korea, included a C shaped jade ornament that the Chinese did not use. This suggests that Silla Korean and Japanese bigwigs tweaked Chinese luxury imports to suit their tastes, something we see again and again in international trade: Ever have Chinese food outside China? It’s barely recognizable to Chinese people.
To illustrate, the exhibit shows an over-the-top necklace, found in a Silla royal grave, and made from gold nuggets and that non-Chinese jade ornament. Meanwhile, Korea was also obtaining items from even farther away via China: A unique dagger sheath with cloisonné decoration, found in Korea, may have started out in the Middle East. Take a look:
The blue glass on the right came from farthest away of all. I was surprised: Frankly, it looks like something from the 1970s that gathers dust in a thrift store [UK charity shop]. But it was an exciting exotic new product 1,500 years ago. Based on glass-making techniques developed by (surprise!) the Romans, examples of this style were found all around the Eastern Mediterranean. This glass probably traveled to Korea via Egypt. Yes, Egypt!
A Note on Glass
Glass is made from humble old sand. That doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. Even today, value is added to hand-blown glass by the skills of craftsmen: You probably would pay more for a Tiffany lamp than a Coke bottle. About 1,500 years ago, glass was a total novelty, and novelties sell. Remember all this when we come to talk at NBH about Native peoples in 17th century America and their excitement about glass and ceramic beads.
When Buddhism took root in Silla Korea, burials with fancy objects like glasses and gold necklaces began to fall from fashion among the rich, because Buddhists practiced cremation.
That doesn't mean posh Koreans shifted overnight to cremation! For rich people in Silla Korea who were still passionate about being buried, a new fashion emerged in the AD 500s: They could be buried with little ceramic people, like the ones your granny collected.
Within a hundred years, these little collectibles for dead people were portrayed wearing Chinese clothes. That’s because Silla Korea’s rulers had decided to require everyone at court to wear expensive imported Chinese clothes. Hey, if it's imported and it costs a lot, it must be better, right? So here they are, and . . . Wait, doesn’t the guy on the left look like a Gnome? The Gnomes at Non-Boring House certainly think so.
Buddhism Goes Viral in Korea, Too
Just like Japan, Silla Korea adopted the imported religion of Buddhism thanks to trade and diplomatic connections with China. Silla’s rulers made Buddhism their state religion in the early AD500s. Relics, in the form of imitation cremated remains of the Buddha (I’m really trying to imagine what imitation ashes looked like) were stored in boxes called reliquaries, just like the later (alleged) remains of Christian saints in Europe.
If you weren’t the Buddha (and odds are good you weren’t) and you were cremated in Silla Korea, then your ashes could well end up in a recycled Chinese jam jar. I’m not totally making that up: Imported ceramic jars made in China were sometimes reused as urns for cremated remains, like the two in the photo at right above.
Only Pools and Horses*: What China Got Out of It
*A joke for my UK readers. You're welcome.
So far, we have seen how trade and diplomatic contact with China influenced early Japan and Korea, bringing not only knick-knacks and fashion but writing and religion. But how was China itself influenced by Silk Roads trade?
China became a big deal during the Tang dynasty, which lasted about three hundred years, from AD 618 to 907. The Chinese capital, Chang’an, became for a while the biggest city in the world.
Yes! At a time when London was a derelict backwater abandoned by the Romans and picked over for building materials, Chang’an was a world-class city. People flocked to Chang’an from as far away as the Mediterranean. Among them? Diplomats, seeking trade with China. Merchants, doing the same. Craftsmen. Even entertainers, because city people like a bit of entertainment.
Tang-era China had one particularly amazing, attractive and unique product to offer the world: Lovely, shiny, comfy silk. Hey, we knew that was coming in an exhibition called Silk Roads.
Silk was the product of little silkworms, which had been cultivated exclusively in China for at least five thousand years. How did China hold a monopoly for thousands of years? It wasn’t easy to smuggle out silkworms, especially before Peak Silk Roads, and I’m guessing silk was unknown in most of the world. Now, however, in a brilliant bit of marketing, Chinese rulers gave gifts of free silk to diplomats, and massively bumped up international demand for Chinese silk, which could be met by silk being sent along the (yes!) Silk Roads. Phew.
Silk not only became a profitable product for China, but even became money itself, sort of like crypto, only real, useful, honest, and not promoted by such ghastly people. Silk was used to pay the wages of soldiers, who, not having much need for fancy silk clothes, used it as cash. Chinese people paid taxes and debts with bolts of silk. Ordinary people accepted silk in payment, knowing they could use silk as cash themselves. Admittedly, it’s a bit tricky to stuff a heavy great bolt of silk into your wallet, so I don't think you could buy groceries with silk.
Silk Roads showed us an impressive ancient bolt of silk. Okay, not all that impressive. It’s very old and grey, and sort of looks like cement blocks. But the miracle, given that this silk may be nearly 2000 years old, is that it still exists at all.
What did Chinese rulers buy with all that silk? Imported luxury goods! Tang royalty loved top-quality horses, which gives them something in common with modern British royalty, and the best horses were bought from Central Asia. If you’re nodding sagely while secretly thinking “which bit of Asia is that?”, well, me too. Turns out that it’s complicated. Basically, though, we’re talking Afghanistan, Kazakhstan (supposed home of Borat, the fictional star journalist played by Brit Sacha Baron Cohen), Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan . . . All the stans, really. Oh, and bits of Iran, plus Siberia and other Russian bits. And bits of China, too, but let’s not confuse you as I am now myself confused.
Anyway, yes, Central Asia was where luxury horses came from, sold to Chinese rulers who paid for these prize gee-gees with silk.
Chinese Royals used these top-quality horses in public ceremonies and sport. Did Chinese royals play polo, I now wonder, like Britain’s royals? Let’s look it up on ye olde Wikipedia . . . Holy cow, Tang Chinese rulers did indeed play polo! Polo originated in Central Asia among nomads (who did a lot of riding, hence their breeding of the finest horses). Polo also came on the Silk Road to China, where it was played in the sophisticated cosmopolitan Chinese capital of Chang’an! And polo was played by women! I imagine these were the kind of women who, if you rudely ordered them to make you a sandwich, would smash your head in with a polo mallet! Like Princess Anne, really.
This story about polo makes me think that not everything for which we credit China actually started in China.
Annette’s Aside: I must mention that “Marco Polo”, the silly but fun game played in swimming pools, is not from China. My guess is it started in Los Angeles, which is a modern version of multicultural Chang’an, except without the political power, but plus loads of pools and sunshine. I’m only guessing though. I will also say that “Marco Polo” has nothing to do with Italian explorer Marco Polo. Plus, while “Marco Polo” was unknown in my 1970s British youth, it has since reached the UK, possibly via Hong Kong. As in China. You can’t make this stuff up, I swear.
The luxury horses that Tang China royals bought from Central Asia were known as “blood-sweating horses.” This sounds like a slightly gory figure of speech, but in Silk Roads we see a large ceramic horse that appears to be, well, literally sweating blood. Or maybe it had been to the horsey hairdresser, and its mane dye was running.
Nope, apparently these horses really did sweat blood. But how? Theories range from galloping bursting blood vessels, to nasty mane parasites. Blood-sweating horses were often buried with Chinese royals, along with ceramic riders and grooms, for a very horsey afterlife. Let's not mention this to King Charles and Queen Camilla, okay?
One Hump or Two? Camels on the Silk Roads
A lot of the Silk Roads ran through desert. That’s where camels came in! Camels were the trucks of the Silk Roads in Central Asia! At first, these were two-hump (bactrian) camels, just like the one ridden by Bing and Bob in Road to Morocco (above). Camels traveled in convoys called caravans, but they didn’t pull trailers: Merch was loaded on the camel’s backs.
Camels themselves started out as novelties in China: Yet soon they weren’t, because of the Silk Roads. They were now regularly seen in the markets of the Tang Chinese capital of Chang’an.
The Museum promised us more than camels, but come on. Camels are iconic. 🐫 A ceramic figure of a camel is not only featured in the Silk Roads exhibit, but appears on the cover of the catalog and the exhibit posters. The ceramic camel is toting what the curators reckon is silk, plus another fabric, a jug [US pitcher], and possibly spare ribs for a desert BBQ. Not joking: The Museum suggests that we're seeing spare ribs.
That Old-Time Religion
So we already saw how Buddhism reached Korea and Japan from China. But Buddhism did not start in China. It started in India. It had come to China via the early Silk Roads, around 150 AD, brought by monk missionaries in shirtsleeves and ties on bicycles. Ok, I confused them with LDS (Mormon) missionaries for a moment, but you get the idea.
Christianity? Christianity also came to Tang China on the Silk Roads, starting with the first missionary in AD 635. He came not from Rome but from Byzantium (later Constantinople, which is today Istanbul), bringing a slightly different flavor of Christianity than the Vatican offered.
To my surprise, Tang Emperors supported Christianity. So much so, two hundred years later, the early history of the Christian church in Tang China was carved on a big stone monument. Workmen accidentally dug that up in 1675, and it’s now on display in a Chinese museum. This monument is very big, too big for the British Museum to borrow and bring to London, we saw a rubbing of it instead. It’s big, I can confirm. It looks a bit like that thingy in 2001: A Space Odyssey, only with Chinese words on it.
Despite royal patronage and a big monument, however, Christianity did not take off in China. But Buddhism did, and so did Daoism.
Buddhism, Daoism, but mostly Daoism
Buddhism came from India to China on the Silk Roads. As always happens with religion, it’s shaped by culture. As someone who has studied missionaries, the Church of England variety in the 18th century, I can confirm that it's impossible to transplant an exact replica of the faith on offer. The Chinese made Indian Buddhism into something Chinese: Buddha even started looking Chinese. This may have perplexed Indian Buddhists, but it helped make Buddhism the #1 religion in Chang’an during the Tang dynasty. Still, bits of Indian culture persisted in Chinese Buddhist figurines: Curves, including curvy clothing, appealed to Chinese Buddhists, for whatever reason. So the curves were kept.
There were still other faiths in Chang’an. Take Daoism, formerly spelled Taoism in the West, but it’s always said as Daoism, so I’m glad it’s changed, since I once pronounced The Tao of Pooh with a T, and some pompous ass took great pleasure in mocking me for it.
Anyhow, Daoism was born in China, and the Chinese royal family claimed to be descendants of the founder of Daoism, which made it awkward for them to give it up. It’s a bit like if today's King Charles, who is head of the Church of England, suddenly announced his conversion to Scientology. That’s extremely unlikely (and my apologies, Your Majesty, should you happen to be reading, sir, grovel, grovel).
So Daoism carried on side by side with imported Buddhism. And, as I mentioned, Chinese royals also supported imported Christianity, so they were clearly hedging their bets. Cosmopolitan Chang’an remained a tolerant place until the middle of the AD 800s: Loads of immigrants, many of them merchants, lived in Chang’an. They practiced their own religions, including Zoroastrianism, which I’ll let you look up. A Chinese funerary bed shown in Silk Roads featured Zoroastrian symbols, like bird-priests and a fire altar. Yes, Zoroastrians still exist, now including in the US and UK. Silk Roads.
Smells of the Silk Roads
This cute little ball with holes in it is a censer, a mini version of those still swung around on chains in Catholic churches when incense is called for. This censer comes from China, and I don’t know if it had religious importance, or was simply an air freshener. The smoldering aromatic woods with which it was stuffed came on the Silk Roads network to China from Arabia and South Asia.
Aromatic woods? How about frankincense and myrrh! How cool is that, to those of us who have only heard of these mysterious substances in connection with the Christian Nativity story, or, if you’re British, via school Nativity plays, because you almost certainly hardly ever darkened a church doorstep.*
*I need to write sometime about unintended consequences on churches of not separating Church and State, a favorite theme of my old professor Dr. Edwin Gaustad, WWII vet, eminent historian, and devout Baptist, who strongly favored church/state separation.
The three wise men, aka the Three Kings, must have traveled on the Silk Roads, surely? The British Museum does not tell us, perhaps because the Three Kings/Wise Men/Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh Providers are, um, according to scholars, legendary.
Don’t panic, Christians! Scholars aren’t saying the Three Kings didn’t exist, just that evidence is lacking, and legit scholarship must be based on evidence, not faith. That said, um, hope you’re sitting down. Silk Roads suggests the story of the famous threesome may have been imported into Christianity by converts from Zoroastrianism, who wanted to bring a familiar story from their cradle faith to their new religion. Ah yes. Welcome to religious history, guaranteed, like all academic history, to test anyone's faith.
Make Music, Dance, Look Cute
China also benefited from fashion, dance, music, and musical instruments that traveled the Silk Roads to the capital of Chang’an. Foreign music became part of the royal court musicians’ repertoire. Imagine Chinese rulers rocking out to Indian music played by Chinese musicians! Nobody said, “Ooh, I’m not playing/listening to that foreign stuff.”
Annette’s Aside: Is that so hard to understand? Ever heard of Japanese singer Kyu Sakamoto’s early 1960s song Ue o Muite Arukō? Maybe not, but get this: When copies of Sakamoto’s record somehow ended up in London, musicians were enchanted. Specifically, Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen, who spoke not one word of Japanese, loved the song. So they recorded an instrumental version.
However, Kenny and the lads had no handy translator for the title. None of them could even pronounce Ue o Muite Arukō. According to Jimmy Appleton, Kenny Ball, Jr’s sound tech, the musicians talked about the problem over dinner in a Chinese restaurant in London with the singer Petula Clark. Petula suggested they name the tune Sukiyaki after a popular Japanese restaurant dish that at least some Brits had heard of. So, it was as Sukiyaki that Kenny’s version made it to #10 in the UK charts. When Sakamoto’s original recording (in Japanese, remember) was then released in the UK, it remained Sukiyaki, and promptly sold 13 million copies, thanks in part to Pet, Kenny and the boys. I don’t believe Kyu Sakamoto complained about cultural appropriation on his way to the bank and global immortality.
In case you haven’t heard Ue o Muite Arukōi, you should. Ignore the opening text in the video that blames/credits Americans for the Sukiyaki title. The Brits did it, I tell you!
I can’t leave this without thanking my jazz-playing Scottish dad's beloved Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen for their cheery version of a sad Western-style Japanese song, played in a musical genre pioneered in America, with its musical roots in Africa, its instruments transported across the Atlantic in the minds of Africans and the trunks of Europeans.
Silk Roads.
Cultural Appropriation Tableware
International trade wasn’t always about making stuff cheaply overseas so it will be more affordable for more people at home, as a consolation prize for their jobs being exported. For a very long time, international trade was about luxuries, serving elites with money to burn, who welcomed the chance to buy cool exotic things from foreigners.
Tang China happily bought wine from Central Asian merchants, and special wine cups/glasses, too. This reminds this early American/British historian of the 18th century adoption of tea and china by the British and British-American elites from —yes!— China! Awesome.
As wine took off at the Tang Chinese royal court, more and more people wanted to become wine drinkers, in imitation of royalty. For these wine connoisseurs on a budget, Chinese craftsmen began producing cheaper knock-offs of designs from Central Asia, and stemmed wine glasses based on the Mediterranean originals, to which they added popular Chinese decorations for local appeal. Who cared about cultural appropriation? No-bod-ee.
As well as glasses, Chinese wine fans wanted proper wine jugs [US pitchers]. Chinese craftsmen obliged, making jugs based on central Asian designs. These were increasingly used to serve all booze, rather than the uncool Chinese old-fashioned ladles dipped into a jar.
Chinese poshoes also bought imported/knock off serving platters, Silk Roads suggested, to serve delectable foreign-style baked goods! Now Silk Roads had me thinking of Mozart, a small bakery chain in Atlanta, named for the composer (he’s too dead to sue). Mozart bakery cafes (who are NOT paying for this plug) serve scrummy Korean European-style (or European Korean-style) cakes. These range from exquisite layer cakes filled with mango (not a European food until recently) to buns filled with sweetened bean paste (not a European thing). I held a get-together for Atlanta Nonnies, paying subscribers, in a branch of Mozart on Buford Highway, an area full of food businesses run by immigrants. The Nonnies had no idea it existed, but were delighted to know it did! Korean-style European pastries in the land of cornbread. Silk Roads strike again.
Now it’s time to leave China, and head west on the Silk Roads.
Not Just Camels Crossing Deserts
By now, despite Silk Roads’ promise that we would be talking about more than camels crossing deserts, we were still talking camels crossing deserts. Finally, however, we started to move away from camels and deserts. A bit.
ROUTES IN ASIA, said the info panel. CROSSING SEAS, MOUNTAINS, AND DESERTS
Deserts were camel territory. Mountains? Maybe. But seas? There’s only one breed of camel I’m aware of that can swim, and I don’t think it was bred until more recently.
Down to the Sea On Camels In Ships
So we’re talking ships, and an entire area of Silk Roads was dedicated to a shipwreck! Yes, a shipwreck! On a sea! I know shipwrecks! I saw Titanic! Also, seriously, I thought of the Atlantic passages taken by Europeans, Africans, and even American Indians in the 17th and 18th century. Ships show us that not all Silk Roads involved camels in deserts.
The sunken ship was rediscovered in 1998, nearly a thousand years after it met with its watery doom. Not knowing its name, the discoverers named it Belitung, after the Indonesian island near which it sank. It yielded a lot of great stuff, a few examples of which now appeared in Silk Roads.
The shipwreck exhibit was popular, but the design of Silk Roads made it hard for more than a few people to crowd round and see it at one time. No matter! On your behalf, I bravely fought my way through the crowd of visitors, and used my shortness and you as excuses to get a closer look. Make way, people! I’m not just here for myself, but on behalf of thousands of interested NBH readers . . . I did not say, because that would have been obnoxious. I just thought it instead.
Yes, ok, we’re still stuck on China, but now we’re branching out, looking at Chinese exports. The ship was sunk in the Indian Ocean, near modern Indonesia, sometime around 800 AD. Returning from China to Arabia, it was groaning under the weight of more than 60,000 objects of merch, most of it Chinese ceramics for sale, so no wonder it sank. But a ship was definitely a more efficient way of transferring a crap-ton of goods than on the backs of grumpy camels. That’s why we have since retired camels from long-distance trade, and now send massive floating stacks of containers around the world’s oceans.
Included in Silk Roads was a Chinese jug (US pitcher) with a dragon’s head serving as the spout. This wasn’t a unique item.. It was one of many, a popular Chinese luxury export which inspired a load of knock-offs throughout the Middle East.
But the shipwrecked object that really got my attention was this:
Why? Cobalt blue and white, folks! The ancestor of willow ware, which was made popular in Britain and America when 18th century English potter/entrepreneurs like Thomas Minton and Josiah Spode had their employees knock off and “improve” imported Chinese designs. Willow wear portrayed romanticized Chinese scenes with willow trees and whatnot, all done in blue and white. A typical example from later:
Choose Your Own Adventure at NBH: I discovered a tribute to blue willow plates in an unexpected place: The loos in the visitor center of Fort Vancouver, once the American West Coast HQ of the early 19th century Hudson’s Bay Company, where Willow ware was found:
Read more here:
Irony time: Even in the AD 800s, Chinese potters were making blue and white ceramics solely for export, because they weren’t popular in China. And their industry was only possible because of the Silk Roads: The design they used probably came from the Middle East, and the cobalt blue paint pigment likely came from what’s now Iran.
There’s more. Some of the designs on the Chinese merch in the sunken ship include images borrowed from Ancient Greece and Rome, like a bloke wrestling a lion on top of a ceramic incense burner. How tacky and yet cool is that? And then there’s goldware made in China to Central European designs, including a cup showing Central European dancers and musicians, popular in China, and now being sent West.
Above all, though, what the Belitung wreck shows us is that, in 800 AD or so, China had the ability to mass-produce, um, china for foreign markets, and export it by the shipload. Chinese exports from this period have been found all the way to East Africa.
Islam and the Silk Roads
The Silk Roads were not all about luxury stuff. Most importantly, they were a superhighway for ideas. Islam was born in Arabia in the AD 600s, and took off in a big way thanks to roads, with Arabs bringing Muslim beliefs as they conquered all the way from what’s now Pakistan to what’s now Spain. However, the people the victors ruled were pretty varied in religion, which meant that Islam, influenced by these competing beliefs, became diverse too. And it took time to convert the public to Islam: Muslim rulers were wisely tolerant of older religions, which made conversion gradual and yet more effective. Plus, while Arabic was used at court and in Islamic religious study, people in Muslim areas also still retained their original languages.
In the AD 700s, Islamic faith was carried all along the Silk Roads by diverse travelers, from pilgrims to craftsmen, and from merchants to scholars. Baghdad became a center of intellectual life in the Muslim world, helped by the spread of papermaking technology from Tang China along the Silk Roads. Books were translated into Arabic from multiple languages, including Sanskrit and Greek.
Science and Math (shudder)
So I looked at The Book of the Fixed Stars, by ‘Abd al Rahman al-Sufi, who in AD 964 was drawing astronomical charts. He did that without a telescope, I’m guessing. My appreciation of this artifact was somewhat limited by my zero knowledge of Arabic and astronomy, but, hey, enjoy:
I am not a science and math person, which I think you already know. So my eyes glazed over as I read a label about al-Khwarizmi, a Muslim mathematician born in the late 8th century AD. I learned that al-Khwarizmi is known as the “father of algebra”, and the best I can say about that is that I hated algebra at school less than I hated geometry, so yay him. Still, al-Khwarizmi, based in Baghdad, published a Book of Algebra, a later copy of which is on display, in which he did scary math like quadratic equations, while I’m not really sure what those are. Good on you, Mr. al-Khwarizmi! Well done, sir! Moving right along.
Not so fast. Apparently Muslim scholars were really amazing at biology and medicine, too, all respect from me, who has benefited from many things she doesn’t understand . . . Oh, wait! Finally I spotted a bit of early scholarship I can relate to! Thank heavens! This next artifact is a mental map!
A what, Laing?
Here, I’ll show you:
As a kid, I was influenced by looking at pictures in a geography book my dad owned, the text of which I couldn’t understand. It was Mental Maps (1974), by Peter Gould. It showed me how maps aren’t just “facts” but reflect how we see the world. As an example, take the Gulf of Mexico! Or don’t! Moving right along. Cough.
Moral: Do not stop kids from looking at books that are not at their alleged “reading level,” because that’s stupid corporate rubbish sold to school districts and states. At age 15, inspired by my earlier flipping through Mental Maps, I carried out an economic geography project mapping the sphere of influence of the various parts of my town center, and I got an “A” at geography “O” level (Older Brits know what that is. I hope they’re impressed.)
The map above was drawn by a Muslim scholar for the king of Sicily, a Christian. South is at the top, and at the world’s center is Mecca, destination of the world’s Islamic pilgrims. So you know, I’ve also seen medieval maps that put Jerusalem in the middle of the known world.
Also on display in Silk Roads as an example of Islamic scholarship was a copy of one of the oldest Qur’ans ever. The Muslim holy book, the Qur’an (also spelled Quran or Koran) was copied a lot more after the arrival of papermaking skills from China enabled lighter, cheaper handcopied books by the late 900s. Before, animal skin, or parchment was used, and that’s heavy stuff you don't want to travel with. Light books reached more people.
Qur’ans spread the idea of the Hajj, the pilgrimage required of all Muslims who are able to travel. Hajj pilgrimages then took the faithful, their Qur’ans, and their beliefs along the Silk Roads, and along the way, local rulers did much to look after the travelers, with free water and repaired potholes.
As Islam spread, there was concern among Muslim leaders about whether it was appropriate for the Qu’ran to be translated from Arabic, the language in which God had revealed his thoughts. Finally, in the late 900s, religious authorities decided to continue to copy the Qu’ran in Arabic, but with translations in the margins. Bilingual texts, folks! Silk Roads.
Pilgrims Progress
So Muslim pilgrims traveled the increasingly improved Silk Roads network. Most headed to Mecca, as one of the duties of their faith. Others journeyed to Jerusalem. Jerusalem? Yup. Arabs had won the city from the Byzantine Empire in the early AD 600s, and Jerusalem’s new rulers built a big holy shrine that’s still with us today: The Dome of the Rock.
So now Jerusalem was a holy place for three competing religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. What’s more, these three faiths were related to each other, and they borrowed extensively from each other: The Dome of the Rock is in the shape of an octagon and has, well, a dome. These design elements were likely drawn from Judaism and Christianity.
Merchants sold stuff to tourists pilgrims. Knick-knack merchants in Jerusalem had already been selling little glass containers to Christians and Jews, allowing them to take home souvenirs like dirt, sacred oil, and holy water. Now the merchants started flogging flasks designed to appeal to Muslims. One of these flask souvenirs was on display in Silk Roads.
Anyone who’s ever taken a look at Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales gets a glimpse of pilgrims as tourists.
Samarra, Samarra, I Love You, Samarra! (apologies to Annie, the musical)
The city of Samarra (now in Iraq) still exists. Founded in AD 836, it was built to be the new capital of the Abbasid caliphate (a religious state), which moved there from Baghdad. Within a half century or so, however, the rulers changed their minds, Baghdad again became the caliphate’s capital, and Samarra became a neglected backwater. As a result, a lot of Samarra’s posh buildings were never updated, which is cool: That’s why we know they were made using teak wood from, wait for it, South or Southeast Asia, thanks to the Silk Roads!
Samarra also imported Tang Chinese china for the caliph’s dinners. Local potters, of course, as everywhere, started copying Chinese design to make cheaper wares for non-royals. I peered at the little stoneware fragments of both Chinese and Samarran pottery, and stifled a yawn. I get the larger point, but if I got excited by little bits of whatever, I would have been an archeologist. In case this floats your boat, though, here you go. The Samarran knock-off is on the right:
Potters in the Islamic world copied Chinese ceramics using a lovely white glaze, just like my cheap imported dinnerware at Non-Boring House, and sometimes decorated with cobalt blue coloring, sourced from Iran. Potters got more and more creative as they competed for business. By the AD 800s, potters in Iraq had invented lustreware, with its bright metal appearance. And there was me thinking lustreware was invented to be given as prizes at funfairs [US carnivals].
It wasn’t all pottery, though. How about linen fabric? This was found in Samarra but made in Egypt, which I now learn was a big manufacturing center for linen, like Egyptian cotton sheets are a big deal today. Apparently, for a luxury touch, and to add value, Egyptian craftspeople embroidered colorful designs on linen.
This rare sample of linen on display in Silk Roads mentions the name of a Samarran ruler. Could this be the world’s first monogrammed towel? No, but close. Sadly, it now looks like a wet paper towel:
On to the Mediterranean!
When the Silk Roads reached the Mediterranean, that brought together Europe, Asia, and Africa, the entire known world. The area of the Mediterranean was ruled by the Byzantine empire, which was run by Greek-speaking Christians from their capital, Constantinople (Istanbul, oh, no I’m humming that annoying song . . .)
The Byzantines imported silk from Egypt, which had obtained silkworms on the Silk Roads, until one day, they acquired their own silkworms, reputedly smuggled by monks on the (altogether now) Silk Roads.
Abyssinia in All Those Unfamiliar Places
The east African kingdom of Aksum is today part of Ethiopia, but by the AD 500s, it was a major player, and controlled access to the Red Sea, which linked the Mediterranean world with the Indian Ocean, as well as Africa with Arabia. Adulis was Aksum’s port on the Red Sea: Here, exports such as ivory from elephants’ tusks were traded for imports like olive oil and wine from the Mediterranean, and for spices and gems from India. Aksum was a very cosmopolitan place: Coins and signs were bilingual, in Greek as well as the local language.
Aksum was one of the first Christian states in the world: Its rulers had become Christians in the mid AD 300s. King Ezanas came to call himself a “servant of Christ”, and issued gold coins with crosses on them. Feeling profoundly ignorant about African history? Trust me, this is normal, and that’s a shame.
Cairo: The Super-Center
Islam and Christianity were competitors for hearts and minds, and they had a lot in common. After Islamic military forces won the eastern Mediterranean area and established a presence in Egypt in AD 639, Islam gradually spread across North Africa, changing all the way to keep appealing to diverse people. Islamic states emerged, including the Fatimid Caliphate, which crossed North Africa and what’s now the Middle East, including Mecca. It had its capital in al-Qahira . . . aka Cairo.
Cairo became the biggest, richest city on the Mediterranean, a center of business, and also a major pottery producer, improving on lovely lustreware. As well as exporting, Cairo imported. Attractive artisan-created beads were brought to Cairo from all over. These were attractive luxury purchases, often passed down in families, and presented to women at their weddings. They originated from as far away as India, Indonesia, and even the Baltic Sea. Small, portable beads were easily traded across the globe—and they later became an important part of trade in early America, too, because people everywhere like unusual pretty shiny things they can’t make themselves. Like these:
But Cairo wasn’t just about buying, selling, and making deals! Cairo was an intellectual center, bringing together ideas from the entire Old World. On display in Silk Roads was a book published in Cairo. This was the wonderfully-named Book of Strange Arts and Visual Delights, aka the Book of Curiosities. It brought together scholarship from Greece, India, and what’s now Iran.
The scholars of long-ago Cairo and beyond did what scholars and scientists still do today: Try to make sense of everything in the universe based on the information and evidence available. That’s the best any of us can do. And that’s why the idea that academic science or history are either unchanging or made up isn’t true. What is made up? Stuff written for profit. Stuff written by people whose income depends on their continuing to sing the same song. But I digress.
Super-Camels Invented!
Silk Roads tells us that the breeding of one-humped camels (aka dromedaries) 🐪 revolutionized long-distance trade, but it doesn’t say why. I guessed the lack of that second hump made more room for stuff on a camel’s back, but, as a historian, I was trained not to guess, but to look it up, so I did. I was close, but wrong. Basically, one hump is lighter than two, so a dromedary could carry more stuff, plus dromedaries are better at dealing with heat and a lack of water, PLUS dromedaries are lighter and so easier to maneuver. This makes them sound like trucks, doesn’t it? Exactly.
These super-camels extended the reach of the Silk Roads. They carried rock salt from the Sahara to West Africa. And then they carried gold sold by kingdoms in West Africa, like Ghana and Gao, which had loads of gold, to the Mediterranean, where gold wasn’t common, and was much in demand. Gold is more like glass beads than we might think: Not practical, but pretty shiny things. The Kingdom of Ghana made a fortune in stuff by paying with gold.
Long-distance trade in West Africa didn’t just come from the Mediterranean. It was from within West Africa itself. Look, the British Museum and I are keen to disabuse Westerners of our peculiar ideas about African history, so here’s a great example. Igbo Ukwu (today Nigeria) was knocking out artistically-decorated copper containers during this period, as well as glass beads: 150,000 beads found at Igbo Ukwu included local examples as well as stuff traded from the Mediterranean, India, and the Middle East. Silk Roads, baby!
Gold from West Africa provided a steady supply of gold for making high-quality coins, which also helped trade: It’s easier to use coins than, say, whacking great bolts of silk. Silk Roads included three gold coins minted in North Africa, Tunisia and Morocco, plus Italy. My photo is a bit rubbish (the light really wasn’t good) but you get the idea.
The Synagogue’s Storeroom
Okay, I loved this next part of Silk Roads. Turns out, a synagogue in the city of Fustat in Egypt had a storeroom for old books, letters, and documents. The congregation weren’t hoarders. They just didn’t want to risk throwing away anything with God’s name on it, because they considered that sacrilege. So they got into the habit of just keeping everything. End result? A treasure trove of lovely documents! FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND DOCUMENTS!
And some of the documents in the synagogue storeroom were written on recycled or, more accurately, repurposed old documents, like we use the backs of paper off our home printers! Win win! This is the sort of thing of which historian dreams are made, because we are sad and weird.
The Jewish community in the booming international trade center of Fustat got a lot of begging letters from other Jewish communities, because it was known to be wealthy. Yes, the silk roads carried long-distance begging letters!
One letter asked Fustat’s Jewish community leaders for donations to help release Jewish traders held hostage by pirates. In the end, whether or not the Fustat community replied, Italian merchants paid the huge ransom. We’re left to wonder if these Italians were trading partners of the hostages, or (most likely) businessmen seizing an opportunity (You can pay us back with our EZ payment plan, folks!) Here’s the letter. Wish I had a translation.
The Jewish community in Kyiv (yes, the one in Ukraine) wrote to ask for help for a man paying off his murdered brother’s debts to non-Jewish creditors. His community had raised enough money to get him out of debtors’ jail, but now they asked the Fustat synagogue to help pay off money still owed.
On a different note, a marriage contract shows how international everything was becoming thanks to the Silk Roads: It was about a wedding in Jerusalem, and mentioned that the bride wore clothes from Byzantium and Sicily, and the wedding featured goods from Baghdad, Damascus (Syria) and beyond. SILK ROADS!
The saddest document in the synagogue collection was a receipt for the purchase of a woman named Na’im. Enslaved people were bought and sold by Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Slavery was a-ok by everyone so long as they weren’t themselves enslaved. Na’im was a Nubian (African) woman, but SLAVERY WAS NOT BASED ON ‘RACE’ NOR WAS IT LIMITED TO THE ENSLAVEMENT OF AFRICANS. Very important, hence the capitals. Britain and British America contributed the idea of race-based slavery. Before and since, slavery has been everywhere, involved all sorts of people, and was and is ghastly. In this case, Na’im was sold by one Jewish woman to another. A few years later, a Christian man bought her.
On a more mundane level, we get a glimpse of another document that shows us a dispute between two traders, one a businessman in Cairo, and the other a traveling merchant. They had pooled their resources to buy a shipload of pepper, which then got lost. Now they were suing each other. More than a thousand years ago. Don’t tell me life was simpler in the olden days: A major point of Silk Roads is that it wasn’t.
And at last: Britain Joins the Silk Roads!
During the five-hundred year period the exhibition covers, northwest Europe, including Britain, was the back of beyond. Even so, as we saw from that example of a Buddha figure in Sweden, northwest Europe was touched by the Silk Roads. I admit that most trade in northwest Europe stayed in northwest Europe. But the Brits and their neighbors weren’t entirely left out; The elite got silks and gems via the Silk Roads, and more ordinary objects which arrived were promptly knocked off by local artisans, as usual. Scholarship, too, made its way from the world’s more happening areas.
Syrian Souvenirs in Essex
Essex is an English county to the east of London, and my British readers may smile, because after WWII, many working-class Londoners, AKA Cockneys, were relocated there from the bombed slum housing of the city’s East End. We’re talking Call the Midwife.
But the East Enders are recent migrants to Essex. Others lived there in the early AD 600s. Digging up the burial sites of posh people from that period, archaeologists have found exotic objects, which they suspect were brought to Essex by returning mercenaries who had been fighting for the Byzantine Empire. On their way home, these soldiers also have detoured into the shrine of a soldier-saint called Sergius, in Syria. One of the objects found is a wine flagon decorated with a Sergius souvenir bracelet around the neck. This:
Mail Order Armo(u)r
People in Essex in the AD 600s loved international fashion! At least, that’s according to the archaeologists who say that grave goods buried with important people “hint” at that: Gold clasps “apparently” (weasel word) were used to fold together a sort of wrap-around shawl similar to those worn on the Steppes.*
*Weasel words like “speculates”, “probably” and “perhaps” are essential because, like historians, archaeologists can’t always be sure: Expertise doesn’t automatically mean certainty. It means the best theory, or professional opinion, based on knowledge, experience, and all the evidence available. That’s still the best bet we have, and likely a better bet than your Cousin Mike who writes a lot of things on Facebook. Make a note of that. It might come in handy.
Chainmail armor based on faraway designs was found in the famous graves at Sutton Hoo.
Sutton Who, Laing?
Sutton Hoo is a place in Sussex (near Essex) where cemeteries from the 6th and 7th centuries were discovered in 1938. There’s a movie about it. This trailer from The Dig is a bit fictitious (implying that the gravesites were found a bit later, to coincide for dramatic purposes with the start of WWII in 1939). The film also makes scholars look a bit villainous, which troubles me very much, especially now, with scholarship widely misunderstood and attacked from across the political spectrum. But, hey, it’s a great film for capturing the excitement of Sutton Hoo:
So the armor found at Sutton Hoo was the only one like it yet found in England. However, it was widely used in the Byzantine army, and its style may have originated in Syria:
The jewelry from Sutton Hoo in the photo above was also based on designs from the Middle East. And the scholars at the British Museum have tested the gems and found that they came from Central Europe and Sri Lanka. They came to Sussex by camel, ship, and riverboat. Think of now: Truck, container ship, truck or train. We’re still bringing stuff over vast distances, now more than ever. What happened in the so-called Dark Ages never ended.
Shipping Ideas to England
There’s a myth that England was long sealed off from foreign stuff during the “Dark Ages”. But that’s never been true. The Romans who invaded Britain were not just from Rome or even Italy, but all over the Roman Empire, including from Africa. The English as an ethnic group only formed after the Romans left: They were German immigrants, Angles and Saxons, who arrived after the Roman Empire collapsed. And then the French took over, with the Norman Invasion of 1066 under William the Conqueror.
Everyone brought ideas. Aldhelm was an scholar who lived in Canterbury, England, in the 600s and 700s, and he was English, meaning descended from people in what’s now Germany. In the playful riddles in his book, a copy of which was on display in Silk Roads, he referred to Symphosius, a poet from North Africa whom he had probably first read at school in Canterbury. Aldhelm’s Canterbury school was founded in the mid-600s by scholars from North Africa and what’s now Turkey. These foreigners taught English boys the cream of Middle Eastern scholarship: Greek, Roman, law, astronomy, medicine and music.
This entire section on England in Silk Roads had me fascinated now. By the time AD 600 rolled around, the Middle Eastern religion of Christianity had arrived in England, brought by missionaries from Ireland as well as those sent from Rome by the Pope: As a result, English Christianity emerged as a mishmash of Mediterranean, Irish, and local styles (and probably more). Some stone fragments in Silk Roads came from a monastery guest house in Jarrow, in northern England. They’re in a distinctly Mediterranean style, and we know the design was commissioned by the monastery’s founder after he visited Rome.
The Final Object
An elaborate hand-carved, hand-decorated box made from whale bone, the last object before the exit through the gift shop, focuses us on England. We were, after all, in London, whose future was as a major international trade center. The box was amazing. It sums up what made the Silk Roads so important.
Made in northern England in the AD 700s, it was found buried in France. On this box are scenes from Christian and northern European traditions, from Jewish and Roman history. The captions aren’t only in Old English, but Latin. We see the Roman Army attacking Jerusalem in AD 70 on the back. On the lid is Egil, a mythological figure I first encountered in a museum in Iceland, to where he was brought by Scandinavians. There are, I’m assured, Christian images on this box, and that’s a religion that started in the Middle East. Follow the connections, and I daresay we would end up in Asia.
The final statement of the exhibit, posted in big letters on the wall by the exit, struck me as a bit lame, and certainly awkward, like they knocked it out at the last minute:
THE NETWORKS OF THE SILK ROADS FORGED CROSS-CULTURAL CONNECTIONS.
THE WAYS PEOPLE INTERACT HAVE CHANGED, BUT THESE CONNECTIONS REMAIN. THEY WILL CONTINUE TO SHAPE THE PRESENT AND FUTURE.
Now I look at it again, though, I’m not so sure. Awkward, yes, but also the heart of the matter: Humans love to trade objects and ideas. We love novelty.
Oh, and we have stuff we want to get rid of so we can buy more, newer stuff.
Silk Roads, whether we think about them or not, became part of British and American history. And our present. But it’s not all great news. This is where the Silk Roads have led us: The Story You’ve Been Told About Recycling Is a Lie (not paywalled).
Where Now?
The Silk Roads exhibit at the British Museum may well be over by the time you read this. But I can say the catalog (while expensive) is the next best thing:
So many tasty fact nuggets!
Yikes history of the world? Sure, bring it on! You Go, Annette!