Download - Trade Classical Period
The Silk Road
• Geography: Outer versus Inner Eurasia
• Three Phases due to Secure Politics (CONSIDER CCOT!)– 100 BCE-200 CE – 7th century – 1000 CE– 13-14th centuries
“I can see clothes of silk (if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one’s decency, can be called clothes)…Wretched flocks of maids labor so that the adultress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner with his wife’s body.”
Seneca the Younger, ~60 CE
The Silk Road
• Dynamic trade– Expensive, luxury items– Syncretism
• Spread of Buddhism (compare with Islam after 600 CE)
Indian Ocean Trade
• Up to 1500 CE, largest sea-based system of trade (cf. Mediterranean)
• Transportation costs cheaper
Notions of Africa
“Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America….”-- Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Rise of Christian Europe, 1965
Afrocentricism: Controversies in World History
“In my three volumes with the title Black Athena, I argue that the Ancient Egyptian civilization can usefully be seen as African. I also maintain Ancient Egypt and Semitic speaking South West Asia played fundamental roles in the formation of Ancient Greece. I do not claim the Ancient Greeks were Black or that the Ancient Egyptians all looked like stereotypical West Africans.”
(Martin Bernal)
Afrocentricism: Controversies in World History
“There were books in circulation that claimed that Socrates and Cleopatra were of African descent, and that Greek philosophy had actually been stolen from Egypt. Not only were these books being read and widely distributed; some of these ideas were being taught in schools and even in universities…”
Conceptions of Africa Reinforced by Media
Primitive› Failed to develop; non-changing
Wild & Dangerous› Wild animals & wild people
Exotic› Strange & fanciful
Unspoiled› Avoided progress – pure
Broken› Poverty, political sickness
Sub-Saharan Africa: Politics
Stateless societies › = no professional political class › = no one spent all their time telling people
what to do Difficult to produce consistent surplus of
food? No state chaos
› Solution through discussion› Authority through kinship, age, experience
Religions
Hundreds, even thousands of indigenous African religions. Many › believe in one God above a host of lesser
gods or semi-divine figures› believe in ancestral spirits› stress the idea of sacrifice, often involving
the death of a living thing, to ensure divine protection and generosity
› Stress rites of passage to move from childhood to adulthood, from life to death.
The plan
• What are these cultural systems – how do they create order?
• How did they spread and how did they affect the way people behave?
• How were these cultural systems expressed visually?