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1.Many nations contributed to the Silk-Road commerce. |
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Among
inhospitable mountains and deserts scatter grasslands, river valleys, and oases,
each once supported a pastoral tribe or an agricultural statelet.
Jostling and squabbling, they constituted a checkerboard of agriculture and
pastoral economies, sedentary and nomadic cultures, and peoples practicing
both or alternating from one to the other. Their history was a kaleidoscope
of moving peoples, diverse languages, shifting identities, and transient
polities, complicated by conquests and the intrusions of imperial powers. They were the peoples of the Silk Road. By
the sixth century BCE, the Achaemenid Persians
built a vast empire stretching from today’s Turkey to the Indus River and
beyond the Amu Darya. Its ceremonial city Persepolis was destroyed by
Alexander the Great. Luckily, some of the carvings on the walls of its
palatial platforms and staircases survived to show us the stylized portraits
of ancient peoples. Besides the Persians and their neighbor Medes, we see a
parade of nations, allies and subject peoples bringing native products. Among
them are an Armenian bringing a horse, a Babylonian bringing a cattle, a
Parthian brining a Bactrian camel, an India bringing perhaps flasks of gold dust. |
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From
north of the Black Sea, the Scythians bring their horse. Compare them to the
horsemen of the Altai region, as depicted on a fourth
century BCE felt wall-hanging excavated in the tombs of Pazyryk. Migrations were common. For example, the
Uighurs, whose descendent inhabit China’s Xinjiang province today, migrated
there from northern Mongolia in the 840s. A Uighur princess of that time
appears in the wall paintings of Bezeklik. In the
seventh and eighth centuries, China under the Tang Dynasty was exceptionally
open to the world. Many color-glazed pottery figurines uncovered from tombs
feature open eyes, thick facial hair, conical cap, and open collar,
characteristics of traders and visitors that frequented the capital Changan. Two musical bands, each mounted on a camel,
contrast the Chinese instruments to that from the “western regions”. |
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