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The accepted and lazy history of civilisation, wrote Wolf, is one where ‘Ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry crossed with democracy in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
important medieval Turkish map in Istanbul that had at its heart a city called Balāsāghūn, which I had never even heard of, which did not appear on any maps, and whose very location was uncertain until recently, and yet was once considered the centre of the world.
Garden of Eden, ‘planted by the Lord God’ with ‘every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food’, which was widely thought to be located in the rich fields between the Tigris and Euphrates.
‘Seidenstraßen’ – the Silk Roads.
‘A talent for following the ways of yesterday’, declared King Wu-ling in 307 BC, ‘is not sufficient to improve the world of today.’
The Persian Empire was a land of plenty that connected the Mediterranean with the heart of Asia.
Cyrus the Great, the architect of the Persian Empire in the 6th century BC, was killed trying to subjugate the Scythians;
Alexander of Macedon. When he took the throne in 336 BC following the assassination of his father, the brilliant King Philip,
Tutored by Aristotle, Alexander
Babylon surrendered,
Alexander was also able to draw more and more territory under his sway because he was willing to rely on local elites.
The Chinese had already developed a concept of huaxia, representing the civilised world, set against the challenges of the peoples from the steppes.
An intensive building programme expanded a network of fortifications into what became known as the Great Wall of China, and were driven by the same principle
as that adopted by Alexander: expansion without def...
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He founded a dynasty, known as the Seleucids, that was to rule for nearly three centuries.
The decades that followed Alexander’s death saw a gradual and unmistakable programme of Hellenisation, as ideas, themes and symbols from ancient Greece were introduced to the east.
Indeed, there is a correlation not only in the date of the earliest statues of the Buddha, but also in their appearance and design: it seems that it was Apollo that provided the template, such was the impact of Greek influences.
Buddhists had actively refrained from visual representations; competition now forced them to react, to borrow and to innovate. 27
exquisite miniature ivories depicting Alexander from what is now southern Tajikistan reveal just how far influences from the west penetrated.
The Greeks in Asia were widely credited in India, for example, for their skill in the sciences: ‘they are barbarians’, says the text known as the Gārgī Samhitā, ‘yet the science of astronomy originated with them and for this they must be reverenced like gods’. 29
According to Plutarch, Alexander made sure that Greek theology was taught as far away as India, with the result that the gods of Olympus were revered across Asia.
It has been suggested, for instance, that the Rāmāyana, the Sanskrit epic poem, owes a debt to the Iliad and to the Odyssey,
Under the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220), waves of expansion had pushed frontiers ever further, eventually reaching a province then called Xiyu (or ‘western regions’), but today known as Xinjiang
This lay beyond the Gansu corridor, a route 600 miles long linking the Chinese interior with the oasis city of Dunhuang, a crossroads on the edge of the Taklamakan desert.
But it was Chinese demand for horses that was all but insatiable,
the nomads were driven back as the Chinese took control of the Gansu corridor in a decade-long series of campaigns that ended in 119 BC. To
China had opened a door leading on to a trans-continental network; it was the moment of the birth of the Silk Roads.
Silk performed a number of important roles in the ancient world apart from its value to nomadic tribes. Under the Han dynasty, silk was used alongside coins and grain to pay troops. It was in some ways the most reliable currency:
Grain, meanwhile, went rotten after a time. As a result, bolts of raw silk were used regularly as currency, either as pay or, as in the case of one Buddhist monastery in Central Asia, as a fine for monks who broke the foundation’s rules. 47 Silk became an international currency as well as a luxury product.
Gansu corridor. From these texts, written on bamboo and wooden tablets, we learn that visitors passing into China had to stick to designated
routes, were issued with written passes and were regularly counted by officials to ensure that all who entered the country also eventually made their way home.
We think of globalisation as a uniquely modern phenomenon; yet 2,000 years ago too, it was a fact of life, one that presented opportunities, created problems and prompted technological advance.
small town in an unpromising location halfway up the west coast of Italy had slowly managed to turn itself from a provincial backwater into a regional power. Taking over one coastal city-state after another, Rome came to dominate the western Mediterranean.
Militarism, fearlessness and the love of glory were carefully cultivated as the key characteristics of an ambitious city
The conquest of Gaul (broadly the area of modern France, the Low Countries and part of western Germany) in 52 BC brought substantial spoils, enough to cause a correction in the price of gold in the Roman Empire.
Rome’s success and its glory stemmed from its seizure of Egypt in the first instance, and then from setting its anchor in the east – in Asia.
After fatefully throwing in her lot with Mark Antony at the battle of Actium in 30 BC, the Egyptian ruler was soon faced with a Roman army led by Octavian, a master of political cunning, bearing down on Alexandria.
Cleopatra committed suicide, either as the result of a poisonous snakebite or perhaps by a self-administered toxin.
Octavian had left Rome as a general; he returned as its supreme ruler, with a new title shortly to be bestowed by a grateful Senate: Augustus. Rome had become an empire.
As Augustus himself was fond of boasting, he found Rome a city built in brick, but left it in marble.
This was part of a system that one scholar has termed ‘ancient apartheid’; its aim was to maximise the flow of money back to Rome.
Not long after the annexation of Egypt, assessors were sent to Judaea to conduct a census, once again so as to ensure that taxes could be calculated accurately. Assuming the same model was used as had been employed in Egypt, which required all births and deaths to be recorded as well as the names of all adult males, the arrival in the world of Jesus Christ would have been registered by an official whose interest lay less in who the infant and his parents were, and more in what the birth represented by way of additional manpower and a future taxpayer for the empire.
The Stathmoi Parthikoi reveals what goods the Romans wanted from western India, noting where merchants could acquire valuable minerals, such as tin, copper and lead, as well as topaz, and where ivory, precious gemstones and spices were readily available.
After being pushed from the Tarim basin by the Chinese, Yuezhi nomads had managed to secure a dominant position for themselves to the east of Persia, taking over domains that had been ruled by the descendants of Alexander’s generals. In time, a thriving empire was born, named after one of the leading groupings within the tribe – the Guishang, or the Kushan – which took to minting large quantities of coins modelled on those of Rome.
Rome’s interest in and knowledge of the Far East was fleeting; its eyes were fixed firmly on Persia. 99 This was not just a rival and a competitor but a possible target in its own right.
But the most significant effect of Rome’s military attention was that it prompted a political revolution. Faced with intense pressure from its neighbour, Persia underwent a major transformation. A new ruling dynasty, the Sasanians, emerged around 220 AD, offering a strident new vision, one which required the removal of authority from provincial governors, who had become independent in all but name, and the concentration of power at the centre. A series of administrative reforms saw a tightening of control over almost every aspect of the state: accountability was prioritised, with Persian
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A splendid new metropolis was built on the site of the old town of Byzantion, on the banks of the Bosporus,
This was a world that was connected, complex and hungry for exchange. It is easy to mould the past into a shape that we find convenient and accessible. But the ancient world was much more sophisticated and interlinked than we sometimes like to think. Seeing
was not only goods that flowed along the arteries that linked the Pacific, Central Asia, India, the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean in antiquity; so did ideas. And among the most powerful ideas were those that concerned the divine.
One who did the latter was Menander, a Bactrian king in the second century BC, and descendant of one of Alexander the Great’s men. According to a text known as the Milindapañhā, the ruler was persuaded to follow a new spiritual path thanks to the intercession of an inspirational monk whose intelligence, compassion and humility stood in contrast to the superficiality of the contemporary world.
