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• Ashoka, also spelled Aśoka was the last significant emperor in the Mauryan dynasty of the Indian subcontinent
• His vigorous patronage of Buddhism (269 B.C.E. - 232 B.C.E) furthered the expansion of Buddhism
• Following his successful but bloody conquest of the Kalinga, Ashoka renounced armed conquest and adopted a policy that he called "conquest by dharma" (i.e., by principles of right life)
• In order to gain wide publicity for his teachings and his work, Ashoka made them known by means of oral announcements and by engravings on rocks and pillars at suitable sites
• These inscriptions - known as the rock edicts or the Pillars of Ashoka - contain statements regarding his thoughts and actions and provide information on his life and acts
• The sufferings inflicted on the defeated people at the Battle of Kalinga moved Ashoka to such remorse that he renounced armed conquests
• It was at this time that he came in contact with Buddhism and adopted it
• Ashoka repeatedly declared that he understood dharma to be the energetic practice of the sociomoral virtues of honesty, truthfulness, compassion, mercifulness, benevolence, nonviolence, considerate behavior toward all, "little sin and many good deeds," nonextravagance, nonacquisitiveness, and noninjury to animals
• Toward all religious sects he adopted a policy of respect and guaranteed them full freedom to live according to their own principles
• Moreover, he encouraged religious toleration
• Among his works of public utility were the founding of hospitals for men and animals and the supplying of medicines, and the planting of roadside trees and groves, digging of wells, and construction of watering sheds and rest houses
• Orders were also issued for preventing cruelty to animals
• With the death of Ashoka, the Mauryan Empire disintegrated and his work was discontinued
• Most enduring were Ashoka's services to Buddhism
• He built a number of stupas (commemorative Buddhist burial mounds) and monasteries and erected pillars on which he ordered inscribed his understanding of religious doctrines
• The Sinhalese chronicle Mahavamsa says that when the order decided to send preaching missions abroad, Ashoka helped them enthusiastically and sent his own son and daughter as missionaries to Sri Lanka
• It is as a result of Ashoka's patronage that Buddhism, which until then was a small sect confined to particular localities, spread throughout India and subsequently beyond the frontiers of the country • Also known rock edicts
• Narrative histories and announcements carved into cliff rock, onto pillars, and in caves throughout the Indian subcontinent by Emperor Ashoka (reigned 269 B.C.E. - 232 B.C.E), the most powerful emperor of the Mauryan dynasty and a highly influential promulgator of Indian Buddhism
• Ashoka's first years as king were marked by his brutal slaughter of thousands of people during the conquest of Kalinga
• After being exposed to the moral teachings of Buddhism - teachings based on the necessity for nonviolence and compassion - Ashoka was moved to deep remorse for his actions
• He converted to Buddhism, and, as a record of his understanding of moral law, he carved lessons into stone in the hope that he could provide inspiration and guidance to the people of his extensive kingdom
• The rock edicts are important sources for modern understanding of ancient Indian political and religious history, particularly with regard to the influence of the Buddha's teachings on the king and, through him, on the people at large
• Buddhism had elements of Hindu teachings and as such, it was perhaps easier to spread in that Hindus had some familiarity with Buddhist concepts; it is important to remember that Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, was raised Hindu • To give up his worldly routine in order to embrace Christ's example as fully as possible was the life of the monk
• In the Middle Ages in Western Europe, growing numbers of men and women became monks and nuns
• This way of life, called monasticism, imposed rigors and privations but offered spiritual purpose and a better hope of salvation
• Monks and nuns performed many practical services in the Middle Ages, for they housed travelers, nursed the sick, and assisted the poor; abbots and abbesses dispensed advice to secular ruler
• But monasticism also offered society a spiritual outlet and ideal with important consequences for medieval culture as a whole
• Monasteries encouraged literacy, promoted learning, and preserved the classics of ancient literature, including the works of Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, and Aristotle
• The need for books and buildings made religious houses active patrons of the arts, and the monastic obligation to perform manual work allowed many monks and nuns to serve God as creative artists
• Every monastic community consisted of men or women vowed to celibacy and bound by a set of regulations
• In a monastic setting, the very exercise of producing a book became a means of meditation on scripture, and the embellishment of the text often highlights this fact
• Only Oxford and Cambridge Universities could surpass some monasteries as centers of learning
• All monks had to read and write as these were fundamental skills for the role they had within the monastery • Hindu mathematicians in India invented "Arabic" numbers at least 1,700 years ago
• The Arabs played an essential part in passing this number system to Western Europeans
• By about 1500 years ago, the Arabs had a translation into Arabic of a Hindu text describing the nine-number system
• Arab mathematician Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khowarizmi helped to get the book into European hands
• Around 850, while teaching mathematics in Baghdad, he wrote an arithmetic book that explains the Hindu number system
• By chance, merchants carried the manuscript to Europe where scholars translated it into Latin - Algoritmi de numero Indorum, meaning, "On Hindu number calculations"
• Reading the Latin version but noticing the book had been translated from Arabic, Europeans jumped to the conclusion that Arabs invented these numbers
• But this, of course, wasn't the case • An empire arose in the steppes of Mongolia in the thirteenth century that forever changed the map of the world, opened intercontinental trade, and impacted history
• At its height, the Mongol Empire was the largest contiguous empire in history, stretching from the Pacific coast to the Black Sea
• Chinggis [Genghis] Khan unified the Mongols and then proceeded to conquer a vast empire
• The Mongols were skilled warriors on horseback and engaged in psychological warfare to frighten their enemies to surrender ["Surrender and be spared. Resist and perish."]
• Chinggis Khan and his successors conquered China, Russia, and Persia
• The Mongols, however, never conquered Japan although they twice tried
• The Mongols were primarily interested in the collection of tribute from their conquered subjects
• In China, the Mongols established the Yuan Dynasty under Khubilai [Kublai] Khan
• In China, the Mongols never adopted the examination system although claimed the Mandate of Heaven and moved the capital to Beijing, closer to their homeland in the steppes of Central Asia
• In Russia, the Mongols destroyed the city of Kiev as the princes resisted but elevated the city of Moscow as Moscow became the primary tribute collector for the empire
• In Persia, the Mongols converted to Islam
• The Mongols were religiously tolerant
• The Mongols secured the Silk Roads and therefore reduced risk from bandits and reduced the number of tolls
• Thus, trade flourished on the Silk Roads during the Pax Mongolica
• Gunpowder technology travelled on the Silk Roads as did Chinese goods
• The Mongols strengthened trade routes
• The Mongols increased cultural diffusion between Asia and Europe
• The bubonic plague travelled on the Silk Roads
• The Mongol Empire greatly impacted history • Located inside the compound of the Grand Mosque at Mecca, the Kaaba or Ka'ba (literally, "cube") is a cube-shaped structure known as the House of God
• It contains the sacred Black Stone, a meteorite that Muslims believe was placed by Abraham and Ismail in a corner of the Kaaba, a symbol of God's covenant with Abraham and Ismail and by extension with the Muslim community itself
• The Kaaba is draped with a woven black cloth embellished with Quranic verses embroidered in gold
• The Kaaba is considered the first house of worship of the one God, originally built by Adam and replicating the heavenly House of God, which contains the divine throne that is circumambulated by the angels
• This heavenly ritual is reenacted during the hajj by pilgrims, who circumambulate the Kaaba seven times
• This symbolizes their entry into the divine presence
• Muslims believe that Adam's Kaaba was destroyed by the neglect of believers and the flood, and according to the Quran (2:127) Abraham and his son Ismail rebuilt the holy house
• However, by the time of Muhammad the Kaaba was under the control of the Quraysh of Mecca, who used it as a shrine for the tribal gods and idols of Arabia
• The Quraysh held an annual pilgrimage to the Kaaba and a fair that attracted pilgrims from all over Arabia
• Muslim tradition tells us that one of the first things Muhammad did when he returned from exile and triumphantly entered Mecca was to cleanse the Kaaba of its 360 idols and restore the "religion of Abraham," the worship of the one true God • Islamic law made a distinction between two categories of non-Muslim subjects - pagans and dhimmis ("protected peoples," or "peoples of the book"; i.e., those peoples who based their religious beliefs on sacred texts, such as Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians)
• The Muslim rulers tolerated the dhimmis and allowed them to practice their religion
• In return for protection and as a mark of their submission, the dhimmis were required to pay a special poll tax known as the jizya
• The jizya was a head or poll tax
• A dhimmi or "protected person" refers to specific individuals living in Muslim
Lands that were granted special status and safety in Islamic law in return for paying a tax
This status was originally only made available to non-Muslims who were People of the Book, namely, Jews and Christians), but was later extended to include Zoroastrians and in some areas, even Hindus • In contrast to many other religions, the basic practice of Islam is simplicity itself
• The believer worships God directly without the intercession of priests or clergy or saints
• The believer's duties are summed up in five simple rules, the so-called Five Pillars of Islam: Belief, Worship, Fasting, Almsgiving, and Pilgrimage
• The five pillars of Islam (arkan al-Islam; also arkan al-din, "pillars of religion") comprise five official acts considered obligatory for all Muslims
• The Qur'an presents them as a framework for worship and a sign of commitment to faith
• The five pillars are the shahadah (witnessing the oneness of God and the prophethood of Muhammad), regular observance of the five prescribed daily prayers (salat), paying zakat (almsgiving), fasting (sawm; siyyam) during the month of Ramadan, and performance of the hajj (pilgrimage during the prescribed month) at least once in a lifetime • The Middle Ages lasted a thousand years
• From 476 to 1500 C.E.
• Yet the entire period was not the same
• The early Medieval period was known for invasions and warfare
• It was a very dangerous time
• Yet the High Middle Ages was more stable and as such, trade and urbanization [movement to cities] increased
• By 1100 the decline of culture following the 9th century invasions had begun to be reversed
• The economic system based on manorialism and the political system based on feudalism was producing a small surplus
• There was a revival of trade, fairs were held, and town life was returning
• The importance of the rise of towns cannot be overemphasized
• In addition to the clergy, nobility, and serfs, a new social class of townsmen, burghers, or bourgeois - a new Middle Class of craftsmen, artisans, traders, and merchants - was making its appearance
• The culture of the High Middle Ages is in many ways a town based culture
• Gothic Cathedrals and universities were located in cities
• And even though religion remained the most important institution of society, new ideas were being nurtured
• Within towns, the Guild System developed
• Craftsmen were organized into masters, journeymen, and apprentices
• The guild [a medieval association of craftsmen or merchants] prescribed both quality and price of products
• Communal government in tows was based on these guilds
• New ideas of republican government made their reappearance
• "Town air makes free."
• This principle allowed runaway serfs to become free townspeople if they could live a year and a day on their own • In 549 BCE, the Persians, led by Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid family, overthrew the Median court of Western Iran
• Cyrus thus founded the first Persian Empire
• The Achaemenid kings are known to have been very pious Zoroastrians, trying to rule justly and in accordance with the Zoroastrian law of asha (truth and righteousness)
• The Avesta is the holy book of Zoroastrianism
• Zoroastrians believe there is one God called Ahura Mazda (Wise Lord) and He created the world
• They believe that the world is a cosmic battleground between good and evil and that people are free to choose to follow good or evil
• However, those who follow good will be rewarded with Heaven and evildoers will be punished in Hell
• Cyrus the Great was relatively tolerant
• While he himself ruled according to Zoroastrian beliefs, he made no attempt to impose Zoroastrianism on the people of his subject territories
• The Jews most famously benefited from this; Cyrus permitted them to return to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon, and rebuild their temple
• Darius the Great, another significant emperor, was also famously pious and showed the same general tolerance for other faiths as his predecessor Cyrus
• Under Darius the empire was stabilized, with roads for communication and a system of governors (satraps) established
• Darius initiated two major building projects: the construction of royal buildings at Susa and the creation of the new dynastic center of Persepolis
• A culturally diverse empire
• However, in 498 B.C.E., the eastern Greek Ionian cities, supported in part by Athens, revolted
• It took the Persians four years to crush the rebellion, although an attack against mainland Greece was repulsed at Marathon in 490 B.C.E.
• The Royal Road was a road of a distance of more than 1,500 miles
• The Royal Road connected the empire
• Royal messengers, who, according to the Greek historian Herodotus, were stopped by "neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night," traversed the entire road in nine days, thanks to a system of relays • At the height of the Roman Empire, a quarter of the world's population lived under Roman law
• This made the empire one of the most culturally diverse societies ever seen
• Initially regarded as inferior, foreign citizens were eventually admitted to the highest ranks of Roman society
• Under Emperor Trajan, the Roman Empire reached its peak
• It stretched from the Middle East to northern Britain and from Egypt to Germany
• Under the "Pax Romana", meaning "the peace of Rome", inhabitants of conquered lands were not automatically considered Roman citizens
• But they were subject to Roman laws and paid Roman taxes
• Some of these paid for public utilities, like roads and waterworks - being part of the empire did have some advantages
• While local inhabitants behaved themselves and paid their taxes, they were allowed to continue with their local customs and religions, as long as these did not directly violate or compromise Roman law
• To help Rome govern its provinces, it often appointed "client kings"
• These would decide on local or religious matters that did not require Roman input
• This arrangement did not always work
• For instance, the head of the Iceni tribe in Britain was a client king, but after his death, his wife, Boudicca, led a rebellion that almost defeated the Romans in Britain
• The trial of Jesus shows how the use of client kings worked. Jesus was first brought before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judaea, on charges of treason - a crime against Roman law
• After hearing the evidence, Pilate found no proof of treason
• He considered the case to be a religious dispute and passed it on to Herod, a client king
• Herod could rule on accusations of blasphemy against the Jewish religion
• However, the death sentence could only be used under Roman law, so Herod passed this back to Pilate, who ordered Jesus' crucifixion
• A major change in the Pax Romana came under the rule of the Emperor Claudius
• For a long time, the Senate had resisted new blood among its membership, especially foreign blood
• Claudius was much more prepared to allow conquered peoples to become Roman citizens than his predecessors had been
• In 48 C.E., he took this a step further, arguing that men from Gaul (now modern France) should be admitted to the Senate, claiming it was the smart and right thing to do
• He was opposed by the Senators
• One claimed that Claudius "was determined to see all Greeks, Gauls, Spaniards and Britons wearing the toga"
• In the end, Claudius won
• It was an important move towards integrating the many countries of the empire and one that would ultimately see Trajan, a foreign born general, take the throne • When the emperor moved his government from Nara to Heian (Eighth Century C.E.), the aristocracy took over most of the positions of the central government
• It was during the imperial court's time in Heian that the Fujiwara clan emerged as a powerful family in Japan
• The power and authority of the Fujiwara family rested not on military prowess but on political strategy and on the family's special relationship to the imperial family, which it carefully cultivated and exploited
• This relationship stemmed from the Fujiwara policy of maintaining attachment to the imperial family through the marriage of Fujiwara daughters to emperors
• It meant that the Fujiwara daughters were empresses, that their grandsons and nephews were emperors, and that members of their family, including its lesser branches, received all the patronage
• Thus, the Fujiwara clan chieftain, whether he held office or not, could manipulate the reins of government
• During the Heian period, Japan experienced a golden age and Lady Murasaki wrote the first novel, The Tale of the Genji • As the first Roman emperor (though he never claimed the title for himself), Augustus led Rome's transformation from republic to empire during the tumultuous years following the assassination of his great-uncle and adoptive father Julius Caesar
• He shrewdly combined military might, institution-building and lawmaking to become Rome's sole ruler, laying the foundations of the 200-year Pax Romana (Roman Peace) and an empire that lasted, in various forms, for nearly 1,500 years
• Beginning in 26 B.C.E., the Roman Senate conferred on him the name Augustus, the august or exalted one
• His birth name was Octavius and when Julius Caesar adopted him, he was called Octavian but history knows him as Augustus Caesar
• Historians date the start of Octavian's monarchy to either 31 B.C.E. (the victory at Actium) or 27 B.C.E., when he was granted the name Augustus
• In that four-year span, Octavian secured his rule on multiple fronts
• Cleopatra's seized treasure allowed him to pay his soldiers, securing their loyalty
• To mollify Rome's Senate and ruling classes, he passed laws harkening back—at least on the surface—to the traditions of the Roman Republic
• And to win over the people, he worked to improve and beautify the city of Rome
• During his 40-years reign, Augustus nearly doubled the size of the empire, adding territories in Europe and Asia Minor and securing alliances that gave him effective rule from Britain to India
• He expanded the Roman network of roads, founded the Praetorian Guard and the Roman postal service and remade Rome with both grand (a new forum) and practical gestures (police and fire departments)
• Augustus Caesar died in 14 C.E., his empire secured and at peace
• His reported last words were twofold: to his subjects he said, "I found Rome of clay; I leave it to you of marble," but to the friends who had stayed with him in his rise to power he added, "Have I played the part well? Then applaud me as I exit."
• Soon after that acknowledgement of human frailty, the Roman Senate officially declared their departed emperor, like Julius Caesar before him, to be a god
• His reign started a period of 200 years of peace in the Roman Empire - Pax Romana • Genetic evidence supports a theory that ancestors of Native Americans lived for 15,000 years on the Bering Land Bridge between Asia and North America until the last ice age ended
• For nearly a century now, most scholars have agreed that the ancestors of Native Americans likely hailed from Siberia, trekking across the Bering Strait to Alaska via a long-gone land bridge
• But certain aspects of the historic migration - including the settlers' specific region of origin, when exactly they left it and what drove them to seek new lands - remain matters of debate to this day
• A new DNA-based study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics offers new insight into these questions
• Russia's mountainous Altai Republic borders China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan
• Inhabited since the Paleolithic, the region is barely larger than Maine but served as a vital gateway to Siberia and the cradle of widespread human lineages found across northern Eurasia
• "It's a place where people have been coming and going for thousands and thousands of years," said study co-author Theodore Schurr, an anthropology professor at the University of Pennsylvania
• According to one prevailing theory, it is also the area where ancestral Native Americans lived before peopling the New World
• The results revealed genetic ties linking Native Americans to all Altaians, with a significantly stronger relationship connecting the migrants to residents of southern Altai
• This timeline for ancestral Native Americans' departure adds to a growing body of evidence that humans colonized the Americas earlier than previously thought
• In the past, archaeological evidence seemed to indicate that people arrived roughly 13,000 years ago, bringing the so-called Clovis culture - known for its signature spear points and associated with various sites in North America - with them
• Recent discoveries together with genetic research have made the case for an earlier wave of immigrants, Schurr said
• No matter when the first trip across the Arctic land bridge occurred, the reasons for the mass exodus are shrouded in mystery - and the submersion 10,000 years ago of Beringia and the archaeological sites it contained further complicates the issue
• One theory holds that overcrowding pushed Native Americans' ancestors to seek out new territory
• While Siberia emerged as the leading contender for Native Americans' ancestral home many decades ago, alternative hypotheses offer starkly different models
• According to one, Southeast Asians traveling by boat reached North America some 20,000 years ago.
• Another suggests that Europeans traversed ice sheets covering the North Atlantic during the last glacial maximum • One of the earliest written law codes
• Hammurabi was a king of Babylon
• Babylon existed in Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers
• Hammurabi's Law Code had class divisions
• Punishments varied according to the individual's class
• Thus, for a peasant, it was an "eye for an eye"
• But for a nobleman, it might be "an eye for a fine"
• However, harsh punishments nonetheless were frequently found in the Code of Hammurabi
• Hammurabi's dictates are often cited as the oldest written laws on record, but they were predated by at least two other ancient codes of conduct from the Middle East
• The earliest, created by the Sumerian ruler Ur-Nammu of the city of Ur, dates all the way back to the 21st century B.C.E., and evidence also shows that the Sumerian Code of Lipit-Ishtar of Isin was drawn up nearly two centuries before Hammurabi came to power
• Hammurabi's Code took a brutal approach to justice, but the severity of criminal penalties often depended on the identity of both the lawbreaker and the victim
• Hammurabi's Code was surprisingly ahead of its time when it came to laws addressing subjects like divorce, property rights and the prohibition of incest, but perhaps most progressive of all was a stipulation mandating an ancient form of minimum wage • Confucius was a thinker, political figure, and educator
• His teachings, preserved in the Lunyu or Analects, form the foundation of much of subsequent Chinese speculation on the education and comportment of the ideal man, how such an individual should live his life and interact with others, and the forms of society and government in which he should participate
• Fung Yu-lan, one of the great 20th century authorities on the history of Chinese thought, compares Confucius' influence in Chinese history with that of Socrates in the West
• A hallmark of Confucius' thought is his emphasis on education and study
• He disparages those who have faith in natural understanding or intuition and argues that the only real understanding of a subject comes from long and careful study
• Study, for Confucius, means finding a good teacher and imitating his words and deeds
• A good teacher is someone older who is familiar with the ways of the past and the practices of the ancients
• "He who learns but does not think is lost. He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger" (Lunyu 2.15)
• Confucius taught his students morality, proper speech, government, and the refined arts
• Confucius' goal is to create gentlemen who carry themselves with grace, speak correctly, and demonstrate integrity in all things
• His strong dislike of the sycophantic "petty men," whose clever talk and pretentious manner win them an audience, is reflected in numerous Lunyu passages
• Confucius finds himself in an age in which values are out of joint; actions and behavior no longer correspond to the labels originally attached to them: "Rulers do not rule and subjects do not serve," he observes. (Lunyu 12.11; cf. also 13.3)
• Moral education is important to Confucius because it is the means by which one can rectify this situation and restore meaning to language and values to society • From roughly 1000 to 1400, several significant cathedrals and churches were built, particularly in Britain and France, offering architects and masons a chance to work out ever more complex and daring designs
• The most fundamental element of the Gothic style of architecture is the pointed arch, which was likely borrowed from Islamic architecture that would have been seen in Spain at this time
• This new architectural style allowed for larger windows and more light
• The windows, tracery, carvings, and ribs make up a dizzying display of decoration that one encounters in a Gothic church
• In late Gothic buildings, almost every surface is decorated
• Of course, when Europeans conquered other lands, especially European Catholics, cathedral building often travelled with them
• In architecture, historians can see evidence of when and if cultural diffusion occurred
• So, look carefully at an image to determine what it is and then look to read where it is located - did diffusion occur or not? • From around 800 to the 11th century C.E., a vast number of Scandinavians left their homelands to seek their fortunes elsewhere
• These seafaring warriors - known collectively as Vikings or Norsemen ("Northmen") - began by raiding coastal sites, especially undefended monasteries, in the British Isles
• Over the next three centuries, they would leave their mark as pirates, raiders, traders and settlers on much of Britain and the European continent, as well as parts of modern-day Russia, Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland
• More than the raiders of tradition, the Vikings were also traders and colonists who left an enduring mark on history
• The countries of Scandinavia are Denmark, Norway, and Sweden
• The Vikings began raiding and conquering as a result of population pressures in their homelands
• The Vikings even traveled to North America
• Like the Arabs, the Vikings relied on their trade routes to help in their expansion • Navigators relied on monsoon winds
• Connected East Africa, Arabia, India, and Southeast Asia
• Admiral Zheng He, sailing for the Ming Dynasty, entered the Indian Ocean network and dominated the network from 1405 to 1433
• The Europeans, however, did not participate in the trading network until 1498
• In 1498, Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese explorer, rounded the tip of Africa and arrived in the Indian subcontinent
• In the 1500s, the Portuguese were able to dominate Indian Ocean trade due to their gunpowder weapons and cannons [ironically gunpowder was acquired from Asia]
• But until 1450, the participants were East Africans, Muslims, Indians, and Southeast Asians and India was the fulcrum or center of the network • It is true that the Mongols, in their conquest of both North and South China, did considerable damage to these territories, and that great loss of life certainly ensued
• The population of North China did decline somewhat, though earlier estimates that there was a catastrophic decline in population have subsequently been revised
• It is also true that the Mongols eliminated one of the most basic of Chinese institutions - the civil service examinations
• The examinations remained banned until 1315, and even after the ban was lifted, they were no longer the only means to officialdom for the Yuan Dynasty, the dynasty that the Mongols founded in 1271 C.E., as they had been in the past
• The Mongols perceived China as just one section of their vast empire
• And they classified the population of their domain in China into a hierarchy of four groups - with the native Chinese at the bottom
• The Mongols, of course, were at the top; then came the non-Han, mostly Islamic population that was brought to China by the Mongols to help them rule; third were the northern Chinese; and at the very bottom of the rung were the southern Chinese
• The Mongol rulers were somewhat distrustful of the Confucian scholar-officials of China because they represented a different path for China than that which they themselves had conceived. These scholars, and other native Chinese, thus were not eligible for some of the top positions in the ruling government
• Notwithstanding the aspects of their rule that were certainly negative for China, the Mongols did initiate many policies - especially under the rule of Khubilai Khan - that supported and helped the Chinese economy, as well as social and political life in China
• Khubilai Khan also founded ancestral temples for his predecessors - his father and Chinggis (Genghis) Khan (his grandfather) - in order to carry out the practices of ancestor worship that were so critical for the Chinese
• And in an even greater effort to ingratiate himself personally to the Chinese, Khubilai insisted on giving his second son, Jin Chin, a Chinese-style education. Confucian scholars tutored the young boy, and he was introduced to the tenets of both Confucianism and Buddhism
• Khubilai also set up institutions to rule China that were very familiar to the Chinese, adapting or borrowing wholesale many of the traditional governmental institutions of China
• The Chinese, therefore, found much of the Yuan Dynasty's political structures to be familiar
• Traditionally, merchants were accorded a relatively low social status in China
• The Mongols, however, had a more favorable attitude toward merchants and commerce - their nomadic way of life, which is much reliant on trade with sedentary peoples, had caused them to recognize the importance of trade from the very earliest times
• Thus, the Mongols worked to improve the social status of merchants and traders throughout their domains
• The Yuan dynasty was the Mongol dynasty of China
• Khubilai's economic policies in China promoted the interests of China • Occurring during the Zhou dynasty, China collapsed into a period of intense fighting between powerful lords
• Seven or more small feuding Chinese kingdoms fought one another
• Yet the Warring States period was one of the most fertile and influential in Chinese history
• It not only saw the rise of many of the great philosophers of Chinese civilization, including the Confucian thinkers Mencius and Xunzi, but also witnessed the establishment of many of the governmental structures and cultural patterns that were to characterize China for the next 2,000 years
• The name Warring States is derived from an ancient work known as the Zhanguoce ("Intrigues of the Warring States")
• In these intrigues, two states, Qin and Chu, eventually emerged supreme
• Qin finally defeated all the other states and established the first unified Chinese empire in 221 B.C.E.
• During "The Age of Warring States," Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism became important philosophies in China for all three sought to restore peace
• In Confucian thought, when there is order and people act according to their status in society, there is peace and harmony
• In Daoism, when people act naturally, there is peace and harmony
• In Legalism, when people obey the law, there is peace • The Aztecs, who probably originated as a nomadic tribe in northern Mexico, arrived in Mesoamerica around the beginning of the 13th century
• From their magnificent capital city, Tenochtitlán, the Aztecs emerged as the dominant force in central Mexico, developing an intricate social, political, religious and commercial organization that brought many of the region's city-states under their control by the 15th century
• Invaders led by the Spanish conquistador, Hernán Cortés, overthrew the Aztecs by force and captured Tenochtitlán in 1521, bringing an end to Mesoamerica's last great native civilization
• Many factors weakened Aztec resistance to the Spaniards
• New diseases from Europe - like smallpox - devastated the Aztecs and made it difficult for Aztec soldiers to fight
• The superior weaponry of the Spaniards harmed the Aztecs
• Military assistance from other Native American Indians who helped the Spaniards because they hated the Aztec conquerors also played a role
• In addition, the Aztecs initially believed Cortés was one of their gods gave the Spaniards an opportunity to enter the capital city without resistance
• In November 1519, Cortes and his men arrived in Tenochtitlán, where Montezuma and his people greeted them as honored guests according to Aztec custom (partially due to Cortés' physical resemblance to the light-skinned Quetzalcoatl, whose return was prophesied in Aztec legend).
• Though the Aztecs had superior numbers, their weapons were inferior, and Cortés was able to immediately take Montezuma and his entourage of lords hostage, gaining control of Tenochtitlán
• The Spaniards then murdered thousands of Aztec nobles during a ritual dance ceremony, and Montezuma died under uncertain circumstances while in custody
• Cuauhtémoc, his young nephew, took over as emperor, and the Aztecs drove the Spaniards from the city
• With the help of the Aztecs' native rivals, Cortés mounted an offensive against Tenochtitlán, finally defeating Cuauhtémoc's resistance on August 13, 1521
• In all, some 240,000 people were believed to have died in the city's conquest, which effectively ended the Aztec civilization
• After his victory, Cortés razed Tenochtitlán and built Mexico City on its ruins; it quickly became the premier European center in the "New World" • Know your place and act accordingly
• Superiors act with benevolence and protect inferiors
• Inferiors respect superiors and obey
• The Five Relationships
- Emperor and subject
- Father and son
- Husband and wife
- Elder brother and younger brother
- Friend and friend
• There is limited social mobility for men because educated men are valued and are considered the ideal in society
• Thus, a man from the peasant class could take the examination for government service and if he passed, he became a scholar-gentry - a respected member of government, a landowner, and nobility
• The examination system was open to all men
• Women, however, were always inferior
• Women had to obey fathers and then husbands and then even grown sons as widows
• Female infants were placed under beds at birth to reveal their low status
• Women had to be chaste [refraining from extramarital affairs] and only engage in intimate relations with their husbands
• Women were to serve men and to be quiet
• Husbands, however, did not have to be chaste
• Age had to be respected
• Filial piety or sons had to obey parents and ancestors
• Sons were preferred over daughters as only sons could perform the ancestral rituals
• Confucius believed that when individuals acted according to their societal roles, peace and harmony ensued
• Thus, when the social order was preserved, all was peaceful and harmonious in China • Ibn Battuta was the great Muslim traveler who travelled 75,000 miles throughout Dar al-Islam
• Ibn Battuta started on his travels when he was 20 years old in 1325
• His main reason to travel was to go on a Hajj or a Pilgrimage to Mecca, as all good Muslims want to do
• But his traveling went on for about 29 years and he covered about 75,000 miles visiting the equivalent of 44 modern countries which were then mostly under the governments of Muslim leaders of the World of Islam, or "Dar al-Islam"
• During the life of Ibn Battuta, Islamic civilization stretched from the Atlantic coast of West Africa across northern Africa, the Middle East, and India to Southeast Asia
• This constituted the Dar al-Islam or "Abode of Islam"
• In addition, there were important communities of Muslims in cities and towns beyond the frontiers of Dar al-Islam
• People in the whole "umma," or community of people believing in one god and his sacred law ("shari'a"), shared doctrinal beliefs, religious rituals, moral values, and everyday manners
• In the early 1300s this community was expanding dramatically
• Ibn Battuta was born in Tangier, part of modern-day Morocco, on February 25, 1304
• The men in Ibn Battuta's family were legal scholars and he was raised with a focus on education; however, there was no "madrasa," or college of higher learning, in Tangier
• Thus, Ibn Battuta's urge to travel was spurred by interest in finding the best teachers and the best libraries, which were then in Alexandria, Cairo, and Damascus
• He also wanted to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, called the "hajj," as soon as possible, out of eagerness and devotion to his faith
• Ibn Battuta led a complete life while traveling
• He studied and prayed; he practiced his legal profession; he had astonishing outdoor adventures; he married at least 10 times and left children growing up all over Afro-Eurasia
• Ibn Battuta traveled to Sub-Saharan Africa and in particular, the kingdom of Mali; he traveled to Mecca and Persia and India and even China
• Even after a series of failures in the Maldive Islands and in India - having lost everything he owned to pirates and shipwrecks - Ibn Battuta resolved to go to China on his own
• Muslim travelers, such as Ibn Battuta, knew that they could find Muslim hospitality in the major sea ports
• The Prophet Muhammad had even encouraged travel and learning in China in a saying: "Seek knowledge, even as far as China."
• So traveling to China, like elsewhere Ibn Battuta had traveled, would not be difficult
• He could depend on the charity of fellow-Muslims in Malaysian ports on his way to China, as he had in every other part of the world he traveled
• After a book was written about Ibn Battuta's life, Ibn Battuta worked as a judge in Morocco
• Since he was not yet 50 when he stopped traveling, he is thought to have married again and to have had more children
• He died in 1368 or 1369; the place of his death is not known, nor the location of his grave
• Ibn Battuta was one of the world's greatest travelers • Originating in West Africa, between the savanna and the forests, the Bantu began migrating after about 1000 B.C.E.
• For centuries, the Bantu migrated south and east, ultimately spreading throughout sub-Saharan Africa
• By 1000 C.E., they had reached central Natal, in what is now the Republic of South Africa
• During their migrations, the Bantu absorbed or displaced other peoples of eastern and southern Africa, driving pygmies, Bushmen, and Khoisan-speaking pastoralists into the southern jungle, the Kalahari Desert, or the extreme southwestern savanna
• Thus Bantu migrants provided most of sub-Saharan Africa with a common cultural identity
• The Bantu migrations spread agriculture and iron-working
• Developing agriculture expanded Bantu populations; iron tools and weapons provided the means to acquire new lands; and the resulting migrations spread both technologies through the whole sub-Sahara region
• The Bantu also spread their languages and as such provided a common linguistic root for many languages in Sub-Saharan Africa • As the Americas lacked domesticated animals, the arrival of the Europeans and their germs devastated the indigenous populations of the Americans
• Historians refer to this tragic loss of life as the "Great Dying"
• Indeed, the largest decline in global population due to disease occurred in the Americas as a result of the new diseases introduced into the Americas by the European conquerors and colonizers
• One of the most striking aspect of the period from 1400 to 1800 was the enormous extension of networks of communication and exchange that linked individuals and societies more and more tightly
• Every region of the world became intricately connected to every other region, a development that is called the Great Global Convergence
• As a result of the Columbian Exchange (the global cultural diffusion of plants, animals, and microorganisms between Afro-Eurasia and the Americas), great changes occurred
• The ecological and demographic consequences of the Great Global Convergence were huge, especially the "Great Dying" of much of the indigenous population of the Americas
• Europeans benefited from this disaster by peopling the Western Hemisphere with new immigrants, both free European settlers and Africans slaves
• Europeans also gained access to important new sources of food and fiber
• These crops included maize (corn), tobacco, and the potato, crops that were indigenous to the Americas and sugar and cotton which came from Afro-Eurasia but thrived in American soil
• As a result of the "Great Dying," the demographic composition of the Americas changed greatly as the Native American Indian population declined and the European population and African slave population increased
• 1492 was a year that greatly changed world history • Animism and polytheism are the oldest of the world's religious beliefs
• Judaism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Jainism, and Christianity follow [in chronological order]
• Islam is one of the youngest of the world religions as it was not founded until the 600s C.E. in Arabia
• Thus, the Vedas [Hindu sacred texts], the Analects of Confucius, the Eightfold Path [Buddhism], and the Gospels of the New Testament - all in chronological order - are older than the Qur'an of Islam
• The Qur'an was introduced after the Vedas, Analects, Eightfold Path, and Gospels • It was a great global cultural diffusion that occurred as a result of Columbus' arrival in the Americas
• It connected the Americas to Europe, Asia, and Africa
• Includes: African population to the Western Hemisphere; Western Hemisphere food to Europe and Africa; and African and European diseases to the Western Hemisphere
• African slaves were brought to the Americas to replace a dying Native American Indian population
• Corn, potatoes, and peanuts were brought from the Americas to Europe, Asia, and Africa - impacting population as potatoes provide many calories to feed many people and led to an increase in population in Europe and Asia [in Africa, the slave trade led to a loss of population that was offset by the new crops from the Americas - thus not an increase but not a decrease either]
• New diseases decimated the indigenous population of the Americas leading historians to refer to the loss of Native American lives from disease as the "Great Dying"
• Crops, livestock, disease, and people "travelled" during this exchange • In Hinduism, a caste system exists
• A Hindu is born into his caste and remains in his caste throughout his lifetime
• There is no social mobility; the caste system lacks social mobility in that a Hindu cannot change his caste during his lifetime
• A Hindu's past life determines his current life in that through his actions (karma) and his dharma (adherence to the rules of his caste), a Hindus reincarnation or samsara is determined
• In the Hindu caste system, there are four castes: Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Sudras
• A person who belongs to no caste is an untouchable or outcaste and an untouchable is viewed negatively and forced to perform jobs deemed unacceptable to other caste members
• Thus, for an untouchable, Islam held great appeal
• In Islam, there is no caste system
• In Islam, all believers are equal in the eyes of Islam
• Islam in India had a strong appeal to members of lower castes because Islam promised the spiritual equality of all believers • From 1405 until 1433, the Chinese imperial eunuch Zheng He led seven ocean expeditions for the Ming emperor
• Over sixty of the three hundred seventeen ships on the first voyage were enormous "Treasure Ships," sailing vessels over 400 hundred feet long, 160 feet wide, with several stories, nine masts and twelve sails, and luxurious staterooms complete with balconies
• During the first expeditions, Zheng He traveled all the way from China to Southeast Asia and then on to India, all the way to major trading sites on India's southwest coast
• In his fourth voyage, he traveled to the Persian Gulf
• But for the three last voyages, Zheng went even further, all the way to the east coast of Africa
• Zheng He was the great voyager and explorer of early Ming China
• Zheng He even brought a giraffe from Africa to the Beijing zoo thereby delighting Emperor Yongle • The Janissaries were Christian boys taken from conquered territories and raised as Special Forces
• The Janissaries were highly skilled soldiers in the Ottoman Empire
• The Janissary - also spelled Janizary or in Turkish, Yeniçeri - was a member of an elite corps in the standing army of the Ottoman Empire from the late 14th century to 1826
• Highly respected for their military prowess in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Janissaries became a powerful political force within the Ottoman state
• The Janissary corps was originally staffed by Christian youths from the Balkan provinces who were converted to Islām on being drafted into the Ottoman service
• The Janissary were part of the Devshirme System or the gathering or collecting of Christian boys in the Ottoman Empire
• Subject to strict rules, including celibacy, they were organized into three unequal divisions (cemaat, bölükhalkı, segban) and commanded by an ağā
• In the late 16th century the celibacy rule and other restrictions were relaxed, and by the early 18th century the original method of recruitment was abandoned
• The Janissaries frequently engineered palace coups in the 17th and 18th centuries, and in the early 19th century they resisted the adoption of European reforms by the army
• Their end came in June 1826 in the so-called Auspicious Incident
• On learning of the formation of new, westernized troops, the Janissaries revolted
• Sultan Mahmud II declared war on the rebels and, on their refusal to surrender, had cannon fire directed on their barracks
• Most of the Janissaries were killed, and those who were taken prisoner were executed • Considered the greatest of the Ottoman sultans, Suleyman brought the empire to its height when the empire stretched to its greatest reaches and a golden age occurred
• Suleyman was a sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1520 to 1566 who not only undertook bold military campaigns that enlarged his realm but also oversaw the development of what came to be regarded as the most characteristic achievements of Ottoman civilization in the fields of law, literature, art, and architecture
• Suleyman even captured Belgrade and laid siege to the city of Vienna
• Difficulties of time and distance and of bad weather and lack of supplies, no less than the resistance of the Christians, forced the sultan to raise the siege on Vienna but Suleyman nonetheless conquered many other lands
• Süleyman surrounded himself with administrators and statesmen of unusual ability, men such as his grand viziers (chief ministers) İbrahim, Rüstem, and Mehmed Sokollu
• Ulama (specialists in Islamic law) made the period memorable, as did the great Turkish poet Bâḳî and the architect Sinan
• Süleyman built strong fortresses to defend the places he took from the Christians and adorned the cities of the Islamic world (including Mecca, Damascus, and Baghdad) with mosques, bridges, aqueducts, and other public works
• In general, Süleyman completed the task of transforming the previously Byzantine city of Constantinople into Istanbul, a worthy center for a great Turkish and Islamic empire • Christians were brutally persecuted and driven into secrecy
• Before the Tokugawa shoguns came to power, in 1543 the Portuguese traders reach Japan (were actually shipwrecked there) and were soon followed by the Jesuit missionary order (established in 1540) in the person of St. Francis Xavier who arrives in Japan in 1549
• The Jesuits worked among the daimyo of the samurai class and were initially well received by leading daimyo
• However, the reunification of Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1600 brought with it an emphasis on the reestablishment of order following a century of civil war and turmoil
• Aware of the political and religious domination of the Philippines since the Spanish colonized the country in 1565, the Japanese political leaders were suspicious of the Dominican and Franciscan missionaries that arrived in Japan from the Philippines and worked among the non-samurai classes
• The Japanese daimyo moved to curtail missionary activity beginning in the 1590s
• In 1606, the new Shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, proscribed Christianity (just at a time the Jesuits were being received at the imperial court in China), and by 1614 a concerted effort to end all Christian practice was underway
• There were an estimated 300,000 Christians in Japan at this time.)
• Apprehensive about the spread of Christianity, Ieyasu expelled all Portuguese and Spanish missionaries, among them Joao Rodrigues, and persecuted Japanese Christians thereby greatly reducing the Christian presence from Japan
• Christianity was viewed as a divisive and foreign threat that could lead to civil war or dissension in Japan • The Hanseatic League dominated trade in the Baltic region
• The Hanseatic League, also called Hansa, German Hanse, was an organization founded by north German towns and German merchant communities abroad to protect their mutual trading interests
• The league dominated commercial activity in northern Europe from the 13th to the 15th century
• Hanse was a medieval German word for "guild," or "association," derived from a Gothic word for "troop," or "company"
• Northern German mastery of trade in the Baltic Sea was achieved with striking speed and completeness in the late 12th and early 13th centuries
• While overseas, the German merchants had tended increasingly to form associations ("hanses") with each other in order to secure common action against robbers and pirates
• From the mid-13th century this cooperation became much more extensive and regularized, and by 1265 all the north German towns having the "law of Lübeck" had agreed on common legislation for the defense of merchants and their goods
• The Hanseatic League attempted to protect its ship convoys and caravans by quelling pirates and brigands, and it fostered safe navigation by building lighthouses and training pilots
• Most importantly, it sought to organize and control trade throughout northern Europe by winning commercial privileges and monopolies and by establishing trading bases oversea
• The Hanseatic League's aggressively protectionist trading practices often aroused opposition from foreign merchants
• The league typically used gifts and loans to foreign political leaders to protect its commercial privileges, and when this proved inadequate, it threatened to withdraw its trade and occasionally became involved in embargoes and blockades
• The league died slowly as England contested with the Netherlands for dominance in northern European commerce and Sweden emerged as the chief commercial power in the Baltic Sea region
• The Hanseatic League's diet met for the last time in 1669 • Over two hundred years, between the 1000s and 1200s, Muslims seized parts of northern India
• The Delhi Sultanate was the principal Muslim sultanate in north India from the 13th to the 16th century
• Of course, even before a Muslim kingdom in a predominantly Hindu subcontinent, Muslim merchants interacted with Indians as early as the seventh century C.E.
• The power of the Delhi sultanate in north India was shattered by the invasion (1398-99) of Turkic conqueror Timur (Tamerlane), who sacked Delhi itself
• And of course, by the 1500s, the Mughal Dynasty was established by Babur, a descendant of Timur (Timur was a son-in-law of Chinggis Khan)
• The Delhi sultanate made no break with the political traditions of the later Hindu period - namely, that rulers sought paramountcy rather than sovereignty
• It never reduced Hindu chiefs to unarmed impotence or established an exclusive claim to allegiance
• The sultan was served by a heterogeneous elite of Turks, Afghans, Khaljīs, and Hindu converts; he readily accepted Hindu officials and Hindu vassals
• Threatened for long periods with Mongol invasion from the northwest and hampered by indifferent communications, the Delhi sultans perforce (by force of circumstances) left a large discretion to their local governors and officials • From 1405 until 1433, the Chinese imperial eunuch Zheng He led seven ocean expeditions for the Ming emperor
• Over sixty of the three hundred seventeen ships on the first voyage were enormous "Treasure Ships," sailing vessels over 400 hundred feet long, 160 feet wide, with several stories, nine masts and twelve sails, and luxurious staterooms complete with balconies
• The likes of these ships had never before been seen in the world, and it would not be until World War I that such an armada would be assembled again
• During the first expeditions, Zheng He traveled all the way from China to Southeast Asia and then on to India, all the way to major trading sites on India's southwest coast
• In his fourth voyage, he traveled to the Persian Gulf
• Zheng eventually went all the way to east coast of Africa
• The European Caravel on the other hand was a significantly smaller vessel
• A Caravel was a small, highly maneuverable sailing ship developed in the 15th century by the Portuguese to explore along the West African coast and into the Atlantic Ocean
• The lateen sails gave the caravel its speed and the capacity for sailing to windward
• Find images of both to visually recognize the ships and their differences • Indian Ocean commerce flourished and was conducted by a mixture of Asian, Middle Eastern, and East African merchants
• Indian Ocean trade connected Southeast Asia, South China, India, Arabia and East Africa in commercial activity
• In East Africa, Swahili city-states flourished as a result of Indian Ocean Trade
• Indian Ocean Trade even flourished in 1000 to 1450 but flourished even earlier
• Zheng He, the great Chinese explorer from the Ming Dynasty, traveled along the Indian Ocean trade routes all the way to East Africa and brought a giraffe back to the Beijing Zoo
• Calicut in India was the pepper capital of the world
• Monsoons winds, blowing predictably for half of the year in one direction and then in the other direction for the other half of the year, were used by navigators in the Indian Ocean basin
• India was the fulcrum of the trade route
• In recent decades, many world historians have challenged the commonly held view that Europeans controlled the largest share of world trade in the seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries because European merchants transported only a fraction of the goods shipped globally • The Mali Empire was the second of three West African empires to emerge in the vast savanna grasslands located between the Sahara Desert to the north and the coastal rain forest in the south
• The Mali Empire was strategically located between the West African gold mines and the agriculturally rich Niger River floodplain
• Mali's rise begins when the political leaders of Ghana could not reestablish that empire's former glory following its conquest and occupation by the Almoravids in 1076
• Consequently a number of small states vied to control the salt and gold trade that accounted for Ghana's wealth and power
• In 1235 Sundiata Keita, the leader of one of these states, Kangaba, defeated its principal rival, the neighboring kingdom of Susu, and began consolidating power in the region
• Sundiata's conquest in 1235 is considered the founding of the Malian Empire
• Under Sundiata's successors Mali extended its control west to the Atlantic, south into the rain forest region, including the Wangara gold fields, and east beyond the great bend of the Niger River
• The emperor or mansa ruled
• Trade was centered in three major cities, Timbuktu, Djenne and Gao
• Between 1324 and 1325 Mansa Musa, the most famous of the Malian Emperors, made an elaborate pilgrimage to Mecca in Arabia, bringing thousands of followers and hundreds of camels carrying gold
• Through the highly publicized pilgrimage and indirectly through an elaborate trade that sent gold to the capitals of Europe and Asia, Mali and its ruler became famous throughout the known world
• Mali's power, however, was eventually weakened by palace intrigue that prevented an orderly succession of imperial power and by the desire of smaller states to break free of its rule to reap the benefits of the salt and gold trade • After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Western Europe entered a period of political fragmentation as competing kingdoms warred with one another for land and power
• Feudalism developed in this age of warfare
• In feudalism, land is exchanged for military service
• As kings are weak; they depend on their lords to provide them with more knights, more soldiers
• In return for military service, kings give land to their lords
• The manor is the lord's land and serfs lived and worked on manors in return for protection
• A serf is a worker bound to his lord's land
• A serf owes his lord labor and fees and in return is protected from dangerous invaders
• The social hierarchy of medieval Europe consisted of kings, lords [vassals], knights, monks, and serfs
• Manorialism is the economic system of the medieval period as people lived and worked on self-sufficient manors as trade was dangerous
• However, by the High Middle Ages, invasions had stopped and commerce and urbanization began to increase
• One reason that helps to explain why the collapse of political institutions was more devastating to the Roman civilization than to Han China or Gupta India was that Han China and Gupta India had strong religious/philosophical traditions to provide continuity • After the Peloponnesian War, the Macedonians took control of Greece and spread Greek culture throughout much of the known world under the leadership of Alexander the Great
• The Peloponnesian War was a war between the Greek city-states [alliances supporting Athens or Sparta]
• As the Greeks fought among themselves, they weakened their cities thereby allowing King Philip II of Macedon to conquer the Greek city-states
• When Philip died, his son, Alexander the Great, took command and reconquered the Greek city-states (the Greeks had tried to rebel)
• Then Alexander conquered a great empire that included Greece, Egypt, Persia, Afghanistan and even a bit of India - but in the Indian subcontinent, his men demanded to return home
• Although Alexander died on the journey home, he managed to spread Hellenism or Greek culture to the lands he conquered
• Ironically, Alexander conquered the Greeks but preserved Greek culture - if not for Alexander, much of classical Greece would have been lost to future generations • The Vikings were a seafaring people from Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden)
• The Vikings set sail from their homelands of Scandinavia and engaged in pillaging (attacking villages and monasteries in England and France) and trading in the Middle Ages
• From the late eighth to the late 11th centuries, the Vikings dominated Europe and spread across the world, from the far reaches of Russia to the eastern coast of North America
• Yes, the Vikings settled in England, France, Greenland and even Sicily
• But the Vikings NOT settle in the Arabian Peninsula
• Though their raids, often directed against religious targets, were undoubtedly brutal, many Vikings also traded, farmed and settled peacefully; making their mark on nearly every region and civilization they touched
• Perhaps the most striking of Viking achievements was their state-of-the-art shipbuilding technology, which allowed them to travel greater distances than anyone before them - their signature longboats were faster, lighter, more flexible and more easily maneuverable than other ships of the time
• The Viking also left their mark on the English language - the word "berserk" comes from the Old Norse (Viking) word berserker, meaning "bear shirt" or "bearskin" - these Viking warriors worshipped Odin, the god of war, and whipped themselves into a frenzied state before and during battle
• In the year 1000 C.E., the ancient Norsemen abandoned their pagan gods and converted to Christianity • In China, Confucianism emphasized the idea that harmony could be achieved by the proper behavior of each member of the family or society
• It is important to remember the Confucius lived during the "Age of Warring States" period of the Zhou Dynasty - in this time of disorder and warfare, Confucius wanted to restore peace and harmony to China
• Confucius believed that order was the key to developing peace and harmony in society
• Thus, each person had to know his place and act accordingly
• In the Five Relationships of Confucianism (Emperor and subject, Father and son, Husband and wife, Elder brother and younger brother, and Friend and friend), superiors set good examples and rule benevolently and inferiors respect superiors and obey
• By acting according to the appropriate role in society, peace and harmony ensued - at least, according to Confucius • Feudalism was the political and military system of the Middle Ages in Western Europe
• Under feudalism, land was exchanged for military service
• Kings were weak in the Middle Ages and needed help from lords to control their kingdoms - kings therefore gave land to lords (the lord receiving land became a vassal to the king) and lords, in return, gave loyalty and knights to the king when needed
• Of course, an accurate statement about feudalism in Europe was that feudalism led to major class differences in society
• Yes, the medieval hierarchy or ranking system was King, Lords (Vassals), Lesser Lords (Vassals to Lords), Knights, Monks, Serfs
• In a feudal society, each person has a fixed position and has responsibilities and obligations to superiors in the system
• A vassal must be loyal to his lord and a serf must work for his lord in return for protection • The word "diaspora" means a scattering of people
• The dictionary defines "diaspora" as a group of people who live outside the area in which they had lived for a long time or in which their ancestors lived
• Merchants, of course, are travelers - they travel to new lands to trade and sometimes, they settle in these new lands
• However, even though they settle in new lands, they still maintain many of their previous cultural ways
• Yes, in the period 600 C.E. to 1450 C.E., merchant diaspora communities, such as those of Muslims in India, Chinese in Southeast Asia, and Jews in the Mediterranean, had the following in common: they generally introduced their own cultural practices into the local cultures
• Yes, merchants were a vector for spreading cultural ideas - when merchants settled in new lands, they introduced their religions and cultural ways to new lands • A guild is an association of crafts workers - like bakers or carpenters
• The guild sets the standards for the work and goods produced and also controls who can enter the guild - first as an apprentice then as a journeyman and finally as a master craftsman
• The medieval guilds were generally one of two types: merchant guilds or craft guilds
• Merchant guilds were associations of all or most of the merchants in a particular town or city; these men might be local or long-distance traders, wholesale or retail sellers, and might deal in various categories of goods
• Craft guilds, on the other hand, were occupational associations that usually comprised all the artisans and craftsmen in a particular branch of industry or commerce. There were, for instance, guilds of weavers, dyers, and fullers in the wool trade and of masons and architects in the building trade; and there were guilds of painters, metalsmiths, blacksmiths, bakers, butchers, leatherworkers, soapmakers, and so on
• Guilds performed a variety of important functions in the local economy
• They established a monopoly of trade in their locality or within a particular branch of industry or commerce; they set and maintained standards for the quality of goods and the integrity of trading practices in that industry; they worked to maintain stable prices for their goods and commodities; and they sought to control town or city governments in order to further the interests of the guild members and achieve their economic objectives
• Yes, organizations of merchants and craftspeople in European cities were called guilds • In both Buddhism and Roman Catholic Christianity, monasticism is an alternative to marriage and family life
• Monks and nuns may dedicate their lives to the religious life and forsake family life
• In Buddhism, a Bhikku is a monk or an individual who has renounced worldly life and joined a monastic community
• The term bhikku in Buddhism comes from a verbal root meaning "to beg" - thus, a Buddhist monk or nun is marked primarily by his or her practice of poverty and nonattachment to the material world
• Originally, bhikkus were the followers of the Buddha who had left their families and worldly pursuits in order to meditate and to apply the Buddha's teachings to their everyday life
• Bhikkus tended to live as a group in forest retreats near villages and towns; in exchange for food, the monks taught the townspeople the ways of religious righteousness (dhamma; Sanskrit: dharma)
• Four monastic rules, if broken, result in lifelong expulsion from the order - these prohibit (1) having sexual relations, (2) taking or ordering the taking of life, (3) taking something as one's own that has not been freely given, and (4) making claims regarding one's spiritual attainments, powers, or degree of enlightenment
• Catholic monks have similar yet different rules but all monks forsake family life for the religious life
• Yes, two religions that encouraged the monastic life were Buddhism and Christianity • The Maya were Mesoamerican Indians and occupied a nearly continuous territory in southern Mexico, Guatemala, and northern Belize
• Before the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Central America, the Maya possessed one of the greatest civilizations of the Western Hemisphere
• They practiced agriculture, built great stone buildings and pyramid temples, worked gold and copper, and used a form of hieroglyphic writing that has now largely been deciphered - the Maya were an advanced pre-Columbian civilization
• The strongest basis of the Mayan economy was agriculture, which produced maize, beans, and cocoa
• The Maya developed independent city-states - much like the ancient Greeks - they were not unified with one king but rather had competing city-states
• The rise of the Maya began about 250 C.E. and lasted until about 900 C.E.
• Some important Mayan cities were Tikal, Uaxactún, and Copán
• Each city had a population between 5,000 and 50,000 • The Neolithic Revolution led to the development of civilizations - civilizations are complex societies with class divisions or class systems, organized government, generally writing systems, and of course, cities
• Most of the earliest civilizations developed in river valleys in warm, dry climates
• This is not surprising as rivers provide water for farming and irrigation - and thus, it is generally easier to farm near a river than away from a river
• The four river valley civilizations were located in Mesopotamia - the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in present-day Iraq - the Nile River Valley in Egypt, the Indus River Valley in the Indian subcontinent, and the Huang He River in China
• Civilizations have distinctly different settlement patterns from ordinary societies -the word civilization is sometimes defined as "a word that simply means 'living in cities'" - compared with other societies, civilizations have a more complex political structure, namely the state and state societies are more stratified in that there is a greater difference among social classes • The Sumerians are generally credited with founding Mesopotamian civilizations in the Tigris-Euphrates river valley
• Sometime around 4000 B.C.E., ancient Sumerian culture emerged on a sun-scorched floodplain along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now southern Iraq
• These enigmatic Mesopotamians are best known for inventing cuneiform script - the world's oldest extant writing system
• The Sumerians lived in city-states; each city had its own government and surrounding farmland but all cities shared the Sumerian culture - however, Sumerian city-states were frequently at war with one another
• Major Sumerian city-states included Eridu, Ur, Nippur, Lagash and Kish, but one of the oldest and most sprawling was Uruk, a thriving trading hub that boasted six miles of defensive walls and a population of between 40,000 and 80,000
• One of the crowning achievements of Mesopotamian literature is the "Epic of Gilgamesh," a 3,000-line poem that follows the adventures of a Sumerian king as he battles a forest monster and quests after the secret of eternal life • In 3100 B.C.E., the history of Egypt is said to have begun when King Menes united Upper and Lower Egypt
• For almost 30 centuries - from its unification around 3100 B.C. to its conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C.E. - ancient Egypt was the preeminent civilization in the Mediterranean world
• Around 3400 B.C.E., two separate kingdoms were established: the Red Land to the north, based in the Nile River and the White Land in the south - a southern king, Scorpion, made the first attempts to conquer the northern kingdom around 3200 B.C.E. but a century later, King Menes would subdue the north and unify the country, becoming the first king of the first dynasty
• King Menes founded the capital of ancient Egypt at White Walls (later known as Memphis), in the north, near the apex of the Nile River delta.
• Most ancient Egyptians were farmers living in small villages, and agriculture (largely wheat and barley) formed the economic base of the Egyptian state - the annual flooding of the great Nile River provided the necessary irrigation and fertilization each year • The "Epic of Gilgamesh" is a poem that follows the adventures of a Sumerian king as he battles a forest monster and quests after the secret of eternal life.
• Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, was two-thirds god and one-third man and he built magnificent ziggurats, or temple towers, surrounded his city with high walls, and laid out its orchards and fields - he was physically beautiful, immensely strong, and very wise but he was very cruel
• The gods heard his subjects' pleas and decided to keep Gilgamesh in check by creating a wild man named Enkidu, who was as magnificent as Gilgamesh - Enkidu became Gilgamesh's great friend, and Gilgamesh's heart was shattered when Enkidu died of an illness inflicted by the gods
• Gilgamesh then goes in search of immortality
• But Gilgamesh learns that he can't live forever but that humankind will - now he sees that the city he had repudiated in his grief and terror is a magnificent, enduring achievement - the closest thing to immortality to which a mortal can aspire
• Thus, Gilgamesh was a king of the city-state of Uruk, a hero in a popular Mesopotamian epic, a warrior in conflict with the city of Kish and a legendary loyal friend of Enkidu • Oceans can separate nations or bring nations together
• Oceans have, at times, kept societies apart - the Mongols tried to conquer Japan twice but the seas made it difficult and the Mongols failed twice - waters surrounding a land can make conquest or contact difficult thereby separating lands
• Yet oceans have served as an effective means of transport - the Indian Ocean was a region of great trading - sailors used monsoon winds that predictably blew in one direction half of the year and the other direction the other half of the year to trade - the Indian Ocean trading network connected East Africa, Arabia, India, and Southeast Asia
• Yes, oceans have stimulated the emergence of networks of trade, technology transfer, and cultural exchange
• And by using oceans, humans could travel completely around the world by the sixteenth century C.E. - in the 1500s, Ferdinand Magellan's crew successfully circumnavigated the world • Culture is a way of life of a group of people; it includes language, religion, clothing styles, and food preferences
• Combinations of the ideas, objects, and patterns of behavior that result from human social interaction are referred to as culture
• Culture is a "blueprint for living" in that it dictates a lot of what people do and what people believe and what people like
• Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving
• Culture can also be defined as the shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs, and affective understanding that are learned through a process of socialization • Perennial plants are for plants that live for more than two years
• Many perennials grow and bloom over spring and summer, die back during fall and winter, and grow again the following year from their roots
• Domestication of perennial plants in each region was true for ALL of the early agricultural systems
• With the domestication of the key food plants and animals in the Middle East (about 10,000 years ago), people were able to live in large settled communities with a reliable, predictable, and abundant food supply that was able to support the development of cities, craft specialization, social stratification, temple priesthoods, and kingship - the complex of connected institutions that we call "civilization"
• In short, the consequences of the Neolithic revolution were enormous - affecting nearly every major aspect of human environment, economy, and culture • Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were two important cities of the Indus River Valley civilization (sometimes called Harappan civilization) - one of the early river valley civilizations
• This mysterious culture emerged nearly 4,500 years ago and thrived for a thousand years, profiting from the highly fertile lands of the Indus River floodplain and trade with the civilizations of nearby Mesopotamia
• A well-planned street grid and an elaborate drainage system hint that the occupants of these ancient Indus civilization cities were skilled urban planners with a reverence for the control of water
• The city's wealth and stature is evident in artifacts such as ivory, lapis, carnelian, and gold beads, as well as the baked-brick city structures themselves
• Writing was developed in the Indus River Valley civilization but it cannot be deciphered by archaeologists today - in other words, archaeologists cannot read the writing
• In the sites of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, archeologists have found a high degree of standardization of weights, measures, architectural styles, and even brick sizes - such standardization may suggest that there might have been a central authority powerful enough to reach all corners of society but we don't know for certain • Most scholars would agree with this statement about early humans that humans originated in Africa and then migrated to other continents
• As to its human history, Africa is the place where some seven million years ago the evolutionary lines of apes and proto-humans diverged
• Human life began in Africa and thus, the story of humanity is an African story
• It remained the only continent our ancestors inhabited until around two million years ago, when Homo erectus expanded out of Africa into Europe and Asia.
• Sometime between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago our African ancestors underwent some further profound change
• Whether it was the development of complex speech or something else, such as a change in brain wiring, scientists aren't exactly sure
• Whatever it was, it transformed those early Homo sapiens into what paleoanthropologists call "behaviorally modern" Homo sapiens
• "Behaviorally modern" Homo sapiens, probably with brains similar to our own, expanded again into Europe and Asia
• Once there, they exterminated or replaced or interbred with Neanderthals and Asia's hominins and became the dominant human species throughout the world
• In effect, Africans enjoyed not just one but three huge head starts over humans on other continents • The longest and most vital overland trade route before 1000 C.E. was the Silk Road
• The Silk Road was a network of trade routes, formally established during the Han Dynasty of China
• As the Silk Road was not a single thoroughfare from east to west, the term "Silk Routes" has become increasingly favored by historians, though "Silk Road" is the more common and recognized name
• Both terms for this network of roads were coined by the German geographer and traveler, Ferdinand von Richthofen, in 1877 CE, who designated them "Seidenstrasse" (Silk Road) or "Seidenstrassen" (Silk Routes)
• The network was used regularly from 130 B.C.E., when the Han officially opened trade with the west, to 1453 C.E., when the Ottoman Empire boycotted trade with the west and closed the routes
• The Silk Road connected China through Central Asia to the Eastern Mediterranean coast
• Silk, porcelain, and other goods travelled on the Silk Roads • Patriarchy means male dominance
• In a patriarchy, women are viewed as inferior to men
• Of course, there are variations in patriarchal societies in that some societies, although patriarchal, give women more rights than other patriarchal societies
• Thus, an accurate statement about gender relations up to 1000 C.E. is that in some societies, women enjoyed more rights than in others
• In ancient Egypt, a woman could own property and in medieval times in Europe, a woman could inherit a fief (land) but not rule it
• Yes, Egyptian women could own property, borrow money, sign contracts, initiate divorce, appear in court as a witness, etc. • The Han Dynasty adopted the examination system or the world's first civil service system in which a candidate for government service had to pass an examination to receive a government position
• In preparing governmental officials, the imperial university of the Later Han enrolled more than three thousand students, with its curriculum primarily based on Confucianism and Chinese history
• Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, had taught that men were pretty much alike but that education set them apart
• For Confucius, the educated man was the highest and most noble men and such men should serve in government as benevolent superiors
• Theoretically, the examination was open to all men - even a poor man could advance to government service and become a scholar gentry - however, education was private and costly - thus, unless a village could provide for the education of a poor man, it was difficult for poor men to achieve government service - difficult but not impossible - thus, the examination provided a modest measure of social mobility • The Five Relationships of Confucianism were Emperor and subject; Father and son; Husband and wife; Elder brother and younger brother; and friend and friend
• Confucius, the Chinese philosopher during the Zhou Dynasty, believed that these relationships formed the basis of every society
• He also believed that society consisted of superiors and inferiors
• Superiors (Emperor, Father, Husband, and Elder Brother) had to set good examples, rule wisely, and be benevolent or caring
• Inferiors (subjects, sons, wives, and younger brothers) had to obey • The Byzantine Empire flourished as a crossroads of trade connecting the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Asia
• The Byzantine Empire included lands in Europe, Asia, and North Africa
• The empire was located on the crossroads of trade - connecting Europe and Asia and North Africa - the Byzantines controlled trade on the eastern Mediterranean Sea
• The origins of the great civilization known as the Byzantine Empire can be traced to 330 C.E., when the Roman emperor Constantine I dedicated a "new Rome" on the site of the ancient Greek colony of Byzantium
• The Byzantine Empire was thus formerly the Eastern Roman Empire
• Though the western half of the Roman Empire crumbled and fell in 476 C.E., the eastern half survived for 1,000 more years, spawning a rich tradition of art, literature and learning and serving as a military buffer between the states of Europe and the threat of invasion from Asia
• The Byzantine Empire finally fell in 1453, after an Ottoman army stormed Constantinople • Confucius was an important Chinese philosopher who lived during the "Age of Warring States" period of the Zhou Dynasty
• Living during a time of warfare and chaos, Confucius believed that peace and harmony could only be restored through an orderly society
• If people knew and acted according to their roles in society, there would be peace and harmony
• Thus, an emperor had to act like an emperor and a father like a father
• Confucius believed in Five Relationships: Emperor and subject, Father and son, Husband and wife, Elder brother and younger brother, and friend and friend
• In every relationship - except friendship - there was a superior who had to rule benevolently and set a good example and an inferior who had to obey
• Order was the key to ensuring a peaceful society, according to Confucius
• Yes, in China, Confucianism emphasized the idea that harmony could be achieved by the proper behavior of each member of the family or society • The world's largest desert is the Sahara desert
• The name Sahara derives from the Arabic noun ṣaḥrāʾ, meaning desert, and its plural, ṣaḥārāʾ
• Filling nearly all of northern Africa, it measures approximately 3,000 from east to west and between 800 and 1,200 miles from north to south and has a total area of some 3,320,000 square miles
• The Sahara is bordered in the west by the Atlantic Ocean, in the north by the Atlas Mountains and the Mediterranean Sea, in the east by the Red Sea, and in the south by the Sahel - a semiarid region that forms a transitional zone between the Sahara to the north and the belt of humid savannas (grasslands) to the south
• In the 21st century, there was recognition that the Sahara and its border region to the south, the Sahel, were creeping southward owing to desertification (the process by which fertile land becomes desert) • Buddhism developed in the Indian subcontinent, South Asia
• Its founder was a Hindu prince, Siddhartha Gautama, who went in search of the cause of suffering and the end of suffering
• Upon achieving enlightenment, according to Buddhists, he formulated the Four Noble Truths
• The Four Noble Truths are
1- Life has suffering
2- Desire causes suffering
3- Suffering can end (nirvana)
4- Follow the Noble Eightfold Path or eight actions to end suffering (Right Speech, Right Concentration, etc.)
• Like Hinduism, Buddhists accept the concepts of reincarnation (Samsara) and karma
• Buddhists, however, reject the Hindu caste system
• And Buddhists allow monastic opportunities for men and women (monks and nuns)
• Yes, the founder of Buddhism developed a religion centered on the elimination of desire and suffering • The Zhou Dynasty established a belief in the Mandate of Heaven or the idea that the gods selected the emperor to rule and gave the ruler the mandate or right to rule as long as the ruler ruled righteously and well
• In the event of famine, floods, epidemics or too much war and conflict, however, the gods signified that the ruler had lost the mandate or right to rule and that the people could rebel
• Thus, the Mandate of Heaven justified rebellion and led to the dynastic cycle in which dynasties claimed the mandate, ruled for a period of time, lost the mandate, rebellion occurred, and a new dynasty was established
• The Mandate of Heaven was not permanently granted to a dynasty
• So, yes, the Chinese concept of "Mandate of Heaven" was sometimes used to justify rebellion • The Phoenicians were a seafaring people from present-day Lebanon
• The Phoenicians established cities throughout the Mediterranean and were traders in the region
• But the most important legacy (handed down from the past) of the Phoenicians their development of an alphabetic writing system that was adapted by the Greeks
• In an alphabetic writing system, each letter represents a sound and thus fewer symbols are needed for writing than when every word has its own character - yes, to this day, when children are taught to read in English (the alphabetic writing system adopted from the Greeks who adopted it from the Phoenicians), they are taught the sounds of the letters - this method for teaching reading is called phonics after the Phoenicians
• Their major cities were Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and Arwad - all were fiercely independent, rival cities and, unlike the neighboring inland states, the Phoenicians represented a confederation of maritime traders rather than a defined country
• The most significant Phoenician contribution was an alphabetic writing system
• The Phoenician alphabetic writing system became the root of the Western alphabets when the Greeks adopted it
• The main natural resources of the Phoenician cities in the eastern Mediterranean were the prized cedars of Lebanon and murex shells used to make the purple dye
• The name Phoenician, used to describe these people in the first millennium B.C.E., is a Greek invention, from the word phoinix, possibly signifying the color purple-red and perhaps an allusion to their production of a highly prized purple dye • The Byzantine Empire greatly affected the culture of the Russian people
• Byzantine missionaries - Cyril and Methodius - brought Orthodox Christianity to Russia
• In addition, as the Russian language did not have an alphabet, the monks created a Russian alphabet in order to write the Bible in Russia - that alphabet is known as the Cyrillic alphabet (named for the monk who created it and introduced Orthodox Christianity to the Slavs of Eastern Europe)
• Yes, the Cyrillic alphabet owes its name to the 9th century Byzantine missionary St. Cyril, who, along with his brother, Methodius, created the first Slavic alphabet - the Glagolitic - in order to translate Greek religious text to Slavic - it is on the basis of this alphabet that the Cyrillic alphabet was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century C.E. by the followers of the brothers, who were beatified (given a title to mark as good and holy people) as saints
• The Byzantine Empire influenced Russia by bringing Orthodox Christianity, the Cyrillic alphabet, and the concept of a Caesar or "Tsar" in Russian - the idea of an absolute ruler - to the Russian people
• Yes, the Byzantine Empire achieved the conversion of many Slavic peoples to Christianity • The following accurately describes a characteristic shared by Afro-Eurasian urban centers before 600 C.E.: cities served as centers of commercial activity
• Yes, urban centers or cities were centers of commercial activity
• In Afro-Eurasia, cities grew and multiplied partly because they developed increasingly strong commercial ties with one another, sometimes across long distances
• About 100 C.E., the world's two biggest cities were almost certainly Rome, with a population nearing one million, and Luoyang in China's Han empire
• The urban downswing that occurred from the third century C.E. was certainly related to the decline of the Han and Roman Empires
• Most cities served as centers of government, religion, trade, manufacturing, education, and artistic display
• In some cities, such as Rome or Alexandria (in Egypt), all these functions operated simultaneously
• Other cities had more specialized purposes, for example, towns of the Mediterranean coast or Inner Eurasia, which functioned chiefly to transship goods along routes of trade Chinggis Khan or Genghis Khan
• Between 1206 and his death in 1227, the Mongol leader Genghis Khan conquered nearly 12 million square miles of territory - more than any individual in history
• Chinggis Khan was proclaimed leader of the Mongols at a tribal meeting known as a "kurultai" - while "Khan" is a traditional title meaning "leader" or "ruler," historians are still unsure of the origins of "Genghis" - it may have may have meant "ocean" or "just," but in context it is usually translated as "supreme ruler" or "universal ruler"
• Genghis Khan often gave other kingdoms a chance to peacefully submit to Mongol rule, but he didn't hesitate to bring down the sword on any society that resisted
• The Mongols were skilled warriors on horseback - their cavalry was unrivaled
• The Great Khan had a keen eye for talent, and he usually promoted his officers on skill and experience rather than class, ancestry or even past allegiances
• One famous example of this belief in meritocracy came during a 1201 battle against the rival Taijut tribe, when Genghis was nearly killed after his horse was shot out from under him with an arrow - when he later addressed the Taijut prisoners and demanded to know who was responsible, one soldier bravely stood up and admitted to being the shooter - stirred by the archer's boldness, Genghis made him an officer in his army and later nicknamed him "Jebe," or "arrow," in honor of their first meeting on the battlefield - along with the famed general Subutai, Jebe would go on to become one of the Mongols' greatest field commanders during their conquests in Asia and Europe
• Unlike many empire builders, Genghis Khan embraced the diversity of his newly conquered territories - he passed laws declaring religious freedom for all and even granted tax exemptions to places of worship - this tolerance had a political side - the Khan knew that happy subjects were less likely to rebel - but the Mongols also had an exceptionally liberal attitude towards religion
• Along with the bow and the horse, the Mongols most potent weapon may have been their vast communication network - one of his earliest decrees as Khan involved the formation of a mounted courier service known as the "Yam" - it consisted of a well-organized series of post houses and way stations strung out across the whole of the Empire - by stopping to rest or take on a fresh mount every few miles, official riders could often travel as far as 200 miles a day - the system allowed goods and information to travel with unprecedented speed, but it also acted as the eyes and ears of the Khan - the Yam also helped protect foreign dignitaries and merchants during their travels • Sikhism is a religion that developed in northern India - a region where Hindus and Muslims lived
• The Sikh faith began in the 15th century when Guru Nanak began teaching a faith that was quite distinct from Hinduism and Islam yet influenced by both religions
• Like Hindus, Sikhs have the beliefs of karma and reincarnation
• Like Muslims, Sikhs are monotheists
• One morning, when he was twenty-eight years old, Nanak went down to the river to bathe and meditate - it was said that he was gone for three days and when he reappeared, it was believed that he was filled with the spirit of God
• It was then that Guru Nanak began his missionary work and the religion of Sikhism was born
• Sikhism is a monotheistic religion, and the basic Sikh belief is represented in the phrase Ik Onkar meaning "One God"
• Sikhism was founded in the Punjab region in India in the 15th century by Guru Nanak Dev
• Sikhism broke from Hinduism due, in part, to its rejection of the caste system
• The primary source of Scripture for Sikhs is the Guru Granth Sahib, regarded as the living Guru, after the final Guru in human form, Guru Gobind Singh, passed away
• A Sikh place of worship is known as the gurdwara - the word gurdwara means "doorway to God"
• The Five Ks are the articles of faith that Sikhs wear as ordered by the tenth Guru, Guru Gobind Singh
• The Five Ks are Kesh or unshorn long hair, a kangha or a small wooden comb meant to keep the hair combed twice a day, a kara or an iron bangle to be worn on the hand used most, a kachera is a specific undergarment for modesty, and a kirpan or short dagger
• Sikhs believe in defending the right of all peoples to religious freedom • The Mongols conquered the largest contiguous empire in world history due to being highly skilled warriors on horseback and highly disciplined soldiers
• The Mongols used psychological warfare to frighten their enemies into submission
• Yes, the Mongols were successful at conquest because they adopted advanced technology quickly, they organized their armies efficiently, and they were talented cavalrymen or warriors on horseback
• Chinggis Khan's organized units of soldiers were based on the principle of ten
• He organized his people into units of ten, a hundred, a thousand, and ten thousand, and the head of a unit of ten thousand would have a strong personal relationship with Chinggis himself
• That kind of loyalty was to be extremely important in Chinggis's rise to power and in his ability to maintain authority over all the various segments of his domain
• Chinggis's military tactics showcased his superiority in warfare
• One particularly effective tactic Chinggis liked to use was the feigned withdrawal: Deep in the throes of a battle his troops would withdraw, pretending to have been defeated
• As the enemy forces pursued the troops that seemed to be fleeing, they would quickly realize that they'd fallen into a trap, as whole detachments of men in armor or cavalries would suddenly appear and overwhelm them
• Another key tactic was the use of the horse in warfare
• The Mongols were superior warriors and conquered a vast empire stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Black Sea • Indian Ocean commerce flourished and was conducted by a mixture of Asian, Middle Eastern, and East African merchants
• Indian Ocean trade connected Southeast Asia, South China, India, Arabia and East Africa in commercial activity
• In East Africa, Swahili city-states flourished as a result of Indian Ocean Trade
• Indian Ocean Trade even flourished in 1000 to 1450 but flourished even earlier
• Zheng He, the great Chinese explorer from the Ming Dynasty, traveled along the Indian Ocean trade routes all the way to East Africa and brought a giraffe back to the Beijing Zoo
• Calicut in India was the pepper capital of the world
• Monsoons winds, blowing predictably for half of the year in one direction and then in the other direction for the other half of the year, were used by navigators in the Indian Ocean basin
• India was the fulcrum of the trade route • From 1405 until 1433, the Chinese imperial eunuch Zheng He led seven ocean expeditions for the Ming emperor
• Over sixty of the three hundred seventeen ships on the first voyage were enormous "Treasure Ships," sailing vessels over 400 hundred feet long, 160 feet wide, with several stories, nine masts and twelve sails, and luxurious staterooms complete with balconies
• The likes of these ships had never before been seen in the world, and it would not be until World War I that such an armada would be assembled again
• During the first expeditions, Zheng He traveled all the way from China to Southeast Asia and then on to India, all the way to major trading sites on India's southwest coast
• In his fourth voyage, he traveled to the Persian Gulf
• But for the three last voyages, Zheng went even further, all the way to the east coast of Africa
• The European Caravel on the other hand was a significantly smaller vessel
• A Caravel was a small, highly maneuverable sailing ship developed in the 15th century by the Portuguese to explore along the West African coast and into the Atlantic Ocean
• The lateen sails gave the caravel its speed and the capacity for sailing to windward
• Find images of both to visually recognize the ships and their differences • Indian Ocean commerce flourished and was conducted by a mixture of Asian, Middle Eastern, and East African merchants
• Indian Ocean trade connected Southeast Asia, South China, India, Arabia and East Africa in commercial activity
• In East Africa, Swahili city-states flourished as a result of Indian Ocean Trade
• Indian Ocean Trade even flourished in 1000 to 1450 but flourished even earlier
• Zheng He, the great Chinese explorer from the Ming Dynasty, traveled along the Indian Ocean trade routes all the way to East Africa and brought a giraffe back to the Beijing Zoo
• Calicut in India was the pepper capital of the world
• Monsoons winds, blowing predictably for half of the year in one direction and then in the other direction for the other half of the year, were used by navigators in the Indian Ocean basin
• India was the fulcrum of the trade route