Historical Tidbits Archives – Page 12 of 53

April 22, 2023April 23, 2023

S is for Samarkand

No one still lives in Babylon. Luxor is an open-air museum, ancient ruins for tourists. Alexandria was burned down, Tenochtitlan is underground, and Çatalhöyük can hardly be spelled, let alone found.

Registan square in Samarkand, built @800 BCE. Wikipedia photo.

It’s not the oldest continuously inhabited city, yet 2800 years seems a pretty good pedigree. And if you’re going to write about the center of the Silk Road, only ONE city in the center, Samarkand would be it.

Samarkand survives.

“Samarkand” painted by Zommer, late 19th c. Wikimedia.

Oasis in the Desert

Remember the Oxus, remember the Hindu Kush and the Kushans a few alphabetic posts back? The Kush is a mountain range in northern India, and the Kushans and Sogdians spread across the land to its northwest. The Oxus, today the Amu Darya, flows from the those mountains to the northwest, to the Caspian and the once Aral Sea.

Above the Oxus, nestled in a long and unusual stripe of green across those mix of foothills, dirt, desert, and mountains, is the ancient city of Samarkand, the second-largest city in Uzbekistan. If you were to take a map of Asia and North Africa, squint and put your finger on the middle, you might exactly touch Samarkand.

April 20, 2023April 21, 2023

R is for Republics

Genoese ships in the Black Sea, photo from memorients.com.

Via della Seta. That, Google Translate tells me, is the Italian expression for “Silk Road.”

The city-states, for Italy was nowhere near being Italy back in 1100, were duking it out for supremacy. Although Rome was sucking wind, trying to recover and build St. Peter’s, and Florence was still finding itself, the big tunas in medieval Italy were the coastal cities. So the Via della Seta was not about carts rumbling down the road to markets but ships sailing across the big Mediterranean Sea to the little seas… the Red Sea, the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Aegean, Adriatic, Ligurian, Ionian–the Black Sea.

The sea dogs were traders and carriers of cargo and ships and horses. Knights in armor especially in 1099. The Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor were trumpeting up a holy war to push back the Saracens and Ottomans who were all over the place, suggesting there might be a competitor to the one true religion. The Republics answered the call by carrying men in heavy armor from France, England, and Germany in their ships down the coast. Some of them even joined the fight.

April 16, 2023April 17, 2023

N is for Nomad

Why did the Nomad cross the road?
It’s what he lives for…

Roads are created by people who walk them–a lot. The Silk Road was named for what was sent on it, but it was carried by those who traveled, not those who sent. All well and good to be the silk weaver or the wealthy owner of all the looms, but who did the actual taking? “Merchants.” Many of those merchants were also nomads or were at least escorted by the nomads.

Not to mention that standard notion of the “Barbarian of the Steppes.” I may have mentioned the 36-episode Great Course by Kenneth Harl that covers that topic in detail. The title is what Prof. Ken Harl chose, and yet what becomes eminently clear is that barbarians is what everybody else called them to make them seem primitive and less dominating.

In fact, there were dozens of tribes who ruled the steppes, many of whom migrated from the harsh, impregnable deserts and fickle grasslands to the lusher lands in the fertile basin. Thus, they came sweeping down off the steppes repeatedly, always somehow surprising though the Xiong Nu, Hittites, Pecheneges, Scythians, Parthians, Huns, Bactrians, Gok Turks, Seljuk Turks, and Mongols did this for nearly two thousand years.

They were the Powerful of the Steppes.