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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.

Modern nomadic family, with Bactrian camel. Photo from The Culture Trip.
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M is for Marco Polo

Marco Polo in prison (litho) by Valda, John Harris (1874-1942); Private Collection

Marco Polo was a liar. One scholar claimed that rather than going to China, he never went further east than Iran.

Marco was a prisoner of war, caught in a skirmish fighting his hometown’s biggest enemy. Marco was not a writer, but a spinner of tales. Mr. Marco Millions was a traveler, a merchant, an ambassador, an embellisher, and a subject of controversy.

Marco Polo was an adventurer, who had too many adventures to tell here. We can only scratch the surface of who he was.

Marco Polo leaving Venice, painting at the Bodleian Library.

The Bare Bones

Marco Polo was born in 1254 in the Republic of Venice. If you read my “D is for Doge” passage last year, you’d recall that Venice was a major world power at the time, responsible for the sack of Constantinople just a few decades earlier and one of the groups calling the shots in Europe. They “owned” ports on the Black Sea and elsewhere and had grown very rich ferrying French and Teutonic knights back and forth to the Crusades. So had the Genoese, another Italian seaport.

Marco’s father wasn’t there for his son’s birth because he was off in Constantinople with his brother, doing trade deals. Niccolo and Maffeo Polo decided to high tail it out of there because Constantinople was taken back from the Venetian puppets; the Polos went east–way east–out to the court of Khubilai Khan. They returned to Venice and persuaded 15-year-old Marco to go back with them, so Marco and family traveled the Silk Road once more, although their first stop was in Acre. Had I mentioned the Crusades?

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L is for Lotus

There is something mesmerizing about this animated graphic, as this woman dances in a circle in front of a circling flower. Is she Indian? Persian? Chinese? I can make an argument for each, and she seems like an amalgam of all three, which is perhaps the point.

You can watch her dance on Youtube here.

The title is “Silk Road Dream|Burning Lotus” and the creator is branded as “Life Makeover,” where other mini animated movies show off products. Is this dancer showing products, or the skill of the artist? Or both?

It’s ironic to be called burning lotus, since a lotus is a water lily. And the symbol of a spiritual adviser who suggested we should avoid craving material goods. And that the hypnotic music, swirling graphic, and picturesque dance are all like narcotic lotus that the Greeks told stories about.

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