The Role of the Kushan Empire in the First Silk Road

Episode 18 – Lost Kushan Empire

Foundations of Eastern Civilization

Dr Craig Benjamin

Film Review

The Kushan, originally descended from Yuezhi nomads,* were the great Silk Road facilitators. Their empire extended from Uzbekistan in the north to Central India and from the Iranian Plateau to the Tarim Basin** in the East.  By the early first century AD, the Han Empire had also expanded to incorporate much of Central Asia as tributary states. This brought them into direct contact with the Kushan, who eventually controlled all the east-west and north-south Silk Road trade routes.

Because the Kushan had no literature of their own, most of their history is reconstructed from historical accounts and their coins. Imprinted with a distinctive Bactrian script employing Sanskrit grammar and Greek letters, the latter frequently commemorated royal lines of succession, foreign conquest. and various religious icons of their subjects.

Major achievements if the Kushan Empire included creating a new dating system and subsidizing numerous schools of sculpture (based on Greco-Roman and Persian sculpture), which would have a major influence on all all Asian art. The Kushan are credited with creating the first sculptural likeness of the Buddha.

Major patrons of Buddhism, they also called the first world conference on Buddhism to consolidate Buddhist doctrine, which the Kushan government translated into Sanskrit for wide dissemination.

The demise of the Kushan Empire was triggered by an invasion by the new Sasssanian Empire in Persia, destroying their capitol and palaces. However the Gupta Empire, which reunified India in the 4th century AD retained many Kushan influences.

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*Long time rivals of the Xiongu nomads, who forced the Yuezhi to migrate to the Central Steppes and resettle in Bactria in 130 BC (ten years prior to their visit from Han Dynasty envoy Zhang Xian).

**Aka the Taklamakan Desert

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/5808608/5808645

Routes Followed by the First Silk Road

Episode 16: Silk Roads: Perils of Caravans and Camels

Foundations of Asian Civilization

Dr Craig Benjamin

Film Review

Prior to the development of the Silk Road* trading networks, China played no part in Afro-Eurasian trade networks dating back to 1500 BC Phoenician traders.

During the Han dynasty, the Silk Road began at the capitol Changan and traveled west along the Great Wall to the Dunhuang oasis, where snow melt from mountains on three sides provided a steady supply of water. It was a prime example of caravan cities that sprung up all along the Silk Road to provide traders secure storage for their goods and food and water for themselves and their camels. The emperor stationed a military garrison there to search all pack camels for smuggled silk worms, pods and eggs.**

After Dunhuang the Silk Road split into northern and southern branches skirting the Taklamakan Desert. The separate routes rejoined at Kashgar and continued on to Samarkand, where goods were handed on to Kushan traders. The northern Silk Road continued through the Kushan and Parthian Empires. To reach the Mediterranean from the Parthian Empire, camel trains needed to cross the treacherous Zagros Mountains.

A southern Silk Road branch, leading to India, peeled off from the Kingdom of Khotan on the southern border of the Taklamakan Desert.

Without the domestication by steppes nomads of the Bactrian camel, there would have been no Silk Road. Native to Central Asia, the Bactrian camel has two humps (consisting entirely of fat), unlike the single-humped Arabian camel. The Bactrian species has two-toed webbed feet to give them good traction in sand and sealable nostrils to protect them against sand storms.**

The first Silk Road trade saw silk and Chinese inventions moving west and religious ideas, Western art and new foods moving east.

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*The name “Silk Road” was first coined by the German explorer von Richtenhofer in the 19th century.

**To ensure their most valuable export, China had to ensure the West never learned the secret of silk production. The Romans believed silk fibers grew on trees. Archeological evidence suggests the Chinese domesticated silk worms as early as 5,000 BC.

***According to Benjamin, there are only 1,000 wild Bactrian camels left, though thousands are still used throughout Central Asia as pack animals.

Film can be viewed free on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/5808608/5808640

History of the Silk Road: Envoy Zhang Qian’s Journey to the Central Steppes

Episode 15: The Silk Roads – The Envoy Zhang Xian

Foundations of East Civilization

Dr Craig Benjamin (2013)

Film Review

Early in the second century BC, the Han emperor Wudi dispatched Zhang Xian as an envoy to the Yeuzhi Federation on the Central Steppes. Wudi’s goal was to seek an alliance with the Yeuzhi against the repeated raids of the Xiongu nomads to China’s north. Long time rivals of the Yeuzhi, the Xiongu had launched a series of brutal attacks that had forced them to migrate thousands of miles and eventually resettle (in 130 BC)in the Oxus River valley (presently northern border of Afghanistan).

Leaving China in 138 BC, it took Zhang Xian ten years to reach the Yuezhi in Bactria with his coterie of 100 men.* The first Chinese in history to cross the Himalayas, he was captured by the Xiongu as he headed through the Gonzu Corridor (controlled by the Xiongu) in the Gobi Desert.

After the Xiongu killed most of his men, Zhang Qian himself was transported to their headquarters on the northern steppes. After ten years of captivity, he  escaped, along with his Xiongu wife and their children. When he finally arrived in Bactria in 120 BC, the Yuezhi refused to ally with the Han Dynasty to confront the Xongnu.

The Xongnu rearrested Zhang Qian on his return trip in 125 BC. After being held for a year, he was released on the death of the Xiongu leader.

The reports he brought back to Wudi gave Chinese the first glimpse of settled regions to the west of China. With a population of a million people, Bactria had a well-developed agricultural economy (based on wheat, rice and grapes) with 100 cities and a well-developed trading economy. A subsequent envoy was very surprised to find goods from southern China (outside of Han control) that had found their way to Bactria via India.

In 124 BC, Zhang Qian set out again to seek a new route to India that didn’t traverse Xiongnu territory. This time Kunming tribes he encountered in the Himalayas murdered most of his men.

Zhang Qian’s initial trip rip to the Central Steppes would lead to hundreds of Chinese expeditions per year to Central Asia.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

 

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/5808638

Confucianism in the Early Han Empire

Episode 11: Contact with the West – the Early Han

Foundations of Eastern Civilization

Dr Craig Benjamin (2013)

Film Review

The first Han emperor Gaozu moved the capitol to Changon after a popular uprising destroyed the Qin capitol Xianyang. Later Han emperors would move it east to Lyoyang.

Ruling a vast empire stretching from Vietnam in the north to Korea in the south and west into Central Asia, Gaozu employed a bureaucracy of highly educated Confucian and Daoist scholars. In the year 2 AD census, the Han empire registered 80 commanderies,* 10 kingdoms and 1,587 prefectures (which were further subdivided into wards).

Immensely popular for reducing taxes on the peasants, the first Han emperor adopted Confucianism as official government policy in 140 BC. The last Han emperor Wudi would found a Confucian academy to educate government officials and initiate the world’s first civil service exam.

The Han Dynasty continued the harsh criminal penalties enacted under the Qin Dynasty and forced all subjects to register locally for conscription for military service and imperial construction crews. To finance his numerous military campaigns, Wudi began minting coins, confiscating lands he had gifted to his nobles and increasing taxes on business activity. This income supplemented growing revenues from the government monopoly on the highly lucrative salt and iron industries.

Wudi is also remembered for dispatching the famous Han envoy Zhang Qian to Central Asia to seek an alliance with the Yuezhi nomads against the aggressive Xiongu nomads to the north of China. The international contacts Zhang Qian initiated would lead to the development of the first Silk Road.

Eventually the fiscal stress caused by Wudi’s military expansionism led to marked peasant unrest and the downfall of the East Han Dynasty in 9 AD. Daoist scholars particularly expressed harsh criticism of corrupt government policies (eg government monopolies in critical industries, incessant wars of conquest and the growing power of palace eunuchs).

One of Wudi’s court officials Wang Mang seized power in 9 AD, declaring the short-lived Xin Dynasty. Wang was immensely popular with Chinese peasants for apportioning land to them under the communal “well field system”** and for establishing grain reserves to stabilize widely fluctuating grain prices.

Wang was overthrown in 23 AD by a group of nobles who resented his favoritism towards the peasants.

The Xin Dynasty was replaced by the East Han Dynasty, which ruled for nearly two centuries. Eunuchs were incredibly powerful under the East Han Dynasty and frequently arrested Confucian scholars for protesting government corruption.

Meanwhile Daoist principles of equal rights and land distribution spread throughout the peasantry, leading to the Yellow Turban Rebellion (184 – 204 AD). As the Han Dynasty collapsed, power eventually fell into the hands of local governments and warlords.

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*Provincial regions with decentralized administrative structures

**In the well–field system, one unit of land was divided among eight peasant families. A shared field was surrounded by eight fields, each worked by an individual family. The field in the center was worked jointly by the families for their noble lord.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/5808608/5808632

The Intertwined Role of Steppes Nomads and Early Chinese Civilization

 

Episode 2: Journey to the East

The Foundations of Eurasian Civilization

Dr Craig Benjamin (2013)

Film Review

This lecture is an introduction to the Benjamin’s 48 episode course The Foundations of Eurasian Civilization.

About half the course is devoted to China, considered the cradle of Eastern civilization. However it will also cover China’s immense influence on the West, beginning with the Confucian about efficient bureaucracy,* and the essential role of numerous Chinese inventions in the  industrialization of western society.

By the fall of the Tang dynasty in 740 AD, China had created the wealthiest and most powerful state (population two million) the world had ever seen, thanks to Chinese peasants creating the world’s most successful commercial farming system.

At the same time, the steppes nomads to the north of the first Chinese cities (and their ferocious horse archers – see Barbarian Empires of the Steppes) also had a massive influence on early Chinese civilization. Their repeated booty raids on China would lead the first Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huangdi (founder of the Qin/Ch’in Dynasty) to build the first border length wall in 221 BC.

Hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers were conscripted to build the wall, with tens of thousands losing their lives. The wall failed to stop the raids.

It would be the steppes nomads, and their domestication of the Bactrian camel, that made possible the Silk Roads, the first overland network of international trade.

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*American founding father Benjamin Franklin was a big fan of Confucius and adopted many of his ideas in developing his approach to democratic government.

Film can be viewed free with a library card at Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/5808608/5808610

Gunpowder and the Decline of the Steppes Nomads

 

Episode 34: Legacy of the Steppes

Barbarian Empires of the Steppes (2014)

Dr Kenneth Harl

Film Review

By 1500, the steppes nomads had ceased to play the strong historical role (as a military power and means to wealth creation and cultural exchange) they had played for 6,000 years.

In this final lecture, Harl credits their loss of power to the military revolution in Europe leading to hand held weapons and naval vessels fitted with heavy artillery. Ironically both these developments were made possibly by the Mongol Peace allowing the spread of Chinese black gunpowder to Europe.* Nomad horse archers were virtually powerless against firearms.

By 1500. the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran, Russia and the Mughal Empire were encroaching on the steppes, restricting nomad movement and exacting tribute along the Silk Road.

The Silk Road also declined in importance (as did the caravan cities) during the 16th century as European explorers discovered faster and safer sea routes to Europe and the Middle East. Harl explores in detail the Portuguese occupation of both coasts of Africa and India as they dominated the India Ocean. In the 17th century, they would be joined by the Dutch, English and French in their colonization of Africa and Asia.

In summing up the legacy of the steppes nomads, Harl points to the domestication of the horse and the invention of the wheel. Both, he feels, were as important as the agricultural revolution. Not only did the two inventions open up the steppes grasslands to human habitation, but they linked the steppes nomads to the prehistoric sedentary civilizations arising along major Middle East and Asian rivers.

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*Ironically this was one of the few Eastern cultural innovations to make it as far as Europe.

Film can be viewed free with a library card.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/5694984/5695059

Revival of the Silk Road Under Kublai Khan

Episode 30: Pax Mongolica and Cultural Exchange

Barbarian Empires of the Steppes (2014)

Dr Kenneth Harl

Film Review

Following Kublai Khan’s conquest of China, the Mongols imposed a Pax Mongolica* across the steppes, which ended centuries-long warring between nomad tribes. The resulting peace led to a revival of the Silk Road and renewed prosperity of both states and nomads involved in the Silk Road trade. It also resulted in unprecedented cultural exchange. Exchanges between Persia and China about geography and map-making enabled both kingdoms to produce maps that were far better than those Columbus used to explore the New World. The Persians also shared their knowledge of medicine (from Hindu sources) with China, as well as citrus and grape cultivation. While the Chinese shared their knowledge of tea, black pepper and cinnamon with the Muslim world.

Under Kublai Khan, the Mongols built great cities and set up lavish courts in many of the regions they conquered. He used captive Muslims and Christians to administer cities in northern China and captive Chinese to administer the Ilkhanate Empire (comprising modern-day Iran and parts of Azerbaijan and Turkey).

Most of the Golden Horde (northwestern sector of Mongol Empire – see Mongol Invasion of China) converted to Islam in the 13th century. Although the Ilkhanate abandoned Sunni Islam for Shi’a Sufism, Buddhism was also an important religion there until the empire collapsed in 1335.

Kublai Khan’s conversion to Buddhism (although he was equally tolerant of Daoism and Islam) resulted in its spread across the eastern steppes. The Uighurs, however, abandoned Buddhism for Islam. Most of Transoxiana also became Muslim.

Thanks to improvements in Silk Road security, it now became possible for European Christians to send envoys to Muslim courts for the first time, while Chinese porcelain became widely traded across the Muslim world. There was a simultaneous expansion in sea routes connecting Europe.

China shared their knowledge of block printing (invented under the Song Dynasty) with the Ilkhans, who used it to produce paper money. Under Kublai Khan’s Yuan Dynasty, gunpowder technology (discovered under the Han Dynasty) also spread across the steppes and into Europe.

This would be the first major eastern technology to take hold in Europe, leading the English to invent the cannon in the mid-14th century and hand held small arms in the 17th century. It was thanks to these technologies that they conquered the world over the next two centuries.

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*Russian historians refer to the Pax Mongolica as the Mongol Yoke, owing to the massive slaughter of civilians during their conquest of the Russian principalities. 500,000 total were either killed or died of exposure and starvation (after the Mongols destroyed their homes and crops).

**Harl briefly discusses the Venetian explorer Marco Polo who traveled to China via the Silk Road in 1271 and served 23 years in Kublai Khan’s court. Because there are no references to the explorer in Chinese sources, Harl believes he likely served as a minor civil servant and exaggerated his role in his writings. His book The Travels of Marco Polo inspired Columbus’s voyage to the new world.

The film can be viewed with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/5694984/5695051

The Conquests of Genghis Khan

 

Episode 26: The Conquests of Genghis Khan

Barbarian Empires of the Steppes (2014)

Dr Kenneth Harl

Film Review

Within a few decades of taking power, Genghis Khan had assembled the largest eastern steppes confederation since the 2nd century BC.

In 1206 he reorganized the Mongol army based mainly on skill, rather than tribal affiliation as prior nomad leaders had done. He was especially skilled at moving troops and supplies long distances. For example, in 1218 he would move 35,000 men from the Mongolian capitol in the caravan city Karakarum to attack the Kara-Khitan Empire.*

In 1209 he invaded Xi Xia and took control of the Silk Road. To save themselves from obliteration, the kingdom signed a treaty agreeing to pay tribute and provide Chinese translators and engineers to develop the Mongols’ siege technology.

In 1211 he invaded the Jin Empire and took control of of their rich millet and wheat  and their manufacture of armaments and tools.

In 1218 he conquered Kara-Khitan, providing his first major challenge to the Muslim Empire. According to Harl, Arabs in Baghdad welcomed the conquest because they were fed up with Turkish rule. After capturing a few fit males captive as slave solders and shipping the prettiest women back to the steppes for his harem, he decimated the rest of the civilian population. Contemporaneous historical accounts refer to landscapes of bleached bones and pyramids of severed heads.

By 1220-21 all the lands of eastern Islam (Transoxiana, Persia and parts of Afghanistan and southern Russia) were under Mongol control.

Genghis Khan died in 1227, appointing his third son Ogidai as his successor.

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*Consisting of Persia and Transoxiana (civilization located in lower Central Asia roughly corresponding to modern-day eastern Uzbekistan, western Tajikistan, parts of southern Kazakhstan, parts of Turkmenistan and southern Kyrgyzstan).

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/5694984/5695043

10th Century AD: Steppes Nomads Conquer Northern China

Episode 27: Manchurian Warlords and Song Emperors

Barbarian Empires of the Steppes (2014)

Dr Kenneth Harl

Film Review

In this lecture, Harl focuses on the steppes nomads who ruled northern China following the collapse of the Tang Dynasty in 907 AD (two centuries before the birth of Genghis Khan).

Harl focuses on three major tribes, the Khitans, the Jurchens and the Xi Xia.

The Khitans, who ruled northern China between 907 and 926, originated from the Manchurian forests prior to adopting a nomadic lifestyle. Calling themselves the Liao Dynasty, they conquered 16 Chinese provinces (including the densely-populated region around Beijing) and ruled as Chinese-style emperors. They simultaneously extended their authority over other nomadic tribes on the adjacent steppes while ruling an estimated 10-15 million Chinese subjects.

Over time, the Khitan emperors came into increasing conflict with the Song Empire ruling southern China. In 1005, they signed a treaty establishing a boundary between the Liao and Song Dynasties that required the Song emperor to pay them tribute.

The Liao Dynasty collapsed when the Jurchens, originating from the steppes north of Manchuria, formed an alliance with the Song Dynasty to attack the Khitans simultaneously from the Northeast and South. After renaming themselves the Jin Dynasty, the Jurchens penetrated a long way into southern China forcing the Song court to relocate further south and pay them tribute. By 1125, the Jin Dynasty ruled the Chinese heartland, a total of 30-40 million Chinese (one-third of the Chinese population).

The Khitans migrated west following their defeat by China and overran the Islamic Seljuk Turk Federation and all the caravan cities in Transoxiana. This ultimately led to to the collapse of the Seljuk-run Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, which once again came under Arab control.*

Although they only occupied a small region between the Khitan Federation and the Uighur** Federation in the Tarim Basin, the nomadic Xi XIa Federation was politically important because it controlled the Silk Road and (after adopting Chinese Script) served as an intermediary between the Khitans and the Song Dynasty.

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*See The Multiethnic Origins of the Muslim Conqueset

**See 9th Century AD: Mass Migration of Uighur Turks to China Leads to Rise of Seljuk Turks on the Steppes

Film can be viewed free with a library card at Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/5694984/5695039

The Arrival of Khazarians on the Steppes and Their Conversion to Judaism

Episode 17: The Khazar Khagans

Barbarian Empires of the Steppes (2014)

Dr Kenneth Harl

Film Review

This lecture mainly concerns the conversion by the Khazars to Judaism in the late 8th and early 9th century and their role in the Byzantine wars against the Arab Caliphate.

According to Harl, the Khazars were semi-nomadic peoples descended from the western Gökturks who established a major commercial empire in the late 6th century AD. The Khazars were heavily involved in providing amber, fur and Slavic slaves to Arabs trading on the northern branch of the Silk Road. This brought them into continual contact with Jewish banking and merchandising houses that stretched from Muslim Spain across North Africa, Egypt and Syria.

The Khazars formed major alliances with the eastern Gökturk Khanate and the Byzantines in attacking Sassanid Empire.* In 705 AD, the Khazars also helped Justinian II regain his throne after he was overthrown in a civil war.

Muslim armies first became a threat to the Byzantine empire in 634 AD, after they crossed from the Arabian Peninsula into Syria (then a Byzantine province). Muslim armies eventually overthrew the Sassanid Empire, as well as Byzantine-controlled Syria, Egypt and North Africa.

The western Gökturks allied with the Byzantine empire against the Muslim Caliphate, while the Eastern Khanate remained under Chinese control. Eventually the entire European steppes would come under Muslim control.

At the end of the 9th century the Magyars, who spoke Finno-Ugrian, migrated to Hungary; the Pechunecs migrated to the south Russian steppes; and the Rus (Scandinavians from Sweden) became prominent in the Volga slave trade.

The Pechunecs, Rus and Byzantines eventually formed alliance against the Khazar Khanate, leading it to collapse in the 10th century.

Harl disputes the widespread belief that the majority of European Jews are descended from Khazars rather than Israelites. He alludes to DNA testing revealing the vast majority of European Jews have Middle East DNA.

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*See The Political Forces Controlling the Steppes When Rome Fell

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/5694984/5695020