 Welcome everyone and aren't we blessed with sunshine today. A couple of things. First, please turn off your cell phones. Second is that next Friday is the first of the month, believe it or not, and so there will be coffee and goodies here at about 1.15 before the lecture. The next thing I want to talk about is the fact that at the end of our fall semester we always have what we call a winter or a holiday luncheon, and that is going to be on the 30th of November. It's the week after Thanksgiving so maybe you'll be ready to eat something then. And it's going to start at 12.30 and you'll need reservations. There is a charge and next week we will begin signing up people who want to come to the reservation, to the luncheon. It's really a very friendly kind of gathering and after the luncheon there will be the lecture at 2 o'clock. So now Sandy will introduce the speaker. I want to introduce Professor William Mears from the Department of Art History at UVM. He is the Richard and Adder Green and Gold Professor of Art History at UVM. He's been working there for 30 years if you can believe anybody works, I guess. Everybody does try to work that long, more or less. He is an art historian and ancient and early medieval art. He teaches classes and courses in Near Eastern, Egyptian, Greek, Roman and early medieval art as well as ancient Central Asia. He attended as an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley and graduate studies at Brown University. And he was a visiting professor in Brazil for a partial semester. He's the author of many books and he's now editing a book on Central Asia and today he's here to talk about the Silk Road from early times to the present. So welcome Professor Mears. Can you hear me? Everyone can hear me? Okay, we've all reached that point, I know. I have to constantly tell my students, no I don't hear from this ear, it's this ear that you need to speak to. So it's a real pleasure to be here again. This is I think the fourth time I've spoken before this group and I enjoy the fact that I'm going to speak a second time on material from Central Asia. The first time I spoke several years ago it was about the issues of the rediscovery as it were of Central Asia and why I thought it had become a popular topic. And today I'm not going to give you a full history of Central Asia from ancient to modern I'm actually going to concentrate on the ancient but depending on our time we'll see whether I can make connections with the modern. The lights are out, I have shut most of the shades. It is just after lunch, the slides are on, yes, you may sleep. You may snore because it won't bother me, it may bother the person next to you. What you may not do is you may not open up your phone to watch the Doctor Who episodes you still need to see. So Central Asia has become an interesting topic in the last few years, really the last couple of decades and I think there are a couple of very specific reasons why. One of them is the Afghan War which has risen the profile of the region even if not the basic knowledge about it. And the second is the growing concern with China's engagement with it particularly the Belt and Road Initiative which has already seen fruition in things like the Karakoram Highway and the beginning to extend the railway linkages. So it is a concern particularly to the United States which has been rather late in taking an interest in this region and I'm not actually sure in the present circumstances we're doing much better but that's another topic. The Central Asian region that I'm concerned about today is the area defined basically by Kazakhstan and the north Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan which form the heartland of Central Asia the western province of Xinjiang which is China's westernmost province the area of Afghanistan and south into Pakistan I won't talk about it for my purposes today but really when one talks about Central Asia one also needs to include the southern Caucasus the regions of Georgia and Armenia which have long been involved in this region and one really can't leave out Iran which has always been a major player in all of this. But if you notice there is a kind of almost T-shaped to this and that reflects the reality of the geography of this region what you are looking at is an area defined by mountains so the area over here, the area of modern day Afghanistan is the Hindukush mountains opposite the Hindukush are the western flanks of the Himalayas which move into the Karakorum and then north of that are the Pamirs which define sort of the southern region this whole area is the Pamir region the area of the Kunun mountains which basically are up here rather which define the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau which is in the Tibet right in here these mountains basically define what is a T-form which then at the top is this group of countries up here they are also defined by deserts because if the mountains define one aspect the deserts define the other and the deserts are extraordinary problematic we have the Taklamakan desert which is about 85% of Shenzhang province and is the driest or second driest place on earth depending on what you feel about the Atacama desert of southern Peru and Chile we have the Kizokum and Karakum deserts of what is modern day Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan we have the Mongolian Plateau which is somewhat desert in the Gobi area and the desert of the Thar which is defined by this area where the Indus River comes down all of this is capped by the great grasslands that form the steppes which run basically from the Hungarian plains straight across to Mongolia and are interrupted by only two things the Euro mountains of Russia basically about here and the Tian Shan and Altai mountains of China which are right about here otherwise this area is a vast grassland but the grassland varies on what part of the steppes you are in now what I want to do is I want to spend my time exploring the dynamics of the ancient Silk Road but I also need to make very clear to you that the Silk Road doesn't exist there was no such thing as a Silk Road that is a 19th century invention of a German geographer that's convenient and a shorthand way of speaking about trade routes and commerce that moved across basically the Eurasian continent but which came in many ways to define Central Asia because that's the nodal point from which things either moved in and then moved out Silk was but one item on that an important item at certain moments as I'll show you but not by any means the most important and depending on the time it wasn't even part of the picture at many points what I want to do is deconstruct a group of garments from a burial that I think helped to explain and show you the incredible the incredible number of forces that came to play that defined the ancient region so my burial is from a place called Ying Pan in the very western or eastern edge of the Takla Makhan Desert now the Takla Makhan Desert is as I said one of the driest places on earth and because of that dryness it preserves organic materials and because of that we have a tremendous amount of textile material that has been unearthed in the last really the last hundred years but particularly more recently under very very good Chinese excavations the Ying Pan Man as you see him here and more or less as he was discovered was found in about mid-1960s it has become more and more something we know about as he has begun to tour as he was here in the United States about five years ago the items that define him are this kaftan which you see here and these pants or trousers the kaftan is wool it's what we call a compound weave and it's a rather incredibly complicated compound weave with mirror imagery so that the imagery on the exterior is gold on a red ground and when you open it up it is a red image on the gold ground but they mirror each other exactly it's the kind of weaving that requires a skilled weaver who understands how not only to work what is in essence the horizontal upright loom but also understands how to create mechanical repetitions within that loom so it is a rather experienced and very sophisticated weaver who made this the pants are silk and I'll return to the pants a little later because it is the kaftan that interests me at the moment now the kaftan is a very specific garment it is a kind of coat as you can see in this case but that coat carries meaning or certainly did in ancient Central Asia it is the exact same garment that was worn by the kings of the Kushan empire as I show you here on a coin and it was worn in many ways in opposition to what people within the empire wore because the Kushan rulers were conquering rulers of the area that stretched basically from Uzbekistan through Afghanistan down into Pakistan and into northern India all of this was sedentary lands that the Kushans had conquered and they chose to dress at least officially on their coinage and in their statuary with this kaftan and to understand why they did it you have to understand what the kaftan meant and why they might have wanted to use it and by extension why the yingpan man may be dressed in it so when we look for representations of the earliest kaftans we find them interestingly enough on Greek vase painting these are 5th century vase paintings made in Athens the Athenian who made these and they're two different painters one we can identify the other is not known particularly but the one on the far side, the right side is by a very well known Greek vase painter both of these are clearly responding to something they've never seen but something they've heard about and are using the dress as a way of referencing the person and what they're referencing is a Scythian warrior the Scythians were the nomads with whom the Greeks had the greatest contact the Scythians existed to the north of the Black Sea an area the Greeks had colonized so Greeks and Scythians regularly interacted sometimes in a positive and sometimes not so positive way but the Scythians had become known to the Greeks and from that source the vase painters in Athens who had never ventured into the Black Sea were able to create an image which any Greek would understand and in fact this image traveled to the west because this particular pot was found in Italy and not in Greece so we know that the image of the warrior of the nomad warrior dressed in a kaftan in this case more of a jerkin it is the origin of the kaftan had already become very closely associated with nomads and clearly it has to do with the fact that you can ride in this costume it is built for riding but to fully appreciate the nomad end of this we need to understand a little about who the nomads were and for that we need a little more history because nomads don't appear out of nowhere nomads are by nature people who make their living at least in Central Asia by herding what they herd are sheep, cattle, and goats probably about the fourth millennium BCE there were already people occupying venturing slightly out into the steplands herding their animals but always returning back to the river valleys particularly during the winter months the reason was simple the herd animals cannot forage for themselves in the winter neither the cattle nor the sheep nor the goats can paw through the snow and ice or they won't they have to be fed and so one had to move them back to where you had fodder for them that means you never went very far onto the steppes at some point and the archaeological evidence is beginning to show it fairly clearly at about the fourth millennium BCE the steppe people began to realize they had another domestic animal potentially and that was the horse the wild horses of the steppes had been around but they began to tame them we can find this in the archaeological record of one particular site called bowtide now we think that they did this in order to have a food source because horses unlike the other animals actually can break through the ice and snow and will feed themselves in the winter the initial purpose of using them as feed or as a source of food seems to have led at some point though exactly when we can't say for certain they began to ride them the riding did something to change nomad herding because once you ride you have much more control over a larger area you are quite far or higher than your herds which means you can take your herds further out into the steppes does they move their herds out into the steppes they also discovered that the steppes can be exploited if you go in a large enough way around them so that you can move your herds all winter long or rather all year long by moving them to different pastures at different times you still have to put something up against the possibility of no-grass availability in the lower elevations in the winter but still properly managed, the steppes will yield a year-round source of food but you have to expand on to the steppes proper the horse was the first step but horses only allowed herders to move out to the steppes to become really nomadic you need to bring a family and that requires something else the culture we think that did this was a culture called the Yamna culture the Yamna culture as you see them here on this map were neighbors to a culture to the south which we call the Maikop culture these are named for sites that we have no idea what these people called themselves none of these people wrote, we have no records of them we identify them by their archeological remains and by certain kinds of what we call assemblages which become diagnostic of their existence the Maikop culture in the modern Caucasus region emerged probably in the third millennium BCE and what is important about it for our purposes is the tombs of certain individuals in the Maikop culture contain objects which we can identify the source for they come from the southern part of Mesopotamia they come from the region that we identify as the Sumerian culture they're very specific and very diagnostic in their presence in this region tells us that the people of the Maikop culture in some way engage with the people of Mesopotamia with the Sumerian culture which is first urban culture that we possess at least in the Eurasian well actually on the Eurasian continent to be quite frank the question is what were the people of the Maikop culture supplying to the people of the Sumerian region that would have been worth it to them to send up high status goods to pay for it this is a world without coinage more and more we think the evidence is that the Maikop people are engaged with the Yamna people and they've introduced the Yamna people to something they've introduced the Yamna people to a new breed of sheep this sheep will emerge as the woolly sheep long staple wool quality of wool that could not be obtained in southern Mesopotamia which is a desert region which works with desert sheep Mesopotamians seem to have been extraordinarily good weavers and the first real evidence that we have for long distance trade of a commodity is the commodity in the trade in finished wool it comes out of Mesopotamia's traded into the area of modern day Turkey we think, or people are coming to think I should say that it's the Maikop people who began to supply them at least initially with a kind of sheep that can only be bred in an area that's cold that wool, possibly in finished form possibly in raw form is what they're sending south this is interesting for a couple of reasons to introduce a theme that is going to remain on this topic for this talk which is that nothing happens on the Silk Road without interactions one group influences another and the second is that hybridization is a standard part of this things also change and commerce is a driving force but it is probably from Mesopotamia that the last part of this comes in which is the cart the cart once introduced into the steps becomes the vehicle by which you can move an entire family out you hook a horse to it or better yet by this point a Bactrian camel because this is the period when the Bactrian camel the two humped camel is first domesticated to pull the cart out and how do you protect the cart and turn it into a moving home that long stapled wool that long wool felt beautifully and any of you that have ever felt it no different wools felt differently this felt to create thick pads of felt that when draped over a cart give it the effect of an RV that's how these people moved out how do we know? partially we find the evidence of the carts and partially we're beginning to see the movement right onto the steps which means the families are coming we now have probably by the middle of the third millennium BC a completely nomadic society which is moving dependent on herds herding horses herding cattle herding this long staple wool sheep woolly sheep and goats and beginning to exploit it fully that's an interesting story but it gets even more interesting sometime around 2000 the dates vary but we'll say 2000 one of these cultures on the edge of the steps a sedentary group but clearly engaged with the step people does something to the cart we know this because we find it in their burials they turn the cart into a chariot the chariot is a step invention this and with it the domesticated horse spreads and it spreads rapidly if the 2000 date is good then the chariot is into the ancient Near East by about 1800 BC it is into China certainly by about 1200 BC it spreads south into India and it spreads we think in a certain way those Maikop people right here we think they're related to all of us they we think are the proto-Europeans they are the people that speak the mother language from which most of modern European languages the Iranian languages the Indian north Indian languages and yes three of the languages that are western part of the Takla Makhan all descend they begin to move they migrate in all directions and with them comes the chariot and the reason we know that is because the chariot is referenced in the literary works that we assign to this period so when you read the earliest Indian literature we possess that we think reflects the moment of the invasion of the Indo-Europeans they come with chariots when Homer speaks of the world of Greece and it is the world of the Indo-Europeans he is speaking of the chariot is there the chariot becomes one of the features that now dominates the Eurasian continent and it is basically a product of Central Asia a product of the steplands that moves out but that doesn't explain the costume that doesn't explain anything about a kaftan because you certainly don't need a kaftan to write a chariot so something else is at work here something happens in Central Asia the date is not firm 900 BCE maybe a thousand tombs tombs up in the all time mountains those mountains that block the movement of the grasslands basically separating Mongolia from Kazakhstan some tombs impressive tombs large-mounted tombs that we call kergans inside them some incredibly rich findings and with them the evidence for writing we know this we know that when the chariot comes in it comes in with the domesticated horse but we also know that writing is not acceptable so the chariot carries both the use of warfare in basically the ancient Near East and in China but writing is not acceptable we have at least one document that clearly indicates that a king who rode on a horse was engaged in an activity that was unacceptable so writing is not an acceptable option when the chariot is there the chariot is the status symbol and also the platform for warfare something has to change that and that change occurs in the nomad lands when the nomads decide to switch from using carts and chariots as their vehicle of mobility to actually using the horse primarily from mobility not for herding, though they continue to use the horse for herding and to do something one last thing they need they need another invention and the invention is a new type of bow it's what we call the composite recurve bow composite because it's made of more than one material and it curves in on itself so that its power to thrust is much stronger they, the nomadic people of the far eastern region learn how to use that bow they learn how to use it to ride simultaneously and with that they move to the west where they become the Scythians of the Greek region in the Socas of the Persian region and they wreak havoc over the sedentary peoples to the south how do we know they begin to identify themselves by their riding and oh yes, by the costume that goes with riding because a Greek artist was commissioned by one of these high-ranking elite members of this society to make this gold comb for his funerary purposes and what you can see is a Scythian warrior dressed in a jacket with trousers what is the prototype for that kaftan engaged with another warrior also a Scythian warrior we happen to think this is a narrative engaged in warfare based on the horse so why does it matter it matters because this garb becomes synonymous with power and with force and with the ability to put others at bay the nomad story which continues all the way to the Mongol period is a story of constantly moving into the sedentary cultures of the south and disrupting them there's a message in the choice of the kaftan but what about the silk trousers the trousers, yes reference part of the garb of a mounted nomadic warrior but the silk is intriguing so it's one of those moments when the nomads have disrupted the order of the sedentary south here's China Han China the first great empire roughly a 600 year reign to their north a nomad group the Xiangnu a highly hierarchical structure powerful force demanding of China at least from her borderlands constant tribute constant artifacts going north including princesses the Xiangnu move to the west and disrupt another group the Xiangnu we're not sure maybe Mongolian maybe not but the people they disrupt we know the Yuichi, they're Iranian they're pushed over here right about into there the Chinese emperor Wu Di has an idea why not form an alliance with the Yuichi the Yuichi have been pushed out by the Xiangnu an alliance with the Han Chinese and together they'll fight the Xiangnu and push them back securing the border to the north but the Yuichi aren't interested but his ambassador finds something right in there a valley still a contested valley to this day called the Fergana Valley and what does he find? Horses Horses that sweat blood possible reasons why that are not important to us but they identify a very very rapid horse a horse that the Chinese have never seen before a horse that they can use very much use against the Xiangnu but it requires a change it requires the move from being chariot based to cavalry based the cavalry is now on the forefront we first saw these horses you may have seen it the great 1970 exhibition of Chinese archaeological artifacts the first time that we had seen things coming out of China since the 1920s and all of us were stunned when we saw the great horse the gansu horse who stands on top of a bird he is what the Chinese call the flying horse once introduced these horses change everything the chariot ceases to be an article of war and it is a cavalry that now takes over and you can see it even in a Han Chinese wall painting where it is the cavalry or the mounted warriors who surround the chariot which is used merely as a status symbol the power of this change gives the Chinese the ability to push the Xiangnu back but it also changes the economy of Central Asia because while the emperor Wu Di initially uses force to get the horses he soon finds there is a much better thing he can buy them with silk so to understand the power of silk and why it was what it was you have to understand what the Chinese did to it so lots of paces can produce silk silk was even produced in the Mediterranean because lots of caterpillars weave silk cocoons there is nothing unusual about it there were several places where you could find silk and it was used to make cloth what the Chinese did was to control production and they began certainly by the Han if not earlier to control this by demanding silk of a certain quality to be made in order to pay taxes so the entire country was engaged in producing silk now to make Chinese silk you must first isolate the caterpillar so you do that by basically collecting the eggs or forcing the malls to lay eggs in one particular spot basically in a basket so you have them and you keep all your eggs from one mall the bombeck's moray mall then you feed the caterpillars on one specific thing carefully selected white mulberry leaves where there is no tannin you may not give a leaf that is blemished you then feed and let the caterpillars rest and you keep them very sedated and they munch away and grow quite rapidly and then they weave a silk cocoon now what makes any animal that weaves a cocoon and it's true of spiders that use silk to weave their webs is they weave it as a continuous strand so when this caterpillar weaves the cocoon it is a continuous strand of silk filament that runs for about a kilometer so the trick is you don't let the moth emerge you stop the moth except for the ones you're going to use as it were for breeding purposes you kill the caterpillar you boil it which is what you see happening up here you boil it and then you unravel that single filament that runs for a kilometer with no break then you ply filaments together because the filament is far too fine to use minimum of three up to as many as twelve filaments to form a thread and what you have is a continuous unblemished white thread of pure silk now the thing about silk that differentiates it from any of the other fibers available flax from which you get linen cotton even wool though it shares with wool this feature it's a protein fiber and when you dye a protein fiber the dye adheres to it unlike cotton where you'll lose a lot of the dye in washing the dye applied to silk and to wool adheres there's a particular reason why this is the case that means you can get luscious deep color on both wool and on silk but you can do something to silk you can flatten the fibers by polishing it and then silk does something that no other fiber does maybe my shirt will do it for you or in my Chinese silk shirt you see how it reflects the light it bounces light back it doesn't absorb it the unpolished portion of this shirt is absorbing which is why you're noticing it comes in flex on the shirt unpolished silk will absorb the same way wool will but polished polished silk bounces light back and you can weave a variety of different kinds of textures depending on what gauge of thread you use wool has no chance to compete cotton no chance certainly linen is useless silk has a vibrancy you can still see it this is over 2,000 years old and it still has that power to direct light the silk can be used both to weave and as a top example shows to embroider so what woody did and what successive emperors following him did was they flooded Central Asia with silk that silk had to go places to be valuable it had to be used it could be used certainly within the context of garments within the region but it's real value lay and developing markets for it elsewhere one of those markets was to be the Roman Empire the Romans we are told first experienced silk and its power to reflect light in a very famous battle the general Crassus foolishly stupidly decided to fight the Parthians he engaged in a war he started sounds suspiciously similar but that's a different story and when he went to fight them his legions the pride of the Roman Empire were blinded by the banners that were unfurled by the Parthians the Parthians were buyers of Chinese silk and their banners seem to have reflected the light back to the way the Romans had never seen it's a good excuse for losing a battle but still it tells you something about the power of this new material the Chinese had long used silk banners in warfare and that's what you see here from a Han tomb but clearly the Parthians had decided to borrow this idea silk became one of the forces but there was something else that would move silk in India in the fifth sixth century BCE a new religion had emerged the religion is Buddhism and it was one of many competing faiths that took shape during that particular moment in Indian history and there are lots of social reasons why it began to take shape it was one as I say of many and rather minor probably until the third century BCE when the Emperor Shoka the first great unifier of much of India took an interest in the faith perhaps converted it isn't quite clear to us but whatever he did he promoted the faith and by promoting it he spread it widely and he spread it with imperial patronage it would not have been particularly important to our story I suspect if the Kushans who later took over portions of Ashoka's earlier empire and then spread or connected that portion of India north all the way up into what is modern day Uzbekistan if those rulers had not also decided to patronize Buddhism again not necessarily becoming Buddhist but deciding that there were political reasons to patronize it Buddhism certainly spreads north from India into the region of modern day Afghanistan we can still find there are magnificent Buddhist remains in Afghanistan and Pakistan and north all the way up into as I say the region of modern Uzbekistan now as Buddhism moves it takes with it the concept of the stupa the stupa is the monument that marks it marks technically a burial spot and marks in theory the burial spot of the remains of the Buddha himself but as this faith moves north it sometimes also marks the burial or spot of something important associated either with the Buddha himself or with one of the other saintly figures that emerge as a feature of Buddhism in simple terms the Buddhist stupa becomes a part of the sacred landscape that exists from northern India all the way up into Uzbekistan and the stupa is part of something larger it is part of a monastery because the Buddhist faith moves through monasteries Buddhist monks, missionaries establish themselves, build monasteries around the centers for stupas but there is within Buddhism the concept of the appropriate the appropriate items to associate with the remains of the Buddha what we would call in the west relics of the Buddha one of those will be silk to wrap the items within a reliquary with Chinese silk this finest of all silks to drape the stupa itself in silk what Buddhism does is to take a fabric and work it in to a religious hierarchy of objects and to make it a central feature something necessary for the existence of the architecture that frames it the move of Buddhism is on its own right an interesting one but of course the question becomes who moves it yes patronized by the Kushan emperors beginning 1st century BCE and continuing perhaps through roughly the 3rd century early 3rd century CE yes they patronized it and some of the monasteries are clearly the work of imperial patronage but not the bulk no there is something else that is moving Buddhism so there are two types of Buddhism for our purposes there are more than that but two there is the very very old traditional Buddhism which we call Theravada Buddhism practice today in Sri Lanka and in Thailand primarily and in east south eastern Asia and then there is a different kind of Buddhism I mean they are all related but nonetheless a different one that has emerged slightly later called Mahayana Buddhism both types move north but Mahayana Buddhism has a very special quality to it it is a particularly good kind of religion for merchants it is the religion in which you can earn merit by giving gifts to a monastery sounds suspiciously like a Catholicism of the Middle Ages and that is what happens the great benefactors of many of these monasteries are merchants and I was reminded this morning as I left of something which is so minor and yet so telling I was freezing as I came out to warm up my car and then I reminded myself oh yes all of these people did most of their traveling in the winter yes they would rather cross the mountains in the winter because bad as snow might be it is better than raging torrents of water that come out of those glacial rivers in the spring and summer the deserts may not be happy places in the middle of winter but they are a lot better than they are in the summer most of these people did travel during the cold winter seasons this was difficult demanding and scary work and I tell my students you never know where you're going to be inspired by something so I went to a movie I went visually fitting you into the International Film Festival that's how important this talk was to me I'm giving up a film so I went to a film the other night called Makala which is all about charcoal making in Africa did anyone see it? oh good, a couple of you it is a heartbreaking story of what it is to make your living basically burning down the forest in order to produce the charcoal that most people need and as this poor fellow loads up his bike with what looks like about 300 pounds of charcoal in bags he sets off to the big city 50 kilometers away he's a single individual and though the image of Silk Road trade is always big caravans the documentation suggests that's not the way merchants moved in many cases they moved in very small bounds and may often have moved alone so that they were quite at risk when they did this so my fellow with his bike of charcoal finally hits the main road paved except that on the main road are all of the towns that every time he goes through the towns he's extorted for the privilege of coming through the town a bag of charcoal here a bag of charcoal there to pay for the privilege that must have been exactly what it was like to be a merchant on the Silk Road if the bandits didn't get you if the mountains didn't kill you the deserts didn't burn you the towns would take what you had if they could so yes a religion that promises you some protection above all the great figure of that religion the great Guan Yin figure Avalokrishivara the great Bodhisattva of compassion to whom you can call in moments of need yes that's a religion you patronize and here they are here are the Central Asian patrons of the great Buddhist cave monastery at Kizil in the northern route of the Taklamakan and notice what they're wearing kaftans but there's something else Central Asians just couldn't rely on China for their silk they stole the knowledge oh yes the Chinese sent their princesses to marry the local princess and one wrote to his future bride if you want silk garments you better bring the raw material and so she did so we're told she loaded her crown or her headdress with silk cocoons brought them to her town where silk was being manufactured probably from as early as the first century CE silk in Central Asia becomes a major product of many of the oasis towns of the Taklamakan region and that silk becomes so good and the patterns that the Central Asians put onto that silk that it is trans-shipped back to China where it becomes an item of exotic use you've heard about this, no? it's called the theft of intellectual property it's very old and very well established so silk comes down the Buddhist path and ends up back in India India has silk India's silk is what we call tasa silk raw silk coming out of basically collected cocoons that are collected in the forest after the maws have emerged it's a beautiful silk if you like silk and you like tasa silk but it dies terribly unevenly and it has no sheen because it's almost impossible to shine it is a kind of silk that the Indians used but when the elite Indians began to look at Chinese silk they quickly moved to that so that there is Chinese silk on the Indian market that has nothing to do with Buddhism and eventually that silk makes it to the western ports of India the ports that line this region right in here particularly this one at Barbarico that is where Roman traders end up out of Alexandria coming down the block coming down the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean and straight over here then up to here they're here for pepper primarily pepper and gemstones but when they discover the silk it comes right back with them so the silk in the Roman world is coming in over land and by sea ending up largely in the markets of the eastern Mediterranean then being trans-shipped into Rome itself what do the Romans offer in place gold coinages the Indians want gold and Rome pays a lot of gold to get all sorts of good objects but they also have a commodity that is particularly valuable not to them but to the eastern world blown translucent glass neither China nor India nor anywhere in Central Asia can yet produce it they don't have the technology and it takes over it's the same with the beads with which the Dutch bought Manhattan something of no value in one place has great value in another here we find not only glass vessels but in this case a painted vessel produced we think in Alexandria one of three which seem to have been valued enough that they were kept in a kind of treasury and which are decorated with imagery that is pure Mediterranean classical imagery so let's consider what's decorating that kaftan so my picture is bad it shows you this as the main pattern and that really isn't facing goats separated by pomegranate trees no this is the pattern that I'm interested in which is up here and repeated down here these are little cupid figures what we call eros eroti battling one another it's a wonderful late classical form something you would have seen in Greek cities in Asia Minor it's the kind of thing that you would find decorating the temple at Didima something that decorate has a decorative band in different places it was particularly popular in the Roman world where we're not in the Roman world in fact we're not even close to the Roman world in date and not only is this motif a classical motif it's been extraordinarily well executed this weaver I told you this is a weaver who can make a compound weave with mere imagery so that to begin with tells me I'm dealing with a highly skilled technical weaver but this is a weaver who knows a pattern that has no place in the world in which he or she works and not only knows how to do it but knows how to execute it with flawless precision because this is beautifully done and though you have to take my word for it trying to turn a curve in this manner and create a form that works in space like this is not easy for any weaver to do so the question is why and under what circumstances was this made so there is a Greek source Alexander the Great did indeed conquer Central Asia he conquered all the way to the edge of India he did take the territory over and upon his death this region Central Asia and its northern part and in fact that entire corridor space down to the northern part of India actually became part of a Greek Kingdom the Seleucid Kingdom about the middle of the third century BCE the northern portion of that region a place called Bakhtria separated itself became its own independent Greek Kingdom with rulers we know the names of them and its whole succession, dynasties they built cities of which one has been found alas it is now as far as anyone knows in complete ruins it is not in a part of Afghanistan that anyone goes to now for archaeological purposes but thankfully when the French dug it they dug it well and published it well so we can still use it it is a site of Aikhanum and though there is much about this site that is not to the eyes of many of us really Greek there is enough of it that we know that the underlying structure is responding to Greek forms not only does the city in terms of its origins and sort of spatial arrangements reflect Greek forms but the coinage that the kings of this empire struck is among the finest Greek style coinage we possess they are always if you are a coin collector this is what you want it will cost you a mint but it is worth it and decorating the city at least there are a few pieces and again my slide is not good a few pieces are very clearly Greek style Hellenic style sculpture that decorated at least in this case one of the grave monuments so yes the Greek presence and that Greek presence took the form of a material culture leaving behind a legacy sure sure that explains it well yes and no remember the Euichy the Euichy the travel because they were pushed out by the Shang Niu guess what they did they destroyed that empire and they had nothing to do with it and from them came their descendants because the Kushans are one of the tribes of the Euichy the Kushans had absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with Greek culture other than perhaps a memory of destroying it and a memory of their nomadic heritage because that is what the costume that the king and this is Kanishka is referring to but they were promoters of Buddhism and it was within the territory of their empire a place called Gondara that Buddhism first created the image of the Buddha Buddhism had existed for roughly 600 years without the image of the Buddha the earliest forms of Buddhism are what we call an iconographic meaning there is no image of the Buddha there are images of other things but not of the Buddha the Buddha is referenced with footprints through the wheel of the Dharma and a few other options but never the Buddha himself no the Buddha will be developed in Gondara and here the sculptors begin to explore the form of the Buddha to see him here by creating the human shape and by trying to understand the anatomy of that form as it is revealed under drapery it is very much a classical Greek response to the form that is what first attracted British from India into Gondara these were discovered and it was proof positive the Greeks had left their mark the trouble is this is about 400 years of no Greek activity but there is that new Roman Mediterranean force that comes in that force perhaps is quite strong as I showed you with the glass so two possible sources which lie behind the image one the old residual Greek presence two a new catalyst in the form of classical forms coming in via Roman traders into these ports in the southern part of the Kushan region coming in through the northwest northwestern ports of India a possible third but not one I want to go into it doesn't matter it matters yes because it's about the bleed through of older cultures Central Asia is a layered world one culture atop another one culture conquering but not displacing what is below it it's hard to find that as I tell my students here in the United States you can it's the American southwest the indigenous culture the Spanish the Mexican and the Anglo and in the right places you can see them all Acomapueblo but it's hard it's hard to realize what it is to layer one culture atop another and then watch those on the bottom force themselves back up but they will any of you that spend time in the southwest know the indigenous forces are coming back if you've witnessed the battles over whether or not you can erect a statue to Coronado and not have problems yes these cultural elements are there so whether the Buddha is residual Greek newly informed Roman or some combination of both doesn't really concern me at this moment but what does concern me is that that style the Gandaran style moves out of Gandara and moves to the north and moves directly into China we now have to consider yet another player in this in a new way Buddhism first appears in China probably under the Han dynasty the same time as they are beginning to flood that market with silk Buddhism is inching its way in but the Han dynasty is not interested in Buddhism so it is just one of the religions and not a terribly important one when the Han dynasty collapses third early third century it is replaced by a period of chaos a period during which the country basically splits into the northern and the southern regions and both regions have a variety of competing forces for governing in the north the forces that take over are our friends nomads in this case the tuba nomads who now take over and establish themselves as the Wei dynasty and all of these nomads abandon nomadic lifestyle but become very much the force that governs and a memory of their nomadic past the Wei find Buddhism useful they probably believe in it but they certainly see a political advantage to supporting it and up comes Buddhism a variety of monasteries many of them cave monasteries are often funded by imperial wealth but also once again funded by a variety of other forces the most famous are these great caves at Dunhuang the Mogau caves where this very early cave possesses one of these Gandharan influence images though I'm not going to spend time telling you how that works so for all of this is a yingpan manabuddist and does it really matter at the time you've got the rhetoric of this lecture yes it matters so here is how he's laid out he's laid out in an inhumation burial his head rests on a pillow in the shape of a rooster I looked high and low and no one has a picture of that rooster take my word for it it's a silk pillow Chinese silk embroidered his face is covered with a hemp mask and the mask is clearly made to fit his face no no this is not a Buddhist burial this is most assuredly not he's not Buddhist what is it the hemp mask is probably what we call a padan mask now padan mask has a very specific purpose it is to prevent the individual who wears it from polluting a sacred fire it belongs in a very specific context it belongs in the context of Zoroastrianism Zoroastrianism now Zoroastrianism is the religion of the sedentary peoples of Iranian origin it is by this point the dominant religion in Persia we are in the world of what we call the Sasanian Persians during this period of time the Persians have a very orthodox form of Zoroastrianism which is quite clearly controlled with a clergy of great power inhumation burial is not an option with an orthodox Zoroastrianism is practiced within the Persian faith so he's likely not a Persian his garment would be okay though his great kaftan would suit a Persian not really though the Persians don't tend to hold on to their nomadic origin at least not in what they wear but the decorative elements of it that classical reference is something Persians were still using as decorative motifs with no meaning attached to them in Persian fire worship was practiced by a number of other forms of Zoroastrianism and you can see it here here's the fire altar and here the figures here and they protect their face so that they don't pollute the fire you don't pollute the fire and when you die you do not allow your remains to pollute the earth or the air to do that you are defleshed so the normal way of Zoroastrianism whether in Persia or in the regions around Iran that practiced Zoroastrianism would do this is they would place the body on a platform and let the birds deflesh the body so that there is no pollution of the ground no pollution of the water and no pollution of the fire no cremation allowed but he's laid out an inhumation form his bones were not collected and placed within an osuary a defleshing arrangement no no he cannot be well maybe so there was a group a group of Persia no a group of Iranians a group of Iranian language speakers that we know as Sogdians who lived, oh where did they live they lived exactly over the Bactrian world they were the inheritors of that Greek kingdom of Bactria after the Uechi to become the Kushans and the Kushans had fallen suddenly the Sogdians emerged a group of federated merchant cities with ties that have communities all the way over in China and possibly all the way over in the Byzantine West there was the Sogdians who worked out treaties with the Byzantine Empire for trade purposes the Sogdians in China restricted communities the Chinese allowed them to live and after all this is the Tang dynasty the great moment in China's history when her openness to the West is at its greatest so yes she allows the Sogdians in she refuses to allow them too much engagement with the local population but even that she doesn't really control because the great rebellion against the Tang is led by a general of Sogdian origin in service to the Tang emperor so even there they don't quite hold control over it but in theory the Sogdian merchant colonies must live together must be governed by a local aficion called the Sogdbao but are allowed to practice the religion of Zoroastrianism and are allowed to bury their dead as Zoroastrians but with a caveat the Chinese sensibilities will not allow for a body to be defleshed therefore the Sogdians resident in China create a new way of burying their dead unlike within the areas where Zoroastrianism is dominant they lay their dead out on great couches raised up so that they don't touch the earth removed enough so that when sealed they don't pollute the air and here they commission stone couches with carvings that often reflect an idealized view of the Sogdian world that they have left behind I think the Yingtan man is just such an individual but not quite at least not as he expected to be so there's something very interesting about that Kaftan if it were a Central Asian Kaftan it would close to the left it closes to the right that's the Chinese way of closing robes he is wearing a modified Kaftan in Chinese style I think he comes from one of these communities I think he was on a trade mission he was quite well off he had a magnificent garment which he clearly carried with him for some purpose and that purpose I assume was that wear when he got back he was young he is Caucasoid that much we can identify and he died in root there was no resident Sogdian community in the town he died in otherwise they would have done something like this for him but he was laid out and treated with great respect as much as the local community was capable of doing for someone and at least someone knew that the mask should be placed over his face treated with the greatest of care his garments tell a long series of stories about the ways in which this world of trade interacts and the forces moving it around so my paper did say and I'm a little bit over but I'll keep you for a couple of more minutes as I tell my students because I did promise you some thoughts on the modern world so I am not obviously an historian of the modern world but I do find some relationships incredibly intriguing so when you think about Central Asia right now and you think about how it's lined up you realize it looks suspiciously like it did during the two periods I've spoken of during the Han Dynasty and the Roman Empire and the Tang Dynasty because during that period of time neither China nor the West controlled it they were involved with it they influenced it they clearly benefited from it but they couldn't control it that changes, the Mongol Empire is completely controlled but during these periods it was not and that's quite similar to the situation today the West of the European Union does not extend control into Central Asia and China does not extend control beyond the borders of Xinjiang province now while it's true that Central Asians and I know this from conversations I had this summer are worried about China they're also very anxious to become engaged with this Belt Road Initiative and there's something else quite interesting about this moment and that is there are two auxiliary forces pushing into the region one of them is a very traditional force of India India has always been involved India is heavily involved in Afghanistan if you're not yet aware of that through a variety of initiatives and India's interest in this and particularly interest in the Himalayas in Nepal is palpable the Nepalese are very worried about India far more than they are about China this is not unlike the situation during which the Tang and the Byzantine and even India at that point but very much like the Han the Roman and the Kushan period there is another force that pushing down and that's Russia the forces from the north have traditionally been the steplands the steplands aren't doing it right now but Russia is in many ways exerting her influence so no, not exactly the ancient world but not totally unlike it there's something else that I think is intriguing many ways what I would argue is taking the place of Buddhism and that tourism and if any of you that travel into the developing world and use tours that I do at this point I confess, I don't travel on my own anymore tours are very intriguing besides the dynamics of the people you travel with but when you talk to your guides you learn a lot so tourism is bifurcated there is adventure tourism which is one whole group of guides and there's cultural tourism a whole group of other guides and what they know is entirely different culture tourist people are extraordinarily knowledgeable about where they're going where they're taking you and what it is you should see and they can answer a tremendous amount if you quiz them the adventure guides know very little about the culture but they know everything about how to move through this territory these were of course the great merchant routes because when you do adventure tourism and you go hike in the Pamirs you are hiking along the very routes that were used to enter China from the south they are the same routes that have been used for eons and when you do the cultural tourism you are stepping on the same places that once moved to Buddhism and for that matter Nestorian Christianity or Manichaeanism around this region and there's something else about tourism the sogdeums were not only great merchants they were great linguists see the Chinese were not Chinese were like we are they were monolingual they were monolingual and they saw no reason why they should learn languages and they didn't but they were entranced with Buddhism Buddhism is an Indian religion the Buddhist script comes up in either the Indian Procret languages in which Gandhari is one or in Sanskrit those are Indo-European languages and Chinese is not who translated the Buddhist documents the texts the first translations from Indian languages into Chinese sogdeums and the sogdeums weren't even Buddhist language if you want to succeed today in Central Asia you know three languages your mother tongue if you are smart Russian and English you don't go anywhere without them oh yes and language is even more complicated than that this bleed through this bleed through of older cultures into new places so Stalin drew the lines of modern Central Asia he did it evidently when he was drunk so the story goes I doubt it it was intentionally designed so that all the Central Asian countries all contain one ethnicity so when you visit Uzbekistan you are taken to Samarkand and to Bukhara the great centers of medieval Central Asia the Persian cities Uzbek is Turkic the Uzbek are speakers of a Turkic language because they are later arrivals but in Bukhara and in Samarkand Persian is still spoken among the Tajiks who are now an ethnic minority but when you go to Tajikistan and they talk about who they are they incorporate Bukhara and Samarkand into their identity languages play a hefty role in this and which languages you speak matter I have a friend whose son is married to a Tajik woman this woman comes from a very elite Tajik family, elite during the Russian period she never learned Tajik she speaks Russian and English and what is she studying now she is studying Persian she is studying Farsi not Tajik why? because there are status associations with the native language Bleed through comes in other ways as well at this moment if you are ethnic Russian you have to debate whether you will stay in these countries because there is real questions about the role of ethnic Russians should they remain or should they not and what role do they play and which language do they speak these are ancient issues that are still very much alive let me leave you with the last one that one I introduce you to which is the concept of intellectual property theft there was an article maybe some of you saw it a while back in the New York Times in which someone tried to explain that this idea makes very little sense in Asia particularly within the Chinese orbit where the whole idea of copying, imitating and improving is a deep-seated cultural force how do you learn to paint in China how do you learn? you copy old masters why do we have an idea of what was painted in certain dynasties where we don't have a single thing remaining because we have the copies of works that were made because that's how you learn no one thought it was wrong and no one does to this date now I'm not here to defend the policies while I'm merely pointing out is the idea that you take what is given to you and you change it, modify it and make it work in a new setting what you're fearing with cultural property is not necessarily a universally held idea and certainly wasn't in antiquity and you change things why do I think that kaftan is decorated the way it is because that still has decorative currency Songdeans inherited all of those forms and they merely reused them for new purposes there's a dynamism to it and it's very hard to control that dynamism and the last thing what I've already mentioned to some extent ethnic identity that kaftan and what it means and how you understand it you see costumes still play a role in Central Asia what you wear identifies who you are sometimes it's state imposed in Turkmen you must dress this way in Turkmenistan sometimes it's by choice the hat of the Karakol she tells me immediately that I'm looking for someone up from the Karakol region of Uzbekistan the dress of an Uzbek woman with her particular treatment of the of the Ikadai the dress and you do recognize the kaftan of the Uyghur of modern day Xinjiang province those people that are being persecuted who identify themselves in origin with no mad people so I hope I've kept you, I apologize I hope I've given you some things to think about perhaps introduced you to some things you didn't know about Central Asia and I'll be happy to try and answer questions thank you very much no questions nope, there's one over there it looks like can you ask it loudly enough that I can hear you was the Songdeans that you said were linguists right? and what was their time period? Songdeans appear, they begin to appear about the first century BCE but their high point is the 6th and 7th centuries CE so the period just before the arrival of the Arab conquerors so there was written language at that time all of these regions beginning really from the 3rd century BCE on have writing okay that was what I was wondering, thanks any other questions? way back, we have one way back there you mentioned that the Chinese language was monolingual no I mentioned that the Chinese were monolingual rather than they were not, I should clarify they were multi-lingual in the sense that China's always had a number of ethnic groups within her they could speak other languages there are pockets of variety of different languages but in terms of the Chinese cultural identity they were like we are, monolingual in the sense that they saw very little reason to learn foreign languages to deal with outsiders outsiders could learn Chinese but I'm not in any way suggesting no there are many ethnic groups who spoke a variety of different languages within China thank you for asking any other questions? okay I'm holding it too late we have to be out of here no that's fine I appreciate it thank you very much