The Silk Roads
Although exchange along the Silk Roads had been taking place for centuries, the sharing of knowledge between the Mediterranean world and China began in earnest during this period. Wending their way across the difficult terrains of central Asia, a steady parade of merchants, scholars, ambassadors, missionaries, and other travelers transmitted commodities, technologies, and ideas between the Mediterranean worlds and China, and across the Himalayas into northern India, exploiting the commercial routes of the Silk Roads. Ideas, including the beliefs of the universalizing religions described in this chapter, traveled along with goods on these exchange routes. Christianity spread through the Mediterranean and beyond, and as we shall see later in this chapter, Buddhism and the Vedic religion (Brahmanism) also continued to spread outward from their origins in India.
The great oasis cities of central Asia played a crucial role in the effective functioning of the Silk Roads. While the Sasanians controlled the city of Merv in the west, nomadic rulers became the overlords of Sogdiana and extracted tribute from the cities of Samarkand and Panjikent in the east. The tribal confederacies in this region maintained the links between west and east by patrolling the Silk Roads between Iran and China. They also joined north to south as they passed through the mountains of Afghanistan into the plains of northern India. As a result, central Asia between 300 and 600 CE was the hub of a vibrant system of religious and cultural contacts covering the whole of Afro-Eurasia. (See Map 1.4.)
Sasanian Persia
Beginning at the Euphrates River and stretching for eighty days of slow travel across the modern territories of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and much of central Asia, the Sasanian Empire of Persia (224–651 CE) encompassed all the land routes of western Asia that connected the Mediterranean world with East Asia. In the early third century CE, the Sasanians had replaced the Parthians as rulers of the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia. The Sasanian ruler called himself the “King of Kings of Iranian and non-Iranian lands,” a title suggestive of the Sasanians’ aspirations to broad regional dominance. The ancient, irrigated fields of what is modern Iraq became the economic heart of this empire. Its capital, Ctesiphon, arose where the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers come close to each other, only 20 miles south of modern Baghdad.
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A map of Afro-Eurasia illustrates major trade and exchange networks between 300 and 600 CE. Red lines mark principal land routes connecting regions across Central Asia, the Middle East, India, and China, while blue lines show important maritime trade routes across the Mediterranean Sea, Arabian Sea, and Indian Ocean. Key states and regions such as the Byzantine Empire, Sasanian Empire, Gupta Empire, Sogdiana, and the Northern Wei and Qi dynasties in China are labeled. Arrows indicate the spread of the bubonic plague between 542 and 808 along these trade routes.
MAP 1.4 | Exchanges across Afro-Eurasia, 300–600 CE
Central Asia remained the crossroads of Afro-Eurasia in a variety of ways. Trade goods flowing between west and east passed through this region, as did religious practices and cultural habits.
- Trace the principal trade routes and maritime routes. Locate the cities of Merv, Samarkand, and Panjikent. How do the locations of these cities compare with the locations of some of the major cities of the west in the Mediterranean and the east in India and China?
- Based on your reading of the chapter and their location on the map, what role did the kingdom of Sogdiana and the Sasanian Empire play in trade in this era?
- What was the relationship between trade and the spread of the bubonic plague?
Symbolizing the king’s rule at Ctesiphon was the 110-foot-high vaulted Great Arch of Khusro, named after Khusro I Anoshirwan (Khusro of the Righteous Soul), who was a rival to Justinian. As his name implied, Khusro Anoshirwan (r. 531–579 CE) exemplified the model ruler: strong and just. His image in the east as an ideal monarch was as glorious as that of Justinian in the west as an ideal Christian Roman emperor. For Persians and Arab Muslims of later ages, the Arch of Khusro was as awe-inspiring as Justinian’s Hagia Sophia was to Christians.
The Sasanian Empire controlled the trade crossroads of Afro-Eurasia and posed a military threat to Byzantium. Its armored cavalry was a fighting machine adapted from years of competition with the nomads of central Asia. These fearless horsemen fought covered from head to foot in flexible armor made of small plates of iron sewn onto leather and chain mail, riding “blood-sweating horses” (so called for the reddish sheen of their coats) draped in thickly padded cloth. Their lethal swords were light and flexible owing to steel-making techniques imported from northern India. With such cavalry, Khusro in 540 CE sacked Antioch, a city of great significance to early Christianity. The campaign was a warning, at the height of Justinian’s glory, that Mesopotamia could reach out once again to conquer the eastern Mediterranean shoreline. Under Khusro II the confrontation between Persia and the Eastern Roman Empire escalated into the greatest war that had been seen for centuries. Between 604 and 628 CE, Persian forces under Khusro II conquered Egypt and Syria and even reached Constantinople before being defeated in northern Mesopotamia.
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Politically united by Sasanian control, Southwest Asia also possessed a cultural unity. Syriac was the dominant language. While the Sasanians themselves were devout Zoroastrians, Christianity and Judaism enjoyed a level of tolerance in Mesopotamia. Nestorian Christians—so named by their opponents for their acceptance of a hotly contested understanding of Jesus’s divine and human nature, promoted by a former bishop of Constantinople named Nestorius—exploited Sasanian trade and diplomacy to spread their faith as far as Chang’an in China and the western coast of southern India. Protected by the Sasanian King of Kings, the Jewish rabbis of Mesopotamia compiled the monumental Babylonian Talmud at a time when their western peers in Roman Palestine were feeling constrained under Christian rule. The Sasanian court also embraced offerings from northern India, including the Panchatantra stories (moral tales played out in a legendary kingdom of the animals), polo, and the game of chess. In this regard Khusro’s was truly an empire of crossroads, where the cultures of central Asia and India met those of the eastern Mediterranean.
Women in the Sasanian Empire
The state religion of the Sasanian Empire, Zoroastrianism, was strictly patriarchal. It maintained an all-male priesthood, and the man was considered the head of the family; a child’s identity was solely determined from his or her father. As a result of the prevalence of patriarchal structures, public roles for Sasanian women were extremely limited. They could not hold political power or positions in the religious hierarchy. Social and cultural practices like polygamy, marriage with close relatives, and child marriages frequently left women at a disadvantage in relation to men. Yet recent research has shown that Sasanian women were not as powerless as they might have seemed to earlier historians, who were often working with incomplete sources or had Orientalist biases that reinforced the idea of women’s servitude in the so-called East. While it is true that Sasanian women’s primary role was in the domestic sphere, this was a position from which women could nonetheless exert influence depending on the type of marriage she had contracted. Marriage was a sacred act in Zoroastrianism, and Sasanian law recognized several different types that afforded wives various levels of rights and privileges, particularly with regard to inheritance. In all cases, it was strictly forbidden for a husband to abandon his wife; this was considered a crime punishable by death. Sasanian women could also freely exercise their civil and legal agency: they could originate lawsuits, own property, and contract business in their name.
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Elite women living in the Sasanian harem (also called the seraglio) even managed to cultivate real political power. The Sasanian harem was the private, domestic sphere of the palace where women attached to the ruling dynasty lived in relative isolation. They might be wives, mothers, daughters, or concubines. Under Khusro II the royal harem grew especially large, with up to 3,000 women residents. They were guarded by eunuchs and spent their days playing music, bathing, and socializing with one another. But far from being the passive objects of male desire, these women could flex considerable political muscle. For example, we know that women who were followers of minority non-Zoroastrian religions, like Judaism and Christianity, were able to use their position within the royal court to help improve the conditions of their communities on the outside. The “Queen of Queens,” the highest ranking of the emperor’s wives, was especially well placed to influence her husband’s decisions on everything from domestic affairs to diplomacy with the Byzantines.
Women not only pulled strings from behind the scenes, but, in a few exceptional cases, they also served as actual rulers over the massive empire. The Sasanians had a strict rule that their leader had to come from the royal dynastic bloodline. But what if none could be found? That was exactly the situation in the summer of 629 CE. With no male heir apparent, the ruling clerics and nobles put a woman on the throne for the first time. Her name was Boran, and she was the daughter of Khusro II. Boran ruled not as a queen but as a king, wearing both the title and the clothing of her forefathers. By all accounts, she was a just and effective ruler. She made peace with the Byzantines (her mother Maria was in fact of Byzantine origin) and engaged in large infrastructure projects to stimulate the economy. The peasants were especially fond of her for easing their tax burden. There does not seem to have been any backlash or complaints due to her gender. In fact, the next Sasanian ruler we can confirm with certainty was Boran’s own younger sister, Azarmidokht (meaning “daughter of the honored one”). Her rule was much shorter than Boran’s, however, and ended quite violently. Her downfall came as a result of her firm intention to rule alone, without husband or guardian. She trapped and had murdered a rival prince who sought her hand in marriage in an effort to usurp her power. The dead man’s son sought revenge by blinding and murdering Azarmidokht and putting her older sister back on the throne. Just five years later, however, it was this same man who led the Sasanian forces in their devastating loss against the Arabs. With the demise of the Sasanian Empire, the position of women in Persian society would become seriously weakened.
The Sogdians as Lords of the Silk Roads
The Sogdians, who controlled the oasis cities of Samarkand and Panjikent, northeast of the Sasanians, served as links between the two ends of Afro-Eurasia. Their religion was a blend of Zoroastrian and Mesopotamian beliefs, touched with Brahmanic influences. Their language was the common tongue of the early Silk Roads, and their shaggy camels bore the commodities that passed through their entrepôts (transshipment centers). Moreover, their mansions, such as those excavated in Panjikent, show strong influences from the warrior aristocracy culture of Iran. The palace walls display gripping frescoes of armored riders, reflecting the revolutionary change to cavalry warfare from Rome to China. The Sogdians were known as merchants as far away as China. Their commercial skills enabled them to become the richest country in central Asia, building large houses and decorating the walls of their homes with elaborate paintings.
Through the Sogdians, products from Southwest Asia and North Africa found their way to the eastern end of the Eurasian landmass. Carefully packed for the long trek on jostling camel caravans, Persian and Roman goods rode side by side. Along with Sasanian silver coins and gold pieces minted in Constantinople, these exotic products found eager buyers as far east as China and Japan.
Buddhism on the Silk Roads
South of the Hindu Kush Mountains, in northern India, nomadic groups made the roads into central Asia safe to travel, enabling Buddhism to spread northward and eastward via the mountainous corridor of Afghanistan into China. Buddhist monks were the primary missionary agents, the bearers of a universal message who traveled across the roads of central Asia, carrying holy books, offering salvation to commoners, and establishing themselves more securely in host communities than did armies, diplomats, or merchants.
At Bamiyan, a valley of the Hindu Kush—two gigantic statues of the Buddha, 121 and 180 feet in height, were carved from a cliffside during the fourth and fifth centuries CE (and stood there for 1,500 years until dynamited by the Taliban in 2001). Travelers found welcoming cave monasteries here and at oases all along the way from the Taklamakan Desert to northern China, where—2,500 miles from Bamiyan—travelers also encountered five huge Buddhas carved from cliffs in Yungang, China. While those at Bamiyan stood tall with royal majesty, the Buddhas of Yungang sat in postures of meditation. In the cliff face and clustered around the feet of the Bamiyan Buddhas, various elaborately carved cave chapels housed intricate paintings with Buddhist imagery. Surrounding the Yungang Buddhas, over fifty caves sheltered more than 50,000 statues representing Buddhist deities and patrons. The Yungang Buddhas, seated just inside the Great Wall, welcomed travelers to the market in China and marked the eastern end of the central Asian Silk Road system. (See Map 1.5.) The Bamiyan and Yungang Buddhas are a reminder that by the fourth century CE, religious ideas were creating world empires of the mind, transcending kingdoms of this world and bringing a universal message contained in their holy scriptures.
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The left image shows a tall standing Buddha statue carved into a niche in the cliff at Bamiyan, Afghanistan. The right image shows seated Buddha figures carved into the rock at the Yungang caves in northern China. Both sculptures display detailed robes and large halos carved into the stone.
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