Around 45 BCE, silk was introduced to Rome. Depending on what route you take,
this luxurious fabric travelled over 6400 kilometers on its way from China
and likely would’ve changed many hands.
It wasn’t long before spices, produce, and other cloth was moving east to west,
south to north, and everywhere in between all over Asia, the Mediterranean,
and North Africa -- which some stories say took anywhere from several months to almost 10 years.
And the routes got more elaborate or simple depending on who controlled them,
and what taxes and fees traders were trying to avoid.
This collection of routes -- which thrived for almost 1600 years -- became known as the Silk Road.
But today they are more often called the Silk Roads to acknowledge just how many routes,
people, and places were part of this network.
And even today -- over 2000 years since silk first appeared in Rome -- exploring the Silk
Roads can tell us a lot about how worldviews and other ideas spread along those trade
routes and eventually influenced the beliefs of billions of people through time and space.
I’m Alizé Carrère, and this is Crash Course Geography.
INTRO
In Cultural Geography, we’re specifically interested in how and why culture changes.
1600 years of trading along the Silk Roads offers lots of examples of how diffusion, or the spread
of ideas across space, happened as traders mingled and left artifacts like maps and statues behind.
Imagine those late nights as travelers from all over the world were staying at an inn,
a monastery, or other lodging.
Maybe after an evening meal, they’d share folklore from their homelands. These are
stories that were passed on, often by spoken-word, that educate a community about their history.
Or, maybe they’d skip the stories and go straight to how they see current conditions in the world.
Either way -- and in other ways too! -- they’d share a little bit about their worldview which
is a set of beliefs, morals, and attitudes about the world and a person’s role in it.
Our worldview is transmitted to us by a community, but then shaped and changed by
our life experience. It helps us answer questions that come from our natural human curiosity like,
what is the meaning of life? How did the universe form? What is my purpose?
What is Truth? Is there banana in this soup?
The way we approach these questions and the way we
develop and share knowledge is a fundamental cultural trait,
one of those building blocks that make up our unique cultural identity, like language.
Specifically, a religion is a belief system and set of practices that help a community define
what is acceptable. Religions can be driven by theology, or belief in a divine power,
but there are also belief systems guided by morals and principles
without the presence of something beyond humans.
Now I just want to take a moment to say talking about culture is really hard.
If you're taking an AP test or an intro to geography class, you might see some religions
put into categories that don't perfectly match how they exist and are practiced in the world today.
And that makes being a human geographer really hard, but also really exciting.
People are complicated, and there's so much nuance to what we're studying. So we'll do our
best to explain the definitions we're using, the time period we’re talking about, and why or how
certain religions fall into different categories. But just remember, the lines are pretty blurry.
Like in Malaysia we saw how belief systems can literally imprint on a space as people travel,
just like we imagined with those late night travellers. Which is eventually how we end
up with places of worship built with both Chinese and European elements, or people
in Malaysia and Indonesia practicing the same denomination of Islam as people in Saudi Arabia.
And to us geographers, the movement of people’s beliefs and how they build their identity through
those beliefs can tell us a lot about the movement of power, empire, and people around the planet.
In fact, relics from the time of the Silk Roads show belief systems
mingling and moving -- if you know where to look.
Around 150 CE, Claudius Ptolemy, a Greek scholar living in Alexandria, wrote a book that contained
what Europeans would eventually use to create (what they thought was) the map of the world.
His descriptions of how to draw a 2 dimensional map of our 3 dimensional world have been so
celebrated that Western geographers sometimes call him the father of geography.
Now we know that his map projections were really amazing for the time,
but there were a lot of meaningful geographic advances before his book and between when
Ptolemy published his calculations and when Byzantines rediscovered them 1,145 years later.
Ptolemy’s calculations are exciting because they use latitude and longitude lines,
which we might take for granted now but are really an amazing mathematical innovation. He’s also
credited for working out the rough boundaries of land, even land he hadn’t seen before.
And even though we don’t have any versions he drew himself, the math behind the map tells us
about Ptolemy’s worldview. Mapmakers before Ptolemy had sized different countries based
on how important they were. So even though many of his calculations were later proven incorrect,
Ptolemy introducing math changed cartography forever.
And to the careful geographic eye this map also reveals a lot about the worldview of the
cartographer who later drew the map. Like the way “Ethiopia” is sort of all of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Or how it looks like people are blowing the wind around the world,
which gives a slight nod to cherubs and Greek mythology.
Along the Silk Roads we’d also find maps that reveal other belief systems and
multiple religious hearths, or places of origin, from which different religions diffused out.
Today, the former lands of the Silk Roads are still known for a large
number of people practicing an ethnic religion,
which is one of the two broad categories of faiths and includes religions that
are typically tied closely to a place or group of people from a particular culture.
Like within ethnic religions there are often animist traditions,
or ethnic religions that worship based on the local environment. Animist traditions
often understand that non-humans in nature have spiritual power to help, harm, and teach humans.
Within geography, belief systems we’d find on the Silk Roads like Shintoism,
Taoism, and Confucianism are often considered ethnic religions because of how the cultural
mechanisms to teach the belief system are woven into their place of origin. Like
Shinto shrines are very important areas for worship and are rarely found outside Japan.
That doesn’t mean those practices don’t exist outside of those places and peoples
or that other places won’t be added as the belief system changes over time.
It just means they’re usually closely associated with one group of people or one place.
Now when a religion or belief system spreads and becomes accessible to a wide part of the
population outside of its hearth, a religion is said to be universal. In general, universal
religions are seen as ones that spread easily, are easy for people in any location to convert to,
and don’t need a person to come from a particular ethnic group to fully participate in that faith.
“Ethnic” or “universal” are examples of those messy categories we use to try and
understand religion. Buuuuut, it’s complicated.
Like as some people from what is now India moved along the Silk Roads starting in the 4th century,
they would’ve brought their belief systems with them. What originally developed in the Hindu
religious hearth was probably something called Brahmanism. Then as people practiced this belief
system, it would’ve changed, eventually becoming more recognizable as Hinduism,
which has inspired what are considered distinctively Indian cultural traits.
But, those traits also can diffuse, often through relocation diffusion which is one of the broad
categories of diffusion and is when people move and take their beliefs. That ease of movement
occurs in part because this faith practice is also able to incorporate a wide range of beliefs.
So it’s common in geography texts to see Hinduism
put into the ethnic religion category because it’s most accessible in India.
But Hinduism today has elements of both ethnic and universal faiths and is a major world religion.
Faith leaders of all major religions would’ve
also had places called caravanserais for travelers to rest along the Silk Roads.
For example, there were several Buddhist monasteries on the road connecting Bactria
to Taxila. While there was no fee for lodging, travelers often would make a
donation as a sign of generosity. In return, the monks would impart spiritual guidance.
So over time, some traders might’ve made a regular habit of stopping to learn from particular monks,
and through that habit, followers of Buddhism increased. This is an example
of a type of contagion diffusion, or the spread of ideas from contact,
which is a type of expansion diffusion, the other broad category of diffusion.
So maybe it's not a coincidence that a majority of the faiths we'd describe as
"universal" can be traced to origins along the Silk Roads, and that within
each of these broad religion groups, there are hundreds of denominations and local practices.
Today we can look back and see how other ideas diffused along the Silk Roads too.
Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, the cultural importance placed on education,
first from the Greeks, then Romans, then Muslims, led to one of the oldest existing and currently
operating universities being established in Fez, in what is now Morocco in the 9th century CE.
Fez became a center of education, which, along with the many large cities along the Silk Roads,
often had hierarchical diffusion, another type of expansion diffusion that we see
when a prominent population practices a cultural trait.
Slowly the idea spreads to smaller towns and the surrounding area.
As a product of those learning systems, by 1154 CE, there was a new map of the
Silk Roads made by Muhammad al-Idrisi, an Arab-Muslim geographer, traveler,
and scholar that came from the Almoravid empire in what is now called Morocco. This map came from
firsthand reports of travelers and geographers that worked for him, as well as his own research.
Artifacts like Al-Idrisi’s map leave behind clues about how people interacted with and
saw the world, just like Ptolemy’s. This map was notable because like many maps by
Muslim and Chinese cartographers, South was oriented at the top of the map, not North.
While there’s no definitive explanation for why maps were oriented that way, by orienting
the map with South at the top of the page, the Holy Land of Mecca is often central to the map.
Maps often reveal what was important to the cartographers making them,
and in fact, the Islamic Holy Land would have been important to many
people since it’s also holy to the other Abrahamic Faiths, Christianity and Judaism.
In 2020, the three major Abrahamic Faiths are practiced by over half of the world’s population.
That huge spread has several reasons, but one would be various types of expansion diffusion,
which is when a cultural trait develops in a center, and then moves outward.
Though the Middle East and North Africa wasn’t the only site of significant diffusion.
By 1402 CE, what we now call Korea and China became places of great cultural mixing,
especially along the trade routes between present day India, Tibet, China, and Korea.
At that time, there was a Korean map called the Gangnido that would’ve been used that’s
thought to have been completed with the aid of Muslim and Chinese maps.
And like the maps before it, the Gangnido is significant because it shows a worldview
that’s centered on the homeland of the cartographers, and is one of the
earliest maps to get the shape of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula mostly correct.
Today’s religious map shows a world full of unique interpretations of morality and beliefs. And this
map is deceiving -- remember, with a thematic map like this, the nuance of the data is obscured.
Like there are lots of cases of cultural acculturation along the Silk Roads,
where people would pick and choose different elements to combine.
Ultimately we end up with something related, but different.
In some of these cases, we end up with faiths that combine the core
beliefs from two or more religions, which are called Syncretic Religions.
And thematic maps can’t show this complexity, the merging and overlap
of religions regionally, and that there are multiple religions in each of these places.
As we know, maps are often created from the worldview of the cartographer and
can prioritize certain stories -- like where the center of the world is -- or can minimize others,
like the location or prominence of ethnic faiths.
But by comparing maps throughout history,
we can see that the Silk Roads played a major role in facilitating the diffusion of knowledge,
both academic and religious, along with the movement of goods like spices and silk.
Today, hundreds of years later, we still feel the impact of the way knowledge has
developed -- like in the spices we use when we cook, the cloth we see as beautiful,
and the traditions and rituals we practice. All of these changed along the Silk Roads and
will continue to change as our cultures share knowledge and make it their own.
Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Geography which is filmed at the Team
Sandoval Pierce Studio and was made with the help of all these nice people. If you want to
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