WRITE A 5 PAGE ESSAY PAPER ON 1 OF THE 3 TOPICS LISTED

The Spread of New Ways in Eurasia, 200 CE to 1000 CE

Required Reading

We will all read Chapter 4 in The Human Journey  as well as other readings and videos specific to the Discussion Board topic you choose.  Those readings can be found in the Discussion Board itself.  To access the required reading, click on the Discussion Board link below and then on the Week Three Discussion 1 link.

 There are two topics for each Discussion Board this week but you only write on one topic. It should take you about a day to read the materials for a Discussion Board. To help you follow what is happening historically to whom by whom and where, be sure to consult the time lines at the start of each chapter and the maps printed throughout the book. They will help orient you to the main developments we are studying.

At the end of the module, students should be able to:

· Explain "southernization"

· Compare and contrast the rise and spread of the world's major salvation religions

· Analyze the role of "Silk Roads" in facilitating the transfer of ideas and material goods across Eurasia

Lecture Notes and Key Terms

Lecture Notes from the Instructor

Rome After People

The Roman Empire had its continuation in the east as the Byzantine Empire.  But in the west, Europe was shattered by the destruction of Roman institutions.  It literally crumbled as people vacated the dying or destroyed urban centers and fled to the country and simpler rural lifeways.

In onsite classes, I like to show the History Channel program called Life After People to demonstrate what it must have felt like to watch a sophisticated complex urban civilization devolve back to nature in the post-classical era. It uses Computer-Generated Imaging to show that, in a scenario where people are removed, time destroys the icons of our complex industrial civilization. Vines tear apart skyscrapers and algae clogs Hoover Dam. The lights go out and nature and wildlife cover the urban landscape.You can rent  or stream this video from Netflix.

Rome’s collapse sent Europe backward into a simpler, non-urbanized period.  Imagine all the complexities of urban life that we’ve discussed – diversified roles, complex religions and rituals, and levels of classism from elites to slaves – falling apart. The population of the City of Rome itself was reduced from about 1 million to around 10,000. 

Without slaves and overseers to maintain baths, theaters, aqueducts and other public amenities of urban Roman life all over Europe, these structures and the customs associated with them fell to ruin. Even literacy and theoretical knowledge fell by the wayside. Historians called it the “Dark Ages” because of an absence of writing from this period to “illuminate” for us what happened then.

Janet Abu-Lughod in her book, Before European Hegemony, paints a picture of Europe as a virtual backwater in the post-classical period. Not so the rest of the Old World! Trade and commerce, exchange of ideas, language, and culture, and a steady stream of travel took place during this period along the Silk Road caravan routes and throughout the Indian Ocean from Africa to Southeast Asia. Persian was the trade language commonly spoken from China to Africa. In fact Swahili, the trade language of East Africa, has elements of Bantu, Arabic and Persian mixed into it.

During the post-classical era, most of Europe remained outside this dynamic “world-system” of trade and exchange with the exception of a few intrepid trading cultures like the Vikings or those nearest the influence of Byzantium and the Middle East.

The most dynamic innovators and conveyors of learning and trade living along the Afro-Eurasian axis during this time were the converts to a new religion, Islam. Islam has its roots in the pagan beliefs of the Arabian peninsula and the Abrahamic religions of Judaism and Christianity with influences from Greece, Persia, and India. 

When it came on the scene in the early 600s CE, its simple-to-follow tenets and practices appealed to people in a way that other religions with more complicated laws, practices, and rarefied theologies could not. Islam spread from its center in Arabia west to the Iberian Peninsula (Spain), south to Ghana, north into central Asia, and east all the way to what is now Pakistan. (See the map on page 131.)

One basic tenet of Islam is to honor the intellect and maintain the life of the mind. If it were not for Islamic scholars, much of classical western learning would have faded with the dying Roman Empire. Greek and Roman philosophy and literature were translated into Arabic and preserved for later centuries when it could be translated into Latin. The Europeans who centuries later revived this body of knowledge looked upon it as a “rebirth” or renaissance

Website: The Journey of Faxian to India (ca. 400 CE) - http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/faxian.html

Website: The Travels of Marco Polo (ca. 1300 CE) - read Chapter 1 through Chapter 18) - https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Travels_of_Marco_Polo/Preface/Chapter_1

 

Topic 1 Required Reading

Kevin Reilly, The Human Journey, Chapter 4

Website: Silk Road - http://asiasociety.org/education/silk-road

Website: Silk Road History - http://www.thesilkroadchina.com/fact-v11-the-silk-road-history.html

topic 1 Required Reading

Kevin Reilly, The Human Journey, Chapter 3

Website: British Museum, Athens - http://www.ancientgreece.co.uk/athens/home_set.html

Website: British Museum, Sparta - http://www.ancientgreece.co.uk/sparta/home_set.html

he Making of an Afro-Eurasian Network, 1000 CE - 1450 CE

Required Reading

We will all read Chapter 5 in The Human Journey as well as other readings and videos specific to the Discussion Board topic you choose.  Those readings can be found in the Discussion Board itself.  To access the required reading, click on the Discussion Board link below and then on the Week Three Discussion 2 link.

There are two topics for each Discussion Board this week but you only write on one topic. It should take you about a day to read the materials for a Discussion Board. To help you follow what is happening historically to whom by whom and where, be sure to consult the time lines at the start of each chapter and the maps printed throughout the book. They will help orient you to the main developments we are studying.

At the end of the module, students should be able to:

· Compare and contrast economic, political, social, and cultural developments in Europe, China, central Asia, and the Islamic world.

· Explain how Europe, Asia, and much of northern Africa became part of a unified network of trade and communication between 1000 CE and 1450 CE.

· Assess the importance of their different cultural contributions to the development of an Afro-Eurasian ecumene between 1000 CE and 

· Lecture Notes from the Instructor

· The Shape of Things To Come

· The first Crusade took place at the end of the first millennium CE. With the promise of spiritual rewards afforded martyrs and the more real expectation of acquiring wealth and political power in the Holy Lands, thousands left the European farms and small urban centers to head southeast.

· On the way, they saw the splendors of Byzantium and the Islamic world: beautiful architecture, sophisticated cities, advanced learning, and – perhaps most importantly – a rich trade exchange fully integrated into the lives of North Africans, Byzantines, and Asians. It’s no wonder that after this exposure, western Europeans would never be the same. The simple life of agrarian manors, villages, and small trade towns began an irreversible change toward growth and complexity in society, politics, and economics.

· The Germanic tribes that overran the Roman Empire 500 years before valued parenting and family life and used marriage as a contract binding families into one group of “kin” obligated to each other for mutual benefit. Among the complexities that came out of exposure to the Islamic world after the start of the Crusades were political changes that entrenched feudalism into society, creating further class hierarchies and categories of elites.

· This new degree of complexity played out in royal courts, the Church, and the new universities of Paris, Bologna, and other European urban centers established long ago by the last great command system empire on European soil, Rome. But history did not play out in Europe the trend that should by now be familiar to you. And that means something big is changing in the whole long history of humankind. Germanic tribes of the fifth century (Franks, Angles, Saxons, various Goths, etc.) became the European monarchies of the second millennium. These monarchies spent centuries fighting and changing borders, gaining and losing territory, but never again filled the space as a long-lived single empire along the lines of Rome, Alexander’s Greece, Persia, or even Babylon, Assyria, or Egypt.

· We hear the very whispers of something new – the Modern Era -- which will not fully form until after the Age of Discovery (circa 1500s). A monolithic command system empire can't seem to replace Europe’s descendants of tribal peoples -- modern nation-states in competition with each other, market-driven, technologically advanced, and increasingly democratic.

Parallel Worlds of Inner Africa, the Americas, and Oceania before 1450

Required Reading

We will all read Chapter 6 in The Human Journey as well as other readings and videos specific to the Discussion Board topic you choose.  Those readings can be found in the Discussion Board itself.  To access the required reading, click on the Discussion Board link below and then on the Week Four Discussion link.

There are three topics but you only write on one. It should take you about a day to read the materials for a Discussion Board. To help you follow what is happening historically to whom by whom and where, be sure to consult the time lines at the start of each chapter and the maps printed throughout the book. They will help orient you to the main developments we are studying.

At the end of the module, students should be able to:

· Appraise the economic, political, social, and cultural developments of Inner Africa, the Americas, and Oceania over several millennia.

· Assess the regional networks each major culture established and maintained.

· Analyze how the worlds of Inner Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific followed and diverged from the broad patterns of Afro-Eurasian history.

Lecture Notes and Key Terms

Lecture Notes from the Instructor

Parallel Worlds

We are getting near the end of our course. It is time to wrap up our whirlwind tour of thousands of years of human history.

As he tries to bring the history of the pre-modern period to a close and stop our heads from spinning, Reilly introduces the idea of "parallel worlds," worlds that operated at the same time but did not know each other or interact. They were isolated - if parallel - worlds.

What does it mean to have parallel worlds? You might think you live in parallel worlds because you may be a student, an employee, and a member of a family and inhabit these worlds with their different demands but these worlds and their demands are not so much parallel as convergent or divergent. One key difference is that you know all of these worlds. People who dwell in parallel worlds as Reilly defines the term do not know of the existence of the other world(s). They only know their own.

We as historians looking back over the historical record can understand that these worlds were isolated from each other and yet were not completely dissimilar. Reilly uses the fact that they were isolated to conduct a "thought experiment:" do worlds that know nothing of each other develop along similar lines or completely different lines?

One conclusion he draws from his thought experiment is that humans have moved along similar paths even when isolated by time and space: hunter-gatherers became farmers who learned to be more productive and preferred living in complex and densely populated societies but not everyone followed the same path through urbanization, writing, and iron metallurgy to get there. Complexity came in many forms.

Another conclusion is that social classes developed as societies became complex and political power concentrated in elites and royalty. Social and gender inequality grew in America, Inner Africa, and Oceania as well as in Afro-Eurasia.

However, he also draws the conclusion that people do not need large cities to have sophisticated societies and ways of life. Cooperation can bring many benefits and a good standard of living that competition negates and there are differences of degree in inequality and control. Humanity does not have to live (or, better, drive) on the same one-way street.

Near the end of Chapter 5 Reilly explained how the world was becoming more integrated after 1200 CE and how Europe was becoming the engine of modernity. Its geography, cities, and social and political institutions favored the systematizing of innovation, a hallmark of modernity, through multiplication of points of creativity.

He continues this idea with his thought experiment in Chapter 6 and wonders what we can learn from the different experiences of parallel worlds that can inform and enhance our own ideas of historical development and "the good life." If the value of parallel worlds is that we can see a wider range of possibilities of historical development, should we not investigate them to see the variety of ways we can live as human beings? The present is built upon the past but is the past a straitjacket that limits people's choice or is it a coat of many colors that signals all sorts of options? Reilly argues that the variety of past human cultures opens rather than forecloses ways to think about the past and historical development. What do you think?