Growth and Interaction of Cultural Communities
CHAPTER 8
Networks of Communication and Exchange, 300 B. C.E.- 1100 C. E. CHAPTER 9
The Sasanid Empire and the Rise of IsLam, 200-1200 CHAPTER 10
Christian Societies Emerge in Europe, 300-1200 CHAPTER 11
Inner and East Asia, 400-1200 CHAPTER 12
Peoples and Civilizations of the Americas, 200-1500
In 300 B. C.E., societies had only limited contacts beyond their frontiers. By 1200 C. E., this situation had changed. Traders, migrating peoples, and missionaries brought peoples together. Products and technologies moved along long-distance trade networks: the Silk Road across Asia, Saharan caravan routes, and sea-lanes connecting the Indian Ocean coastlands.
Migrating Bantu peoples from West Africa spread iron and new farming techniques through much of sub-Saharan Africa and helped foster a distinctive African culture. Conquering Arabs from the Arabian peninsula, inspired by the Prophet Muhammad, established Muslim rule from Spain to India, laying the foundation of a new culture.
In Asia, missionaries and pilgrims helped Buddhism spread from India to Sri Lanka, Tibet, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. The new faith interacted with
The oldest surviving world maps come from medieval Islamic culture. This example, a fourteenth-century copy of a presumed tenth-century original, is unusual in being oblong instead of round. South is at the top. The Mediterranean Sea is in blue in the lower right quadrant, with the Nile River extending upward until it ends in two sets of smaller streams at the Mountains of the Moon. Other bodies of water are green, except for the Encircling Sea that surrounds the entire map. The yellow square is Mecca. (Courtesy, Suleymaniye Library, Istanbul)
Older philosophies and religions to produce distinctive cultural patterns. Simultaneously, the Tang Empire in China disseminated Chinese culture and technologies throughout Inner and East Asia.
In Europe, monks and missionaries spread Christian beliefs that became enmeshed with new political and social structures: a struggle between royal and church authority in western Europe; a union of religious and imperial authority in the Byzantine east; and a similar but distinctive society in Kievan Russia. The Crusades reconnected western Europe with the lands of the east.
In the Western Hemisphere, the development of urban, agricultural civilizations in the Andes, the Yucatan lowlands, and the central plateau of Mexico climaxed in the Maya, Aztec, and Inca cultures. The cultural exchanges and interactions that mark this era in Eurasia and Africa have counterparts in the Western Hemisphere.
-What factors contributed to the growth of trade along the Silk Road?
-How did geography affect Indian Ocean trade routes?
Indian Ocean Sailing Vessel Ships Like this one, in a rock carving on the Buddhist tempLe of Borobodur in Java, probably carried colonists from Indonesia to Madagascar. (Allan Eaton/Ancient Art & Architecture)
-Why did trade begin across the Sahara Desert?
-What accounts for the substantial degree of cultural unity in Africa south of the Sahara?
O—Why do some goods and ideas travel more easily than others?
World History
