The History Thread!

Gan Ying in 97 CE got as far as the port of modern-day Basra, Iraq, before he was turned back by local Parthian officials telling him that the sea route from there to Roman Egypt was too long and dangerous.

Of course, what they didn't tell him was that the land route to Roman Levant was a stone's throw in comparison. As a rival power to Rome that benefitted from arbitrating and putting tariffs on long-range trade items, including silk, it's quite obvious why the Parthians didn't want them to trade directly with the Chinese.

For that matter, the Silk Road wasn't one singular route like how we often imagine it to be. It's more like a series of inter-city trade routes run locally by regional traders, passing trade goods from one end to another in a relay fashion. And in terms of both volume traded and cultural influence, it pales in comparison to its maritime cousin, the Indian Ocean trade network.

Speaking of the Silk Road, the multitude of inter-city contacts can be seen in the cultural exchange in storytelling. I once went to a lecture by an expert on the Kalevala, which is a collection of Karelian stories that have pre-Christian origins and were edited together by Elias Lönnrot to create a unified Finnish national mythology. The Kalevala-expert explained how the various story-elements had been influenced by traditions from Indian and Chinese epics, Siberian shamanistic beliefs, as well as Scandinavian heroic sagas, all of which were re-told through a Karelian mind-set.

Ooh, I read John Martin Crawford's translation back in high school. I'd be interested to learn which parts of the story came from native Karelian traditions and which ones were adapted from cultures further abroad. IIRC, you had elements of creation myths dating back to the Iron Age alongside distinctly more modern elements, like Joukahainen having a crossbow - all blending together through centuries of oral retelling until Lönnrot wrote it down in the 19th century.

As far as I remember, the naval raid for Sampo and other similarly violent episodes were inspired by Scandinavian traditions, while the creation myth at the beginning has a strong Indian influence. The expert brought up the story of Kullervo as an example of how the stories change with the passage of time, due to the people forgetting things about their own past. There is a sequence where Kullervo is given bread with stones baked into it, which causes him to break his knife. Originally this detail would have shown that the Karelians themselves or a culture they knew would bake bread this way, for the purpose of keeping the bread warm for longer. But when the Karelians forgot about this tradition, the baking of stones into bread in the story was turned into an intentional act of malice.

Another thing of interest to me is from the behind-the-scenes details of Lönnrot's collection and editing of the stories. One of the reasons he made the assumption that these stories represented an original pan-Finnic mythology was that he came across almost exactly the same versions in both Karelia and in Ostrobothnia. But the reason for this was that the elderly people he talked to in Ostrobothnia were in reality evacuees from Karelia, from where they had escaped during the wars between Sweden and Russia. It's a similar situation to when the Grimm brothers talked to old women who had escaped the French Revolution.

The motif of a cosmic being (and sometimes a "primordial egg") who gets sacrificed at the universe's creation is something that runs across most Proto-Indo-European-derived myths. Germanic/Norse mythology has Ymir; Hindu creation myth has Purusha; Slavic mythology has an unnamed god, sometimes thrown together with the supreme deity Rod; Greek creation myth is kind of the odd one out in that the primordial gods were born out of the chaos void, but had plenty of violence in the aftermath to make up for it. Ilmatar's fate is quite tame compared to most of them.

...Though on the other hand, Chinese mythology has its own sacrificial primordial being (Pangu), and I've never heard of anyone drawing a line between that and the PIE myths. You could chalk it up to nationalism, but I think it'd be hilarious if the creation myth in the Kalevala turned out to be a native Finnic creation and it just turned out that a whole bunch of world cultures came up with the "primordial being" idea independently.

And that last bit, oof. I don't really know much about the behind-the-scenes stuff (other than Lönnrot being a doctor by trade), but it does make you wonder how much of those oral myths died right there in the 19th century, and how much more we could've gotten recorded otherwise.

I also thought it was cool to find out that an intriguingly large number of mythologies and religions around the world, despite being unrelated, have another thing in common: dragons.

One thing not to chalk that up to: dinosaur fossils. They're typically buried deep inside hard sedimentary rocks, in dry terrain hostile to human habitation. And they mostly come in the form of barely-recognisable bone fragments with similar colours and textures to the surrounding rock, anyhow.

It's really difficult to recognise fossilised animal remains in the wild unless you know what you're looking for. So whatever inspired dragon myths all over the world, dinosaur bones probably ain't it.

Count me as one of the people who thought that. ^_^;;

Even relatively new fossils and much fresher animal remains tend to look very misleading without anything beyond the bones. Quite a few animals end up looking like big serpents when reduced to skeletons, like whales.

The editing-process was mostly inspired by the ideals of early national-romanticism, as well as his Christian faith, so he did take some liberties to make everything fit together into one narrative. Thankfully his notebooks reveal what bits he changed, like resurrecting a dead Lemminkäinen instead of having two unrelated guys with the same name. He did help inspire the people who would attempt to create a scientific method for gathering folkore, but unfortunately that was too late for most stories and beliefs that were already dying at that time-period. It's quite sad how much knowledge we have lost of past world-views, customs, attitudes and beliefs, simply because not enough was written down, or because the people who did write something didn't feel that establishing the proper context was necessary.

True. Overall, the stories collected into the Kalevala and Finnish folklore in general is quite tame when compared to that of much more populous parts of Eurasia, which have experienced far more regular violence and more frequent atrocities. That does not stop most modern Finns from believing that Finns have suffered most of all cultures, because the national myth glorifies suffering and creates a mentality where we believe that having it the worst makes you the best. This belief doesn't really have any basis in truth, so many Finns become angry whenever they are reminded of other people having it legitimately worse than them.

I just noticed this now, that the maps of the Han and Tang Dynasties look surprisingly similar. As they go westward, their borders become thinner and more river-like, before greatly expanding outward again at their westernmost points.

The borders of pre-modern nations didn't work like they do today.

For example, if you think about the US-Mexico border, you might think of a line following the Rio Grande and then west towards the Pacific coast. This line is recognised by international law and will not change until someone takes it to the international court. Along that border, you have fences and checkpoints to control cross-border movement. On one side of the border, people carry US IDs and pay for things in the US dollar; on the other side, people carry Mexican IDs and pay in Mexican pesos. There's a clear point where the US ends and Mexico begins.

So, remember what I said before about pre-modern China not being a modern country with fixed borders? To its people, it's everywhere that people accepted Chinese civilisation and considered themselves Chinese.

Most of China's population since ancient times have been concentrated in the east, where the Yellow and Yangtze River valleys converged to form some of the world's richest agricultural lands. The people in these lands thought of themselves as Chinese.

They spoke some form of Chinese (which in those times was more diverse than in today's People's Republic, where Mandarin is enforced) and wrote things down in Chinese script. They followed the laws laid down by the Imperial government; registered for censuses; paid taxes in the form of coins, grain or annual labour. Order was enforced by town mayors, county magistrates and governors who all considered themselves servants of the Imperial government, took its salary (plus whatever wealth they could filch off alongside) and carried out their duties according to its laws (which had plenty enough loopholes for a spot of nepotism here and there).

As you went west, things started to change. The rich, dense wheat and rice fields of the east started to grow sparse and then disappear altogether. In its place was the wilderness: forests, hills and plains, growing higher and drier as you approached the Tibetan Plateau. You could walk through the plains for weeks and not come across a single city.

The people, too, started to change. Most towns you came across would've had magistrates and customs officials, dressed in the Imperial uniform and writing things down in Chinese script. If you sat down with them for a cup of tea, though, you would've noticed that they spoke in foreign-sounding dialects; they might even tell you that they're not born Han, but from some strange western tribe that you'd never heard of.

Here and there you'd find little villages, farmed by Han Chinese settlers who thought they'd try their luck out on the frontier. Mostly, though, you'd find people that didn't seem like any kind of Chinese at all. You'd see bands of Tibetan nomads out on the plains, with herds of sheep and yak trailing behind. If you were taking a route further north, then those nomads might've come from the early Turkic or Mongolic tribes instead, carrying telltale circular felt tents on wooden carts.

The borders in these lands had always been fluid. In the Han Dynasty times, the Xiongnu nomads of the north challenged Chinese domination over the frontier, launching raids on frontier towns and making the traders pay taxes to them instead of the Chinese. The Chinese could raise vast armies out east; but here, where the grasslands were cut by arid deserts and multicoloured rock canyons, it didn't matter that much. You couldn't send an army of 100,000 somewhere you couldn't feed it.

So they adapted.

They sent envoys out to tribes that were willing to challenge Xiongnu domination, as well as those Xiongnu tribes that were unhappy with the heavy hand of the ruling Chanyu. These folks didn't march and fight like the Chinese did. They had herds of horses, up to a dozen for every man: short and stocky, strong but lite enough to live off wild grass, so long as they kept the herd moving. The sheep, camels and yak followed closely behind. The herd had everything they needed to fight. And unlike a city or a fort, it could move — whether away from danger or towards it. The Chinese had to leave most of their menfolk behind to tend the fields and watch the city walls; the nomads could bring all of theirs to battle while the women managed the herd. This was the kind of army you needed to rule the frontier.

The Han army changed as well. The old conscription system was expensive, none too useful for this kind of border war and had the unsettling tendency to leave behind rebellious peasants who were too good at fighting. The Imperial court did away with that and raised a smaller army of professionals on horseback. And they built forts and watchtowers all along the western frontier, both to keep an eye out for the nomads' movement and to store the grain that the army needed to march out onto the plains. Together with their nomadic allies, they broke the Xiongnu in half, forcing one half to surrender to the Han and the other to scatter out west.

That wasn't the end of it, though. These roads and frontier towns would see many claimants over the centuries: the Qiang, the Xianbei, the Tibetans, the Göktürk. A tribe or town that paid taxes to the Emperor one year might be paying them to these foreign powers in the next one. Chinese chroniclers don't like to admit it, but there were many Han settlers that found the nomads' ways more appealing and joined forces with them against the Empire, like during the Liang Rebellion in the 2nd century CE. The Chinese border forts, too, sometimes went over to the foreigners if the commanders and their native troops thought it suited their interests; other times, they're simply abandoned for budgetary reasons.

But that's borders for you.

At the end of the narrow Hexi Corridor, past the roads flanked by the northern and southern deserts, laid the city of Dunhuang. Its name means "Blazing Beacons", which tells you why it was built: as the Han Empire's main bastion in the west. The Silk Roads met in this city from the north, west and south. Chinese traders, settlers and foreigners mingled here, haggling for spices and gilt-silverware brought from distant lands on endless caravans of soft-furred, two-humped camels.

Once, in the 4th century, a Sogdian woman named Miwnay — maybe from modern-day Tajikistan — followed her husband, a trader named Nanai-dhat, to the city. The husband left her behind at some point (apparently after being cheated by a business partner), leaving Miwnay in a foreign city with no one to look after her. She wrote letter after letter, begging the city's Sogdian councillors for help and cursing the husband who abandoned her, all the while running out of money and growing increasingly destitute. Maybe she found a way out. Maybe she had to sell herself into slavery to survive. Her letters were found by archaeologists at the beginning of the 20th century; but the rest of her tale, like so many others, was lost to the mists of history.

All kinds of things moved through this city: porcelain, cotton, ivory, wool, slaves. The Chinese, for their part, treasured the warhorses bred by the people of the western frontier. They bought thousands at a time and took them to Imperial pastures, in the Ordos Loop by the Yellow River and then further east, looking to use them as bloodstock for the small, frail Chinese horses but rarely finding lasting success. Chinese traders and officials believed that the nomads loved their tea, and stocked up bales of the leaves to trade for horses. Joke's on them: few on the steppes would waste their precious water and fuel for some hot leaf juice.

It wasn't just physical goods that came through here. Faiths and ideas did, too. Manichaeism and Buddhism made their way through, with the latter eventually pushing into the Chinese heartland through centuries despite pushbacks from Confucianism, Daoism and local folk religions. The Church of the East, Judaism and Islam came later. Paper-making, Byzantine coins and Greco-Indian art from modern-day Afghanistan left marks as well.

In the nearby Mogao Grottoes, the Buddhists of Dunhuang painted intricate artwork on cave walls over the course of centuries, as well as leaving behind countless votive objects and ceramic figures, telling us how people there lived and dressed in the first millennium CE.

Past the city, to its west, the Silk Roads split. Between them were swathes of arid wilderness, with no humans in sight for days or even weeks. The Chinese then called it Xiyu, or the "Western Regions"; later in the 19th century, they would claim it as a province and name it Xinjiang, or "New Frontier". Not that there were many of them out here anyhow.

But the desert wasn't altogether lifeless. Here and there were oases, cool and blue and surrounded by lush settlements. Towns sprang out of the smaller ones, becoming stopovers and waypoints on the Silk Road where travellers could rest at caravanserais. The larger ones gave life to the desert's greatest cities: Kashgar, Hotan, Kucha, Aksu, Yarkand, Turfan, maybe others that boomed and then went bust before history could record them.

Were these cities Chinese? Most of the people in them certainly weren't. But the Imperial governments out east knew the value of the trade passing through them, plus their worth as a bulwark against the foreign empires lurking to the west. Through force and diplomacy, they tried to persuade these cities' rulers to accept their rule — to pay tributes, accept Chinese tax and customs officers, host garrisons of troops and allow forts to be built on the major road junctions.

When you look at maps of the Han or the Tang Empire made by modern enthusiasts, you might see borders reflecting where these cities stood, when they answered to Chinese rule. But that wasn't always the case, either. Sometimes they were ruled by other empires — the Xiongnu, Kushans, Göktürk, Uyghur, Khitan — whether through military conquest, or because their rulers thought these new powers offered a better deal than the Chinese did. Other times there were no foreign power to rule the region, giving them the freedom to set up their own kingdoms, like Shule and Qocho. And sometimes all these ruling powers joined together in delicate coalitions, like how the Tang intermarried with the ruling Ashina clan of the Göktürk and accepted many Turks and Sogdians into its aristocracy.

Out west were lands that never knew Chinese rule. Gandhara. Ferghana. Talas. Sogdiana. Tokharistan. Yettesu. Here there be dragons.

When Alexander and his mounted hetairoi rode through the Ferghana Valley in the 4th century BCE, they brought waves of Greek colonists in their wake. Trade goods — not the least of which were horses — flowed into Greek settlements across Central Asia, continuing under his successor Seleukos and then under the local ruler Diodotos when he declared an independent Greco-Bactrian Kingdom. When the Han under Emperor Wu were waging their war against the Xiongnu, over a century later, one remnant state of the kingdom still ruled over the valley, where it bred herds of what the Chinese knew as "blood-sweating horses". The Chinese, desperate for warhorses, invaded and forced it to pay a tribute of 3,000 warhorses; centuries later, at the collapse of the empire, the renowned warrior Lü Bu was recorded as riding a horse named Red Hare, descended from these very same horses. Legends from East and West sometimes intertwined in strange ways.

Anyway, borders aren't actually real; they're a scam by map companies to sell more maps. The imaginary lines on maps are all abstractions. Sometimes they tell you who's laying down the law, enforcing taxes, paying the troops and law enforcement to secure the territory. But not always. The further out you travel from the central nodes of state power, the less true that becomes.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Dec 1st 2020 at 6:36:02 AM

Wow, that was an impressive read!

One example I can think of how troublesome it is to establish and maintain proper borders are the state borders in Africa, because these were not drawn according to any existing geographical features. A bunch of European politicians drew lines on a map, with a ruler, not at all caring about where the physical borders would be. This has had devastating effects on the entire African continent, because the colonizers drew lines through tribal lands and divided villages without an afterthought. These areas had a very diverse populace, with many different tribal groups often living in small clusters over a large piece of land, rather than neatly have all the people of one group live in the same place. This meant that the competing tribes had to forge compromises to maintain a delicate balance of power, because it was quite hard for any one tribe to gather up enough people to massacre the other tribe. Then the Europeans drew up a lot of made-up lines that smashed the previous population balance. They practically enslaved most of the people, played favourites with some groups in order to make the colony easier to rule, as well as brought in fire-arms that could be used to far more easily murder all the neighbouring tribes. A century or two of this and things were ready to heat up way out of control once the European governments chose to leave.

Speaking of Africa, I just remembered a historical thought I’ve been pondering about for a while now. What was going on and what was it like in South Africa while we the people of the United States were having the Revolution?

Edited by Demetrios on Dec 2nd 2020 at 12:50:14 PM

Around that time the Dutch East India Company had formed a permanent base there, as a stop on the way to the rich markets in Asia. They had also started colonization with the intention of getting Company-loyal people to settle and breed future workers for the Company. These people would be the ancestors of the Boer population. The local Khoisan-tribes had over centuries been supplanted by Bantu-tribes and thus weakened by a pretty powerful enemy even before the arrival of the Dutch, who forcefully turned the Khoisan to indentured servants. Obviously this led to a series of rebellions and minor wars, which the Dutch won thanks to high-tech firearms.

Considering how little we know of older time-periods, particularly ones with little written evidence, there will inevitably be many questions that sadly lack answers for now. One thing that I have wondered about concerns Thor's hammer in Norse mythology:

Could he in earlier myths have been a blacksmith, like Hephaestus who builds Zeus' lightning-bolts? It is difficult to say for certain, as the hammer is almost the only thing he has in common with Hephaestus and every other Ultimate Blacksmith appearing in the various related Indo-European myths, at least at the time the Norse stories were documented.

I happened upon this fascinating video. :)

I really enjoy the TED-ED series, because of how well they can summarize historical subjects. The one on graveyards is a personal favourite.

Speaking of chess, I'd gladly own a full-sized replica of the Lewis chessmen set.

This historical question just occurred to me. Refresh my memory. What was going on with indulgences in the 16th Century that made Martin Luther finally say “That’s bullshit. This whole thing is bullshit. That’s a scam. Fuck the Church. Here’s 95 reasons why.”?

Luther was far from the first person to question corruption within the church or wish to reform it into something closer to the teachings of Christ, or at least how they perceived it. Jan Hus and the earlier Bohemian Reformation comes to mind. I suppose there were multiple factors that led to Luther's reformation causing such a huge schism in Western Europe, as there were lots of things happening around the same time that affected the political landscape.

Catholic Europe wasn't really as unified as one might think, with lots of smaller factions connected to each other and mostly nominally under papal authority. In the north the monastic knightly orders were barely under control as they rampaged across the Baltics for centuries, first against native pagans and later against the neighbouring Orthodox Christians. At the same time there were tensions and occasional trade-wars between the Hanseatic League, their rival merchant guilds and even kings. In the south, the Spanish kingdoms had unified into a single country, after they had first defeated the earlier Muslim rulers and driven them out. No too much later the brand-new Spanish kingdom started getting obscenely rich with resources gotten from a previously unknown land to the far west. To the east, Constantinople had eventually fallen to the Ottoman Turks, which created a big scary Muslim presence even more uncomfortably close to Italy than the one in Spain. It also didn't help that the Turks had become powerful by being allied with the Mongols just two centuries earlier, when they sacked Baghdad and brought a definitive end to the Golden Age of Islam.

In short, right around the time Martin Luther started griping about the church not living up to its own ideals, Catholic Europe was going through a lot of upheavals at the same time, after an earlier series of upheavals. With Europe being such a powder-keg, it's not surprising that Luther caused such a stir, in part because the church was worried that they'd get another armed rebellion coming up, like the Hussite wars that were still in fresh memory. Things kinda snowballed when political rulers saw a chance in being able to do things without adhering to papal authority, as well as gaining control of all church-activity in their lands, including the opportunity to seize property that previously belonged to the church. So I'd say that it was still mostly about money and power, even when Protestantism led to secession from Catholicism.

Yeah, that's true, but it kind of feels like he was the most famous for it.

That's what happens in history sometimes, other people may have started it, but then someone else later on did it but was much more successful, gain the credit for it in popular history.

I think Luther was mostly lucky with his timing, because so many things happened simultaneously. Especially when Henry VIII wanted to get re-married and decided to make his own state-controlled church. Then it became very convenient for people tired of the Pope to support Luther. A proper example of how little this had to do with faith was the chance for kings to get richer at the church's expense, as with Swedish king Gustav Vasa who confiscated all monastic property and melted their church bells to make cannons for his wars with Denmark. He had even less interest in changing the faith than monarchs in Germany and England, so the Swedish Lutheran church has remained decidedly more Catholic-looking for centuries.

It also helps that Luther took a decidedly anti-populist stance during various peasant revolts, where he supported the local rulers' rights in doing their own thing separate from the church. The peasants were supposed to do as the nobles told them, as was the plan set out by God himself, so of course they had to be punished. This endeared Luther to many lords who had otherwise feared that Luther's theology would be too egalitarian. This was the clearest separation of church and state at the time, which was welcome to kings and lords who were tired of risking excommunication and having to literally crawl to the pope in a burlap sack to get penance.

I've often pondered about how the rest of the world felt about the American Civil War. This here video answered it for me. :)

I am surprised to learn that Russia was a firm ally of Lincoln. Did the abolition of serfdom in Russia in 1861 have anything to do with it?

Yeah. Tsar Alexander even called Lincoln his great and good friend. On the flip side, Russia had just gotten through putting down a Polish rebellion so when Alexander heard that his counterpart in America was having his own issues with a rogue region trying to break off his feelings were along the lines of, "Same bro."

There was also some realpolitik going on that the video touch a bit. Russia and the UK were not happy with each other and war was entirely possible. Just like war between the US and UK was entirely possible for the first few years of the Civil War. Russia very much wanted the US to act as check on British power. So when the Russians sent their fleets to New York and San Francisco to avoid being frozen in it was also the understood that if the British went to war with the Union, then Russia would ally with the Union and their combined navies would take on the Royal Navy.