When I talk about a Silk Road view of the world what do I mean? It’s a trade route, how can it be a world view?
Well, first of all, we must begin with the silk road view of history. A traditional view of history, at least in the West, is a Eurocentric one. The world began in ancient Greece- they invented our civilization and we are its heirs. Civilization spread from Greece to Rome to France and Germany, to England, and then to America, and then to the world, civilizing all the savage peoples beyond. The world outside of the West is peripheral, something we sometimes borrow something from- such as gunpowder from China and foods from the Americas. Europe is the Center and everything else orbits around it. Peter Frankopan really spells it out in detail in “A New History Of The World”, but this view has held for much of our history. This, unfortunately, is a very provincial understanding of the history of the world. The reality is that Europe is just a node in a far greater network. The actual axis of history has been the Silk Road, and the center of the Silk road is Central Asia, or the Persian area of ancient Khorasan. Today this would include the far east of Iran, Uzbekistan, Northern Afghanistan, and areas near these. Today’s apparent backwaters are where all the action was centered for almost all of our history.
In ancient times the armies of Alexander founded the Greco-Bactrian kingdom in Northern Afghanistan, planting Hellenistic culture in the heart of the world. This was the eastern Persian world; the Chinese traded here; the Indian world had its western lands here; Mongol and Turkic tribes were here; massive empires were centered here. The Islamic world, officially based in Baghdad found most of its great minds here and many of the innovations for which the Islamic world is famous came from here. This is where civilizations met each other and exchanged ideas. Rooted in Persian culture, ancient Hellenistic logic and education, developed by Buddhist viharas (monastic education centers), and then converted into Islamic centers of learning, this region gave us our western University system and was the birthplace of experimental science, modern medicine, astrology, modern mathematics, and countless other innovations.
The European Renaissance was inspired by so much learning which was developed in this place that it’s impossible to know where to begin. Read Frankopan for an outstanding overview.
The Silk road was the central nervous system of exchange and innovation for the world for millennia. It spanned all the way from the coast of China in the east to the shores of the Mediterranean in the west. Actually, people think it only got that far in the west. The reality is that it went much further. At the Mediterranean it joined with the European internal trade system, which was for much of its history slightly closed, but it nonetheless existed. The part that people have not paid attention to is that at that point it also lined to the trans-Saharan trade routes. The Sahara was not, contrary to western perception, a barrier. It was a highway. The Sahara was a vibrant trade route for both material goods and idea flow. From ancient times Africa was never a disconnected backwater, it was always deeply connected and never isolated. In the last 1500 years Africa all the way to west Central Africa was tightly connected to the Islamic world. The Islamic world had powerful trade networks down the east coast of Africa and all the way into the heart of west Africa. The kingdom of Timbuktu in Northern Mali was a lively and brilliant intellectual center in the 1100s and grew from that time into a major center of brilliance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Timbuktu)
Africa and the Saharan region in particular have hosted many civilizations, and may very well be the origin of world civilizations in general.
A very intriguing idea is the idea that the Egyptian civilization grew out of Black African civilizations in the Sahara in wat is called the Proto-Saharan era. The Sahara desert was actually quite lush for a long time, and early archaeological signs of writing are seen there, before the times of dynastic Egypt. A case can easily be made that Egyptian civilization as we know it was founded originally in the Sahara and spread from there ( https://www.scribd.com/document/113687462/Proto-Saharan-Precursor-of-Ancient-Civilizations?fbclid=IwAR1zYdgvLVS8lcid4uhn0CjEPiEucerweJlUEuETuNTt9EfksE3thyF8z84#fullscreen&from_embed).
Suffice to say. West Africa and the East African coast were connected to the Silk Road, and always were.
It’s best to think of the Civilizations of Europe, African civilizations, Iran, The Islamic world, India, Russia, China, and the Mongols and Turks of the north as all various nodes of a network. The Silk Road was the spine and the civilizations were its various organs. Central Asia was its heart center.
A Silk Road view of history is one that looks at history from this perspective. When one adopts this perspective one has a much more accurate vision of the real history of the world and one’s provincial view of history is overcome.
The beauty of learning to see history this way is that one can come to feel centered in our increasingly globalized world. When I think of my world as only being my one country then everything else becomes part of a foreign world, one that’s invading mine. When, instead, I adopt the perspective of the Silk road view then I am always at home. It was always part of a network of civilizations. Yes, my personal civilization is my own neighborhood in this network- and is one that I should claim and look after- but these other societies aren’t actually from outside of mine. They are all from the same network- my neighbors and partners in the project called civilization.
The Silk Road view is both more accurate than previous views of history we have been using, but it also brings one peace of mind and a sense of being at home in a sea of cultures.
Shambhala Caravanserai 