middle east and south asia: how separate are they?
Post on 25-Feb-2016
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Middle East and South Asia: How
separate are they?
They are regions of Asia … CaucasusIraqWest Cent AsiaIranTarim BasinAltai MoutainsGobi DesertMongolia-AmurNorth ChinaHindu KushIndus Basin Ganga BasinBurma to Vietnam
… and more broadly, of Afro-Eurasia (the world region that Marshall Hodgson considers the vast historic homeland
of what he calls “Islamicate cultures”).
Early urban civilization sites at Harappa (Indus Valley, now in Pakistan) were connected by trade
and migration to Mesopotamia and
Mediterranean Basin
Indo-European languages spread with
ancient migrations across western and
southern Asia
Many routes of mobility well documented and influential across Afro-Eurasia by 1500 were alive
and well 2000 years earlier …
Routes interconnected regions of Afro-Eurasia by land and sea. They carried all the elements
of culture in various directions.
Ancient silk road and Marco Polo’s route
<==Spread of Buddhism: 300BCE-300AD
Spread of Black
Plague, circa 1300
Alexander the Great followed trade routes to India, fought and lost battles in the
Hindu Kush, and died in retreat in Iran
He lost to Mauryan armies dispatched from the
eastern imperial heartland of the Ganga River basin.
India’s first empire marched west in the 4th
century BC … as Alexander marched
west … The Mauryan Empire rose on the eastern
Ganga edge of routes extending across Iran to
the Mediterranean … marked by competitors
for territorial control over routes of mobility.
The stupa at Sanchi is one of the oldest of the surviving monuments from the Buddhist period.
… but the homeland of Buddhism was always on the move … in
various directions
Empire in South Asia was always a moveable feast,
moving along routes of trade and cultural exchange …
… and compelled substantially by
nomadic warrior-herder-merchants who migrated to conquer
settled sites of intensive agricultural
development – dependent on river
water supplies – along routes of trade and
cultural mobility in one vast differentiated
region of Afro-Eurasia … always connected to the Middle East.
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