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.