Silk, Slaves, and Stupas

Material Culture of the Silk Road

Susan Whitfield

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780520957664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Following her bestselling Life Along the Silk Road, Susan Whitfield widens her exploration of the great cultural highway with a new captivating portrait focusing on material things. Silk, Slaves, and Stupas tells the stories of ten very different objects, considering their interaction with the peoples and cultures of the Silk Road—those who made them, carried them, received them, used them, sold them, worshipped them, and, in more recent times, bought them, conserved them, and curated them. From a delicate pair of earrings from a steppe tomb to a massive stupa deep in Central Asia, a hoard of Kushan coins stored in an Ethiopian monastery to a Hellenistic glass bowl from a southern Chinese tomb, and a fragment of Byzantine silk wrapping the bones of a French saint to a Bactrian ewer depicting episodes from the Trojan War, these objects show us something of the cultural diversity and interaction along these trading routes of Afro-Eurasia. Exploring the labor, tools, materials, and rituals behind these various objects, Whitfield infuses her narrative with delightful details as the objects journey through time, space, and meaning. Silk, Slaves, and Stupas is a lively, visual, and tangible way to understand the Silk Road and the cultural, economic, and technical changes of the late antique and medieval worlds.

ONE

A Pair of Steppe Earrings

THE EARRINGS SHOWN IN PLATE 1A were buried with a woman who died in the second century BC.¹ She was a member of the elite in one of the cultures possibly belonging to the Xiongnu political alliance, which, at its greatest extent, controlled a large empire to the north of China.² Made of worked gold with inlays of semiprecious stones and oval pieces of openwork carved jade, the earrings showcase the arts and aesthetics of the many cultures of the empires of both the Xiongnu and the Chinese. The relationship between the Xiongnu and the Chinese, long neighbors in East Asia, is central to understanding the early history of the eastern Silk Road but is often simply characterized as one of conflict. These earrings tell a more complex story—of diplomatic endeavors, trade, intermarriages, and technical and cultural dialogues. They come from a time when these cultures were renegotiating their interrelationships and territories. That process was one of the catalysts for the expansion of long-distance Eurasian trade, the Silk Road. The earrings also reflect the story of the encounter between the peoples—and other objects or “things”—along the ecological boundary of Inner and Outer Eurasia, stretching across the length of the Silk Road.³ But we must not forget

For places mentioned in this chapter see Map 2 in the color maps insert.

that the earrings were possibly also the valued possession of an individual. Seeing them through her eyes is not possible, but as historians of material culture we strive to understand something of the world in which she lived, a world that shaped her perceptions of and reactions to the objects around her.

THE XIONGNU AND THE STEPPE

Most of the largely nomadic pastoralists who lived in northern Eurasia had no need for a written culture.⁴ Their histories were therefore told by their largely settled neighbors to their south: outsiders to their society, who tended to interpret it by the norms of their own.⁵ There were no professional anthropologists in these early societies trying to understand other peoples from their own viewpoint.⁶ Moreover, the pastoralists often make an appearance in these histories at times that they are seen as a threat to the settled. Archaeology is thus very important for providing an alternative viewpoint to understand such cultures and their complexities. It has, for example, disproved the long-propounded idea that early pastoralists did not practice agriculture: the discovery of domesticated wheat and millet at the site of Begash in Kazakhstan, for example, has led Michael Frachetti to conclude that “pastoralists of the steppe had access to domesticated grains already by 2300 BC” and that “they were likely essential to the diffusion of wheat into China, as well as millet into SW Asia and Europe in the mid-third millennium BC.”⁷ It has also uncovered cities: not all the occupants of the steppe lived in tents, nor did any spend their lives constantly on the move. In other words, this land was home to a great range of cultures and lifestyles, but ones that were necessarily shaped by their environment.

There is evidence that from the earliest times the cultures that occupied the lands of China had contacts with and were influenced by the steppe. This is seen in religion, as in the adoption of oracle bone divination, as well as in the introduction of domesticated wheat, the use of horse-drawn chariots as found in late Shang (Yin)-period (ca. 1600–ca. 1046 BC) burials, animal-head daggers with looped handles, and bronze mirrors. Jessica Rawson has noted the presence in early China of carnelian beads produced in Mesopotamia and has suggested they were transported by steppe peoples.⁸ As Gideon Shelach-Lavi concludes, “We should not underestimate the role of the steppe peoples in the transmission of cultural influences to the ‘Chinese’ societies,” which “selectively endorsed those features that suited the elites as well as the ‘Chinese’ societies’ sedentary way of life.”⁹

However, this situation was to change in the second half of the first millennium BC, when a dichotomy started to emerge in Chinese writings between what the histories characterized as a settled, civilized “Chinese” culture and that of their steppe neighbors. Largely on the basis of archaeological sources, Nicola Di Cosmo and others argue that, before the rise of the Xiongnu as a nomadic force of mounted warriors in the late first millennium BC, the Chinese had not encountered such a threat.¹⁰ Their northern neighbors up to then had largely been agriculturalists with written language who fought on foot. Others have countered this view, pointing out that the cultures of China must have encountered some semipastoralist and seminomadic peoples.¹¹ But the confederation of tribes known as the Xiongnu possibly changed the perception of the elite in the various states that ruled central China at the time. Previously that elite seems to have held that all men under heaven were of a nature capable of being civilized, if subjected to civilizing forces. We see a change to a more dichotomous view, in which the Xiongnu became “the other,” a people with a “heaven-endowed nature” essentially different from that of the Chinese.¹²

Chinese histories show an escalation in this view of the “other,” undoubtedly promoted by the need to demonize peoples who had become a major threat but also, as Paul Goldin points out, in response to the concept of “Chinese” formulated by the Qin Empire (221–206 BC)—the first rulers of a united China: “As there is no Self without an Other, calling oneself Chinese meant calling someone else non-Chinese; the new China had to invent an irreconcilable opponent, and the Xiongnu were in the right place at the right time.”¹³ As Sergey Miniaev notes, the early histories use a variety of names for their northern neighbors, and the first mention of the Xiongnu in the Shiji, the first history of China, by Sima Qian, of an encounter in 318 BC is probably a later interpolation or was being used “as a collective designation, common in this time, for stock-breeding tribes, being devoid of a particular ethnocultural meaning.”¹⁴ Tamara Chin notes that Sima Qian avoids “anthropological rhetoric” and does not embed the Chinese conquest “in a narrative of cultural or moral superiority.”¹⁵ That rhetoric, she argues, came post-Qin with the expansion of China under the Han emperor Wu (r. 141–87 BC). By the time of the next history, Hanshu, composed in the first century AD, it was firmly embedded.¹⁶

Other settled cultures also have to name or label the “other” to tell their story, and we inevitably learn more about the settled cultures from these histories than about the “other.” The fifth-century BC historian Herodotus used the term Scythian; the Achaemenids in Iran termed their steppe neighbors the Saka. Early Chinese histories use several terms for the peoples the Chinese encountered to their north. This has given rise to numerous discussions about the origins and ethnicity of the peoples so labeled. In the case of the Xiongnu, these have especially concentrated on a possible identification with the peoples that historians and archaeologists have called the Huns.¹⁷ However, many scholars remain skeptical; as Goldin notes, “The semantic domain of the term ‘Xiongnu’ was political: there is no reason to assume that it ever denoted a specific ethnic group—and, indeed, plenty of reason not to. . . . Excavations in areas that came to be dominated by the Xiongnu have uncovered a wealth of distinct cultures.”¹⁸

The Chinese histories tell of settled and pastoralist peoples and mounted warriors living both northeast of and within the area enclosed by the great northward curve of the Yellow River, known now as the Ordos.¹⁹ Many scholars have proposed that it was the encounter with these peoples in the late fourth century that led a ruler of the Zhao (403–222 BC)—a kingdom in what is now northern China that bordered their territory—to change his army from an infantry to a cavalry force.²⁰ The horse up until then had been used to pull chariots or as a pack animal. Despite breeding programs, central China never succeeded in raising sufficient stock to equip its armies.²¹ The adoption of horseback riding also necessitated a change in clothing and weaponry. Over the next millennium the horse became an essential part of life in northern China, not just for the military, and was celebrated in art and literature (see chapter 6).

The Zhao was the last kingdom of what is now known as the Warring States period (ca. 475–221 BC) to succumb to the army of the Qin, who declared a united empire of China in 221 BC....

Table of contents

• Subvention
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration and Names
• Introduction
• 1   •  A Pair of Steppe Earrings
• 2   •  A Hellenistic Glass Bowl
• 3   •  A Hoard of Kushan Coins
• 4   •  Amluk Dara Stupa
• 5   •  A Bactrian Ewer
• 6   •  A Khotanese Plaque
• 7   •  The Blue Qurʾan
• 8   •  A Byzantine Hunter Silk
• 9   •  A Chinese Almanac
• 10  •  The Unknown Slave
• Bibliography
• Index