Day 47 : Book Excerpt : The Silk Road In World History

From the time Eurasians started using polished stone tools to plant and harvest crops and to keep domesticated animals, they began to split into two distinct societies divided by the Tianshan, Altai, and Caucasus mountain ranges. To the fertile south, people became farmers. But on the Eurasian steppe, people continued to herd livestock such as cattle, sheep, and horses. Their herds fed in the cool mountains in summer, where the grass was lush, and were shepherded in winter to warmer valleys and plains. Each group of nomads grazed its animals according to a fixed annual pattern. However, climate changes and political conflicts with other nomads or with agricultural societies to the south often forced nomads out of their normal rounds. The movements of nomadic populations and their livestock continually threatened the settled lives of farmers, whose crops could be quickly destroyed by herds. Sometimes these displaced people and their herds moved westward in search of more fertile grasslands in western Asia and eastern Europe.

Some time around 600 BCE, horseback riding had begun to spread on the Eurasian steppe, and by the 400s BCE, nomads on the north border of the agricultural zone had learned to combine horsemanship with archery to become masters of the horse as a military machine. It is about this time, when these cavalries emerged, that our story of organized trade and communication along the steppe thoroughfares begins, for it was nomads on the Central Asian steppe who brought West and East together.

In the fifth century bce, seven agricultural states in what is now eastern China were fi ghting each other for supremacy. In addition to fighting with each other, three northern states, the Qin, Zhao, and Yan, also had to cope with frequent incursions of nomadic cavalry. Nomads from the steppe raided villages and towns, looting millet and wheat, the major grains of north China, and silks, which were common in China but considered rare and precious among nomads on the western steppe. Sericulture, the process of raising silk worms and extracting silk yarn, had appeared in China in the third millennium bce; Zhou Dynasty folk songs of the early first millennium bce frequently refer to silk weaving and textiles.

The mounted archers of the steppe had the advantage of speed and surprise. In an effort to defend themselves, the three northern states built walls along the mountain ranges to divide the agricultural and pastoral zones. Realizing the advantage of the nomads’ tactics and horseman-ship, the state of Zhao, under King Wuling, reformed its army in the fourth century bce. His troops began to master the bow and arrow and began to dress in trousers and tight-sleeved robes as the nomads did. The members of his court heaped criticism on these reforms, since they considered the nomads “barbarians” and unworthy of any emulation.
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Nevertheless, the Zhao state’s adoption of its enemies’ military practices continued and improved its defenses.  Once the superiority of nomadic tactics and weaponry to the traditional horse and chariots and infantry was demonstrated, other northern Chinese states followed Zhao’s example.

Such reforms increased the need for horses. The agricultural societies did not have the knowledge or the pasture to produce good horses, especially military mounts. Only the vast grassland could breed large numbers of fast, hardy horses with great endurance. Obtaining such horses was not easy. During the third century bce, the Yuezhi, who lived in a region relatively near China, northwest of its western borders, between the northern foothills of the eastern end of the Tianshan Mountains and the Turfan Depression, had emerged as a powerful confederacy on the steppe. They maintained a friendly trading relationship with agricultural China. The minister and economist Guanzi (?–645 bce) in his treatise on the economics of the Qi state argued that jade supplied by the Yuezhi should be the most highly valued currency of the state. “Our ancestor kings attributed the highest value to jade, as it came from a long distance. Gold is the second, and copper currency is the third.”

~~The Silk Road In World History -by- Xinru Liu