Chinese archaeologists are striking out along the Silk Road
wsj.com
wsj.com
> The extent to which present-day politics hovers over China’s archaeological ambitions became clear during a Wall Street Journal reporter’s encounter with an Uzbek researcher at the ruins of an ancient Kushan city near Chinor. “Tell the Chinese that they will not find any traces of the Chinese here,” he said.
Kind of an interesting story if you can look past the attempt by WSJ to shoehorn in a geopolitcal angle.
> Asked whether Beijing could use the Yuezhi to make territorial claims, Wang said the notion was absurd because the nomads are a historical people and no one serious would put forth that argument.
"We're just asking questions", etc.
It's not being anti-Chinese to observe that China is currently an expansionist totalitarian state, and that Chinese archaeologists will be under pressure to support a state-approved narrative. Their research should be viewed with their cultural context firmly in mind.
Sensoji temple in Tokyo was also rebuilt to its original design in the 1950s.
The giant stone Buddhas of Afganistan could do with reconstructing IMHO as well.
Do you have a source for "and passed it off as ancient"?
With Sensoji, which pieces of wood represent the temple? It's a sort of ship of Theseus situation in any case.
Modern history is still history, and also forms part of the story to be told.
Or more likely: because they have, far too often, proved the natives wrong and also shown that the people the natives called ancestors weren't... or, if they were, they were also the ancestors of those terrible people from the Evil Enemy Tribe that Nobody Likes.
Natives have political agendas, too.
"Can we get enslave those guys over there? Is the cost/benefit analysis in our favour, at least for the short term? And there are no (incredibly strong!) social taboos against it? Then let's go ahead and do it!"
The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
This is nonsense. Truth is patently objective. Narratives fail to get at truth, but that doesn't change the nature of truth.
One day Soviet Union or Russia will remember the if china can claim Mongolian empire theirs and it reached Moscow …
But if chinese really studied its own history, its history are full of expansion then totally collapse. Anything went into the core land collapsed in it no doubt. But the core is not stable. There is no political solution to solve an empire which abhor difference and only use exam to do social cohesion and inclusion.
Nah, HN readers might be more familiar with its anime adaptation, "Dragon Ball".
It's kinda like Pinocchio, which you may find in Ergo Proxy or a thousand other stories.
No.
Gandhara finds its name in way older documents such as Mahabharata. The people of Gandhara were called Gandharva. According to Mahabharata, these were people skilled in archery, wars, and also fine arts.
I am not sure about the history, but I am sure the name doesn’t come from Alexandria.
This sort of thing happened a lot with the Old Testament (despite being written down). I would be shocked if it didn't also happen with Mahabharata, which is famous for not having been written down (much).
Priests were highly trained in recitation and memorization and the oral texts were consistent across vast regions.
My source is vague memory but I think it was from JAB van Buitenen speaking about oral transmission and accuracy in the intros for either “The Bhagavadgita in the Mahabharata” or “The Mahabharata; Book of the Beginning”.
I’m sure ideological archeology can solve that though. That path also has a lot of history.
A short, memorable, oxymoronic, and yet accurate description of these efforts.
I like the term so much that I'm going to start using "ideological [scientific field]" to refer to similar pseudo-scientific efforts in other fields.
Usually the way of the site of higher riches and more advanced technically, organizationally, etc, to the less one?
Later, roving hordes on horseback arrive without warning from far away, and simply take everything, breaking any balance. The horse masters are the new rulers. Later, the horse masters lose. etc
We don't really acknowledge in history class just how lucky the west got with Temüjin dying and stopping the expansion that was literally right at our door.
Edit: The sibling comment is grossly misleading, the west barely won against a scouting battalion that we had time to prepare for that was frozen and starving because the greatest wingman in history tricked the army into taking the long dangerous way through the mountains and sent us a heads-up.
The Mongol army wasn't primitive, it's that their purposeful strategy (and what made them so dangerous so far from home) required they plunder food and supplies regularly along the way. It made it so they didn't need huge supply lines and could outmaneuver armies that did.
Walter Scheidel has written a fascinating book that takes a very hard historical look at possible historical counterfactuals comparing post-roman Europe to imperial China and finds the chances of Mongol success in Europe to have been very small despite their incredible string successes leading up to that point. Europe's greatest benefit was an incredible political polycentrism; Europe was hard to invade while China wasn't. That pushed China into sustained imperial centralization like many other empires with close steppe proximity.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691172187/es...
Hm? The Golden Horde seems to have lasted for a fairly respectable period of time as far as empires go. Mongol rule in Russia outlasted Mongol rule in China by more than a century.
It's certainly an interesting "could have been", but you need to move very far away from what actually happened to make it a convincing possibility.
I don't think that there was really anything that could stop the Mongols at that time because they had Chinese siege engineers to deal with fortifications and plenty in the way of "normal" soldiers but I'm happy to read the argument. The strongest case I've heard against them was that away from the steppe the conditions that produced hardy soldiers with their talent for shooting started to fall off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keraites
Some of the invading Mongols were Christians, with a particular reverence for the biblical Magi (the three wise men), and Genghis Kahn, and his son, and his grandson Kublai Khan, all married into this group.
I don’t understand why your comment was being voted down.
For geographical reasons they would have gone further west than Germany.
It’s unlikely that this is really going to move the needle as far as rivalry between China and other countries goes; it’s more of a side effect of that rivalry, like national museums, the Olympics, and moon landings.
If we look at what was happening in India, in Mali, in Japan and China, in Tenochtitlan or Caracol or Cusco, we see a different history happening.
From the failure of the siege of Vienna in 1683, to the end of World War II, Europe and the US did dominate the world. That has been fading, and the narrative is facing too.
So the world turns.
It's a bit tiring to see the average tech guy on HN demonstrate their critical thinking about everything China. Being able to write some code and read your own country's propaganda does not mean you're well equipped to talk about other countries.
That's because it is hard to learn about pre-Columbian America because we have very little writing from that period -- mainly because they didn't write much down compared to for example how much was recorded in writing by people in China 3,000 years ago.
Civilisation in the Americas started later than in the Old World. Columbus also arrived in the wake of wide-ranging ecological disasters in Meso-America and the ancient Pueblan territories.
Pardon my ignorance but why is a culture's existence for millennia such an extraordinary fact that it has to be seen as a myth or popaganda? Did humans just pop out of nowhere?
The null model is key: if you are mischievous, you can just define a seemingly benign but incorrect null model and generate extreme p values without discarding: all values will be significant!
I was of the persuasion that "History is written to say it wasn't our fault" - Sam Phillips, but it may play a more active role than that.
I recently read and enjoyed 'The Silk Roads', Frankopan, which, to oversimplify, takes as its thesis the idea that "...for millennia, it was the region lying between east and west, linking Europe with the Pacific Ocean, that was the axis on which the globe spun." I was persuaded that he has a point.
I'm currently reading 'The New China Playbook', Jin, together with an ideologically-varying friend as a way to base our discussions more on knowledge than opinion.
So I'm particularly interested in what others have found helpful in understanding China's past and present. Any recommendations?
"The reasoning of 1421 is inexorably circular, its evidence spurious, its research derisory, its borrowings unacknowledged, its citations slipshod, and its assertions preposterous ... Examination of the book's central claims reveals they are uniformly without substance."
Whelp!
Those chinese ships were small floating cities and disease would have spread throughout the continent.
That post Portuguese/Spanish contact native American populations were annihilated by disease is now well established fact. That again argues against earlier Chinese contact.
Conveniently formulated historic fact absolving settlers IMO. Apropo to topic.
Convincing argument from indigenous is that indigenous in NA didn't get wiped out "because of" disease, worst historic pandemics wipe out like 50% of population over ~10 years before some sort of immunity kicks into population and gen pop rebuilds a few generations after that. Indigenous NA got wiped due to generations of increased deprivation enforced by settlers over 100+ years that made them suspectible to disease/fatality. It's like how malaria, dysentery, starvation was primary cause of death in prison camps, but really it's the fact that prison camp conditions allowed those diseases to spread in enviroment of artificially sustained deprivation.
90% population wipes over multipe generations isn't how disease operates, it's not natural epidemiologic behavior on continental scale. 90% population wipes happens because of coordinated genocide over generations across continent, blaming "contact" and "disease" is deflection. Hence if prevous visitors (can be whoever) didn't stick around for 100 years to coordinate a genocide, the indigenous people would still be around to greet Portugese/Spaniards, because they would have had ~100 years to recover/rebuild from whatever contact disease from prior meeting.
I'm sorry but contact alone with people from Eurasia or Africa would have innevitably almost wiped out native american populations.
I don't think this is even debatable.
So yes, IMO it's completely debatable 90% of population would STILL be wiped out after 100 years in event of an earlier, pre Columbian exchange where new disease is introduced to the continent. Because unless those visitors stuck around and active took effort to genocide the locals, but using disease as a weapon AND creating conditions where disease can proliferate without response, local population would recover after multiple generations (european population took ~80 years to recover from black death).
You write way too much for too little information.
Why take an account from an author of dubious qualifications and veracity seriously if the most significant evidence of such an encounter is entirely lacking?
Your reading comprehension is severely lacking.
I mean the next step for the Chinese is to take such bullshit as true and start laying claim to the Americas.
Clear now?