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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Scouring trade route history is a two-edged sword: which way did influence run?

I’m sure ideological archeology can solve that though. That path also has a lot of history.

I read a book with a collection of papers about the history of bronze in China and it was eye-opening how aggressively Chinese scientists fight the idea of bronze technology being introduced together with horses and chariots from the west.

>which way did influence run?

Usually the way of the site of higher riches and more advanced technically, organizationally, etc, to the less one?

imagine a way of the sword and a way of the cloth. The cloth ways prosper while the sword ways train to fight. The sword way group then kills or threatens to kill the cloth way group, demanding payment. So it begins.

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

You leave out the bit where the sword way freeze to death because they have no technology to deal with the harsh weather (which obviously is present because there's a need for cloth in the first place).

The West really isn't winning this one if that's your standard. The Mongol empire which amassed all the wealth, technology and military prowess of China during their expansion destroyed the Arabic world (arguably the most advanced civilization at the time), Russia, and the West they encountered like a bulldozer through wet cardboard. And did so with armies 1/3-1/5 the size of their opponents.

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.

In an alternate timeline, the whole world population look like some mixture of Chinese.

Well the mongols weren't "chinese" to begin with. So...

They became Chinese pretty quickly…

There were structural, geographic, and ecological, reasons for why mongol invasions stopped before they reached western Europe (aside from some relatively short-lived attempts at imperiogenesis in eastern Europe). The same reasons were present for Arab "invasions" up from Iberia.

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...

> aside from some relatively short-lived attempts at imperiogenesis in eastern Europe

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.

Mongol rule in Russia posed no serious threat to western Europe in terms of imperial conquest. The horde was fragile on its western frontiers. Steppe invasions and conflicts on the east between the Mongols and Chinese empires shaped that area for millenia. Russia, as an outlier, if we consider it a part of Europe, is uniquely exposed to the steppes in a similar way to China. The Mongol threat to greater Europe, however, was not that great. The tactics, ecology, and technologies, that made them a remarkable threat would not have been effective in western Europe during the same time periods.

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.

Why does that make their attempt at imperiogenesis in Eastern Europe "short-lived"?

Fascinating, the takes I've seen from most historians was that polycentrism was actually likely to be Europe's undoing because the Mongols were the best to ever do it at recognizing that armies weren't as united as they first seemed and, before the fight, made deals with fractions to get them to stand down (and then kill them later) and, during battle, taking advantage of split command and breaking ranks.

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.

I was reading about Keraites recently:

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.

Thats not so weird before Christianity became big in Europe it was big in west and east Asia. At least from what i can remember from Peter Frankopan's book The Silkroads mentioned this. Also Dan carlins mongol series also talked about a big Christian king/savior in the far east.

The case of the Mongols was the example I was actually thinking of. But there’s a long history of ideologically interpreted archeology in the west as well.

I don’t understand why your comment was being voted down.

> just how lucky the west got with Temüjin dying and stopping the expansion that was literally right at our door.

For geographical reasons they would have gone further west than Germany.

> ideological archeology

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.

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