CH7, CH8 & CH10

500-1500

• Swahili civilization, the kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, Songhay stimulated and sustained by long-distance trade across the Sahara.
• Another new civilization known as Kievan Rus in the area of Ukraine and western Russia took shape with a good deal of cultural borrowing from Mediterranean civilization.
• Those in Japan, Korea and Vietnam were strongly influenced by China.
• the most prominent and influential of the new third wave civs. was Islam. Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, India, West Africa, the coast of East Africa, Spain, and southern Europe.
• More globalized, exchanging ideas, goods, diseases, etc.
• Peoples with a recent history of a nomadic or herding way of life entered the stage of world history as empire builders: Arabs, Berbers, Turks, Mongols, Aztecs, ruling over agricultural poeples and established civs.

(CH7)

• Merchants often became a distinct social group, viewed with suspicion by others because of their impulse to accumulate wealth without actually producing anything themselves. In some societies, trade became a means of social mobility, as Chinese merchants, for example, were able to purchase landed estates and establish themselves within the gentry class.
• Trade also had the capacity to transform political life. Should trade be left in private hands, as in the Aztec Empire, or should it be controlled by the state, as in the Inca Empire?
• Trade became the vehicle for the spread of religious ideas, technological innovations, disease-bearing germs, and plants and animals to regions far from their place of origin.
• The Silk Roads, from China, linking pastoral and agricultural peoples to India, Persia, and eventually reaching Mediterranean Sea.
• The movement of pastoral ppls for thousands of years also served to diffuse Indo-European languages, bronze metallurgy, horse-based technologies, and more all across Eurasia.
• Silk Road trading networks prospered most when large and powerful states provided security for merchants and travelers. Roman and Chinese empires in the second wave era, the Byzantine Empire, the Muslim Abbasid dynasty and Tang dynasty China during the 7th and 8th centuries, the Mongol Empire in the 13th and 14th centuries.
• Chinese monopoly on the most desired goods, silk for centuries. Although the silk trade itself was largely in the hands of men, women figured hugely in the process both in terms of supply and demand. Foe many centuries, Chinese women, mostly in the rural areas, were responsible for every step of the ingenious and laborious enterprise of silk production.
• By the 6th century, Koreans, Japanese, Indians and Persian learned how to produce silk.
• In Central Asia, silk was used as currency and as a means of accumulating wealth. In both China and the Byzantine Empire, silk became a symbol of high status, and governments passed laws that restricted silk clothing to members of the elite. Silk became  associated with the sacred in the expanding world religions of Buddhism and Christianity.
• Buddhism spread widely throughout Central and East Asia, owing much to the activities of merchants along the Silk Roads.
• Scholars have found thousands of Buddhist texts in the city of Dunhuang, where several branches of the Silk Roads joined to enter western China, together with hundreds of cave temples, lavishly decorated with murals and statues.
• Smallpox and measles devastated the populations of Roman Empire and Han dynasty China.
• The most well-known dissemination of disease, the Black Death that killed up to half of the population of Europe between 1346 and 1348, was associated with the Mongol Empire.
• Paralleling the Silk Road trading network, a sea based commerce in the Indian Ocean basin connected the many ppls between China and East Africa.
• Unlike Confucian culture, which was quite suspicious of merchants, Islam was friendly to commercial life.
• The Malay kingdom of Srivijaya connected the sea trading between China and India.
• Elements of Indian cultural and religious influences took hold in Srivijaya and other Southeast Asia regions.
• Women in Southeast Asia had fewer restrictions and a greater role in public life.
• The far more extensive commercial life of the western Indian Ocean trading following the rise of Islam stimulated the growth of Swahili cities.
• Swahili civ. quickly became Islamic.
• Sand Roads, connecting ppls between West Africa and North Africa & Mediterranean world through the Sahara. Turning point: introduction of camels. 

(CH8)

• Conditions of disunity, unnatural in the eyes of many thoughtful Chinese, discredited Confucianism and opened the door to a greater acceptance of Buddhism and Daoism among the elite.
• Unlike the fall of the western Roman Empire, where political fragmentation proved to be a permanent condition, China regained its unity under the Sui dynasty (589-618). Sui build a canal system stretching some 1,200 miles in length, connecting northern and southern China economically.
• Tang dynasty and Song dynasty are regarded as a "golden age" of arts and literature, setting standards of excellence in poetry, landscape painting and ceramics.
• A political system that would endure for a thousand years: six major ministries: personnel, finance, rites, army, justice and public works, accompanied by the Censorate, an agency that exercised surveillance over the rest of the government, checking on the character and competence of public officials. To staff this bureaucracy, the examination system was revived and made more elaborate, facilitated by the ability to print books for the first time in world history. 
• Invention of printing and gunpowder. Leading technologies in navigation and shipbuilding (China).
• The most compelling expression of a tightening patriarchy lay in foot binding.
• Known as the "tribute system", it was a set of practices that required non-Chinese authorities to acknowledge Chinese superiority and their own subordinate place in a Chinese-centered world order.
• This tribute system did not always work in the favor of China. Some stronger nomads were able to extort large amount of "gifts" from China in exchange of peace.
• In Korea, the Silla, Koryo, and Yi dynasties generally maintained its political independence while participating in China's tribute system. Its leaders actively embraced the connection with China, and especially during the Silla dynasty sought to turn their small state into a miniature version of Tang China.
• Great influences of Chinese culture: Confucianism, arts, bureaucracy, Chinese texts, Chinese Buddhism...
• Still, Korea remained Korean. In the 1400s, developed a phonetic alphabet, known as hangul, for writing the Korean language replacing writing in Chinese characters.
• As in Korea, the elite culture of Vietnam borrowed heavily from China, adopting Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, administrative techniques, the examination system, artistic and literary styles, even as its popular culture remained distinctive.
• The cultural heartland of Vietnam in the Red River valley was fully incorporated into the Chinese state for more than a thousand years.Vietnam retained a greater role for women in social and economic life, despite heavy Chinese influence.
• During 7th to 9th centuries, a unified Japanese state deliberately and systematically set out to transform Japan into a centralized bureaucratic state on the Chinese model.
• Missions sent out to learn Confucianism, Chinese Buddhism, Chinese-style court rituals, a system of court rankings for officials, Chinese calendar, two capital cities ( Heian/Kyoto and Nara) modeled on the Chinese capital of Chang'an, art, literature, education, medicine, Chinese writing system, calligraphy and poetry.
• Over many centuries, the Japanese combined what they had assimilated from China into a distinctive Japanese civ., which differed from Chinese culture in many ways.

(CH9)

• For a thousand years (600-1600), ppls claiming allegiance to Islam represented a highly successful, prosperous, and expansive civ., encompassing parts of Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. While Chinese culture and Buddhism provided the cultural anchor for East Asia during the third-wave millennium and Christianity did the same for Europe, the realm of Islam touched on both of them and decisively shaped the history of the entire Afro-Eurasian world.
• Islam thrust the previously marginal and largely nomadic Arabs into a central role in world history.
• Submission to Allah was the primary obligation of believers and the means of achieving a God-conscious life in this world and a place in paradise after death.
• The message of the Quran challenged not only the ancient polytheism of Arab religion and the social injustice of Mecca but also the entire tribal and clan structure of Arab society, which was so prone to war, feuding, and violence.
• The 5 Pillars of Islam: "There is ni god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of God"; ritual prayer performed 5 times a day; almsgiving; fasting during Ramadan; the hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca). 
• "greater jihad" and "lesser jihad"
• Muhammad was not only a religious figure but also, unlike Jesus or Buddha, a political and military leader able to implement his vision of an ideal Islamic society.
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