culture while trying, by listening to the many “things” of the Silk Road, to find some small areas of firm ground on which to base further research and knowledge.
1. I use the terms objects and things interchangeably here. See below for my explanation of their scope.
2. The South African film The Gods Must Be Crazy used this scenario to good effect. A tribe living in the Kalahari Desert are perplexed by a Coca-Cola bottle that lands in their village after having been thrown from a small plane. In this new context, the object, which they see as a gift from the gods, is bestowed with all sorts of meaning completely unrelated to its original function. It should be noted that even access to the culture does not guarantee that an outsider will correctly interpret the situation, as some anthropological reports have shown.
3. Most notably with MacGregor (2011).
4. See, e.g., Mintz (1985); Kurlansky (2002).
5. Such as the project “Commodities in World History, 1450–1950,” carried out by the University of California Santa Cruz’s Center for World History.
6. See, for example, Harvey (2009) and Hicks and Beaudry (2010).
7. Moreland (2001: 31).
8. Moreland (1991: 119).
9. “Culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviours, institutions, or processes can be casually attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly—that is, thickly—described” (Geertz 1973: 316).
10. “Transport of horses and elephants from India both to Sri Lanka and southeast Asia” (Ray 1994: 39).
11. For a recent and detailed discussion of the entanglement of humans and things, see Hodder (2012).
12. The steppe (and sea) routes links across Eurasia were included under the “Silk Road” rubric in a 1957 report on Japanese scholarship on the Silk Road ( Japanese National Commission 1957 and Whitfield 2018).
13. Whitfield (2008).
14. For the relationship between objects, people, and the environment, see Ryan and Durning (1997).
15. Schlütz and Lehmkuhl (2007: 114). They might also have spread to the borders of Europe, if we accept that these are the peoples subsumed under the term Huns in the literature of the settled. For a critique of this assumption, see Kim (2016: 141) and chapter 1.
16. On Kushan chronology, see Falk (2014a).
17. Holcombe (1999: 285). See also chapter 1 for tensions between the Chinese historical records and archaeology regarding the peoples of the Xiongnu alliance and others on China’s borders.
18. This is not to undervalue the contributions of people who have worked in this area and asked these questions.
19. See chapter 5. Also see Watt et al. (2004) and Whitfield (2009) for acceptance of this description.
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
