Roma

(İng. Rome)

Göndermeler

Diğer

The term “silk road” thus refers to more than just trade in silk between China and Rome over a few centuries. It stands for the exchanges of things and ideas, both intended and accidental, through trade, diplomacy, conquest, migration, and pilgrimage that intensified integration of the Afro-Eurasian continent from the Neolithic through modern times. Warriors, missionaries, nomads, emissaries, and artisans as well as merchants contributed to this ongoing cross-fertilization, which thrived under imperial and religious unifications.

In the 1930s, the social scientist Frederick Teggart looked at the Eurasian connections between Rome and Han and their shared problem with “barbarians” on the frontiers; he wrote a book attempting to explain what he saw as correlations between Eastern and Western history. Wars in the Roman east and barbarian invasions along the Danube and Rhine were ultimately the result, Teggart argued, of policies of the Han government. How? Through trade and nomadic migrations. Wars in the Tarim Basin disrupted trade that would have passed through Parthia, which in turn made trouble on the eastern Roman frontier in Armenia. Likewise, Han policies to split the Xiongnu set tribes in motion across the steppe to Russia, who in turn drove other “barbarian” tribes before them, right up to the Roman northern frontier in Europe.

Many of the Latin sources, for instance, demonstrate an almost instinctive hostility towards the Phoenicians as a result of the devastating and costly wars fought by Rome and Carthage during the latter half of the first millennium.