Gone Medieval - The Silk Road: Where Cultures Collided

Episode Date: October 8, 2024

At the edge of the Gobi Desert, Dunhuang was once a bustling oasis on the famous Silk Road connecting China and the Mediterranean. For more than 1000 years, Dunhuang was an important pilgrimage site and a cultural melting pot where ideas, technologies and art flowed freely - encompassing multiple languages, faiths and cultures - and spanning literature, astronomy, medicine, politics and art.Dr. Eleanor Janega goes to the British Library and meets curator Mélodie Doumy to get a rare glimpse into life in Dunhuang in a new exhibition of manuscripts, documents and artworks which remained sealed for nearly 900 years. Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. The editor is Ella Blaxill and the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘MEDIEVAL’ https://historyhit.com/subscriptionYou can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanorianaga and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here.

Today I've been let out of the Gone Medieval Dungeon for a special treat. I've come to the British Library in London where visitors are currently being transported to 5th century China, a unique place that was an extraordinary melting pot of people, languages, religions, cultures, and ideas. The Oasis of Dunwong was established in the year at 111, BCE as a military outpost. But as travelers took to the overland trading routes known as the Silk Roads, Dunlang became an important resting place. At the beginning of the 20th century in the nearby Mungau caves, some of the most significant Buddhist art from the period was discovered.

But perhaps more importantly were thousands of scrolls which shed light on this vibrant mixture of religions, cultures, and civic life at Dunwang in the first millennium and the people who were traveling the Silk Roads. Many of these scrolls and much more are on show in a new exhibition here at the British Library called a Silk Road Oasis, Life in Ancient Dunwain. And I'm going in now to meet the curator Melody Dumme. Hi, Eleanorz. Nice to see you. Melody, thank you so much for having me. You cannot imagine how excited I am. That's my pleasure. I can't wait to show you the exhibition. Melody, I am incredibly excited to dig into this extraordinarily rich collection of documents that you have. But these are all from northwestern China.

How do we find a bunch of thousand-year-old documents in the first place, and how do they come to be in London as a result? So those documents were discovered in a small cave, known as Cave 17, in the Moga Cave complex. They were discovered in 1900, and a few years later, so in 1907, a British Hungarian explorer known as Mark Orlstein, traveled to Dung Huang, heard of that extraordinary discovery, and managed to acquire several of the manuscripts,

paintings and artifacts from the cave, which is how later on they ended up in the UK and then in the British Library. And the Mouvao Caves, this is a huge complex, right? it's an incredibly important site in terms of the Buddhist religion, for example. Yes, it's an absolutely incredible site. I mean, it's basically hundreds of caves carved on a cliff face. That's about two kilometers wide or long, depending on how you think about it,

which are richly decorated with beautiful murals and stucco figures. And we're looking at really 1,000 years of Buddhist art because they were a cave from the beginning of the first century all the way to the 14th century. which is incredible. And the site itself thrived. It was a really important pilgrimage center. So people who would come to Duhuan would then travel to the Moghau Caves go and worship, also to wish for, you know, good luck on their travels on the Silk Road.

You really have somewhere there that's important for the local population, but also for anyone else coming to this oasis town. One of the things that I think is most exciting about this exhibition is that when people tend to think about the Silk Road, they think that it's literally about moving silk from one. place to another, and I'm not saying that doesn't happen. But what it does so well is that it shows that one of the big things that was moving along the Silk Road is ideas as well. And how did you try to pick out documents that show that fact? Well, in a way that was quite easy to pick

documents that really show the transmission of ideas, knowledge, technologies, all of that, because obviously the documents are so significant and there's such a multicultural mix that ID was like the thread linking all of them together. So that's why the exhibition has got such a human dimension and why we wanted to highlight all those personal stories, those personal testimonies that obviously come to the fore in the documents because for us it was a way to cast a sort of lens on this little microcosm

and show how through it you can look at history in completely different way, look at the movement of people and how all those people coming all together to form a melting pot. We're contributing to these convergence of IDs and so on. What are the documents that I find, well, collection of documents really that I found exemplifies this, is that you've got a bunch of Zoroastrian texts. I suppose the first thing I need to do is ask you to let our listeners know what Zoroanastrianism is and why I'm so excited about that. Yeah, we have one very significant Zoroastrian text. It's the Ashembuhoo.

It's written in Socten. One of the lines is actually a very ancient prayer in Addiston, which is ancient Iranian, and it's a transliteration. So that text predates any other Zoroastrian, well, surviving Zoroastrian scriptures by about 400 years. It's extremely significant for that reason. So one of the very few testimonies of the religion would have been like for that period. Yeah.

And Zoroastrianism, that usually is something that we would expect to see, for example, in Persia, right? And here we are in northwest China. And there's at least enough of a community that people are saying, I need to bring this text with me. Yeah. So that item is in the case that falls under the section we call the Merchant. And through that case, we wanted to bring to the four documents that we have in the collections, which are in Socton. And they were produced by members of the Sogjun community, where originally from the region near Samarkam. which at the time was called Sokjana, which is present in Uzbekistan.

And these people were very famous for their mercantile activities. They basically dominated the silk rose when it came to commerce. And from the fourth to about the eighth century, they obviously established a series of outposts from their homeland all the way to central China that enabled them to trade commodities. And because they also lived at those outposts, Doolhong being one of them, Then they obviously brought with them their religion, their beliefs, their culture, their language, and also many more things. And that's something that we see really through our documents.

So as you said, we have Yashem Vohu, which is one of the ancient Zoroastrian prayers. But we also have a document written by subjects which deals with Christianity and shows that you also have Christians practicing in this part of what is now northwest China. I think this is so important, not just because it's interesting that Christians in Zoroa, Austrians are hanging out in China, which is obviously interesting. Well, I think that there's a tendency to think of the Silk Road as a one-way piece of traffic, where silks come from China and they go towards Europe, and not to realize that this is quite a permeable space. So there's people moving back and forth across, and they're bringing things like ideas as well as goods,

right? But for our purposes, ideas, that's the one. But I think because two of the documents we have in that case are letters, and they were finally discarded postal bag, but they're produced by people living around Dunhong, but obviously they were trying to liaise with their fellow countrymen and women based in Samarkandstil. So by no means they crossed all the desert to establish themselves further east all the way into China, but it doesn't mean that they were losing that contact with their country. And obviously there was some back-end-fors, and they probably kept travelling between this location.

So as you say, the movement of people, of goods, of everything, ideas was definitely going both ways. Well, you've had on something here that I also think is really special because what you have in the exhibition is also a number of documents that are in a way more mundane, but as a result of how source survival works way more exciting because you've got letters like this or one of my favorite documents that I saw was establishing a woman's social club among nuns. And this is just incredible stuff, right? Because this is the bread and butter of daily life that we don't ordinarily get to see. I'm used to kind of seeing a beautiful monumental text that everyone agrees as important survive. But something like a discarded letter or a social club contract is so much more

interesting because we can see the day-to-day life there. Yeah, and that's information that's not been redacted or produced for posterity. These were documents that people did not really think about how they would travel through time. They just needed them. They were part of their daily life. And I think they give us some invaluable insights on what life was, whether the experiences of those people were. And this is the thing too, right? Because we know a lot about the people themselves as a result of these documents and that sort of nitty, gritty information. And their names? Yes.

Which, I mean, if you've got a document over a thousand years old and I know somebody's name, that's absolutely incredible. The number of things that, you know, we have in Europe and it's just some unidentified monk, some identified monk. But here's a whole list of nuns names from the 9th century. It's beyond. Yeah, and that particular document is absolutely fascinating. It's dated to 9-5-9 to 10th century, mid-10th century, and it really sets the rules for these, like, women coming together, forming a club to support each other.

I've actually got a translation of it if you want to hear it. Because I think it's really wonderful. It really summarizes really the objectives that they set and how they decided to work or form that sort of support network. So here it goes, this woman's association, on account of the coming of the new year, each member joins in expressing good wishes and setting down bylaws again. Now we know with utmost sincerity we establish an association with bylaws and protocols as for our tan principles. Parents give us life and friends sustain our resolve.

When we encounter danger, we support each other. When we have problems, we help each other. In dealing with friends, our word is our bond. once befriended of public speech reinforces each other's. And so then it gives basically the rules that those ladies with follow exactly what their contribution be. So for instance, we know that in exchange of grain, for instance, they would get help from the women from that association if they ever found themselves in a difficult situation. But there were also clauses in that document that say that you could be punished if you broke

the rules that you agreed to. And so at the end of the, well, not quite at... the end, but as a significant part of that document when you look at it, is the series of 15 names of the ladies who signed the rules and agreed to them and to basically signify their consent. Some of them had to scribble little doodles because not all of them were literate. That's such a wonderful thing too, because of course, when you're working with documents all the time, what you're doing is hearing from a bunch of people who are literate, usually. And so this is a nice little peak at a world about some women who they are certainly a little more educated and they're, living a not so mundane life. You know, they're doing something much more interesting in terms of documents

by being a nun. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you read and write. Or maybe they read and they don't write. There are all these interesting implications from that. Yeah, absolutely. And that whole section, which is around Buddhist nuns at Duvong, is it really shed light on the life of ordinary women, but also on the very crucial role that nuns could play. And the reason we really wanted that section to feature so prominently in the exhibition because we could have decided to talk about Buddhist monks, which I guess is maybe when people think about Buddhism, especially in the West.

This might be what comes to mind. But we wanted to break those stereotypes a little bit and really show how Buddhism, when it travelled from India and started establishing itself further into China, had such a profound impact on women, for instance, because before you could be someone's daughter, someone's wife, and now suddenly with Buddhist,

Buddhism coming into China, women had the chance to play a completely different role in society. And this association of women, this woman's association, for instance, we can see it's led by a nun, Gondeltyn, who actually is the first one to sign her name on that document. And that really speaks to the impact of nuns on society and at least in Doolhong's community. I've found it just incredibly moving as well. It's funny how it's something like a document that's just establishing what the rules of an organization are can be really a motive. So this thing about being sustained by friends, that's something that we really feel now as well. And it just shows how we have this direct link in our humanity with people from over a millennium ago. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I just love

the idea that they're promoting friendship, really putting it as one of the very core values for them. And it's something that thing is so significant. Yeah, I think if you think it's basically your 10th century sorority with men and standing together and, you know, through thick and thin and helping each other is pretty amazing. I thought it was also quite interesting seeing just you've got one great scroll which has names upon names of nuns. And this to me was really interesting because as you say, when we tend to think about the religious life, whether it's a Buddhist or Christian, we tend to immediately picture a man in our heads. And we can see that Dunwain, this is like a place that is full of religious

women, like absolutely packed to the rafters. Yes, so we're very lucky that from the documents from Dunhuan that survived, we have a number of registers or list of nuns and monks, and through those, basically scholars have been able to get a sense of what the monastic population was like. And from those documents, we actually can see that there were more nuns at Dunhung than they were monks. And the document you were referring to is one of those amazing list of nuns, and the section we'll have open on displays for what was one of the main nunneries.

Dashing and you have the name of over 200 women, but it's more than just the names. And that's something that I think, I don't know there are many documents that would give you this amount of information. We know the name they had before becoming nuns. We have the village they come from. We have the district they belong to. And then you have the name that they took upon ordination, so when they became Buddhist nuns. So that's their Buddhist name.

And in the end, you also have their age. And so all of them appear more or less by order of, seniority. So I think it could have been, but obviously, the order you wear, the more you rose with the ranks. But you can also see that at the end you have the youngest nuns, most of them around 12, 11 in some cases. And then suddenly, order women again probably had become widowed and then decided to become nuns. So I just think it's absolutely fascinating how much you learn through a document like this. This granular detail is so incredibly rare for medieval documents in the first place. we see that also in some of the monumental ones that you have on display.

Because now let me see if I can get this right. You have got the oldest dated, printed, complete book on display. I got that right. So that's all the best. Yeah. And that is a copy of the Diamond Sutra, right? Yes. Well, okay, we need to back up here because the Diamond Sutra, for those who don't know,

this is an incredibly formative Buddhist text, right? Yes. Absolutely. So it's one of the most seminal Buddhist scriptures in the Mahana branch of Buddhism, which is very popular in East Asia, as we said, in countries like China, Korea, and Japan. And so that text, which is the Vajrakidika Prasnya Paramita Sutra, or the Diamond-Cutting Perfection of Wisdom, is a text that basically challenges our perception of all-natural phenomena by basically teaching that you need to adopt a more fluid sort of vision of reality of things that surround you and really challenge what you see or what you perceive.

And so, for instance, some notions such as the self are some that are challenged in this text. So it basically tells you that nothing is permanent. Everything is forever changing. There is no immutable essence in any of the things that surround you. It's such a core and important tenet to Buddhist thought. And I suppose that is really reflected in the object itself because it's got absolutely gorgeous engravings. It reads so clearly for a document that is 11 hundred years old. But it just shows us how incredibly demanding, I guess, the local citizens are.

You know, they don't just have a copy of the Diamond Suture. They've got a really gorgeous copy of the Diamond Sutro. And it's printed, right? So there's a lot of people who are wanting their own very gorgeous copy of the dying. So that's the earliest complete dated, printed book. And the reason we know that is because at the end of it, there is a note, which is a dedication by the person who commissioned that beautiful copy. So an individual named Wang Tier, who basically wanted it to be produced for universal distribution on behalf of his parents. So we don't know whether the parents were deceased or not.

But we know that obviously he did it with them in mind, but also with the aim of making sure that the scripture would be propagating and disseminated, shared with as many people as possible. And then on one hand, you've got this incredible monumental document here of the Daven Sutra. But then there's this really personal cluster that you have as well, which I thought was incredibly moving. So you've got three handwritten in Chinese documents where an oxygenary, was writing the diamond sutra using his own blood mixed with perfumed ink as a devotional gesture. And I was absolutely blown away by this. Yeah, in a way that gentlemen remain anonymous. None of the documents that are associated with him mention his name.

He just describes itself as an old man, Laurand, in Chinese. And we know he's an octogenarian. So he produced himself those documents over several years. In the exhibition we have little booklets that he wrote, but he also produced some scrolls. And it's absolutely amazing thinking that he was such a fervent Buddhist and that he wanted, through this act of using his own body, his blood, really help create those scriptures and engage with the ritual practice in that.

What's really interesting is on the one hand, you have the Diamond Sutra, beautifully produced, printed, to be shed on the large scale. And then you have those little booklets. Obviously, they're much more portable items. They're much smaller. Someone could have carried them on themselves, produced by an individual who even pricked his finger

to help in like production process. What I love about both of these kind of objects as well is that they show us this important pillar of Buddhism as well, which is just the idea of accumulating merit, right? So the production of texts like this isn't just for the edification of others or indeed just a practice that one is doing because they are quite spiritually devoted, but you kind of earn points towards... I mean, I'm trying to think of a nice way of putting this.

Earn good karma? Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is, isn't it? So in a way, you're accruing merit is hard because I guess you can describe it as a way to earn spiritual benefits, but those benefits are not necessarily exclusively spiritual in the sense that when you look at the nose of people where commissioning Buddhist sutras, in particular the Diamond Sutra, you see that they had concerns for their relatives, in the case of Wang Thier's parents, for their loved ones. And that could be a loved one in the broader sense of the term.

So what I'm thinking about is another booklet which we couldn't have on display, but that one was dedicated by a man to his plowing ox. And because he wanted him the ox to be reborn in the pure land and the cycle of rebirth. So what is really amazing by those documents, again, is you see really, the concerns of people, their hopes, their wishes, it's quite poignant. People still love their animals. Even in 10th century, Dune Fong, they did. I find that it very interesting as well, because we do have a kind of similar thing going on in medieval Europe at the time, but it's specifically and almost exclusively related to the monastic orders, right?

So monks over in their little monasteries, there's this idea, we call it an aura at labor, so work and prayer, which are interchangeable. So you have monks who are copying out by hand because they don't have the tech that they have over in China, right? But they're copying out prayer books and Bibles and philosophical texts and all of this is seen as being for the greater glory of God. So it's also interesting to see that they're... The parallel. Exactly, right? So it shows that there is this real permeability of ideas across Afro-Eurasia at the time.

Absolutely. That's also why we wanted to share those documents, because obviously a lot of them are in languages that people might... visitors here might not be familiar with, but there is something so universal about them. And the motivations behind their production or why they were, how they were used, I think these are things that all of us can relate to. You know what I really related to, though? And the love is, you have some really great divination texts. And, okay, look, I do not think that you can do divination by dice in order to get an Oracle, which is one of the documents, right?

but there are these really incredible maps of the night sky that are partially one of the oldest complete star map that there is which is just absolutely mind-blowing that there's a seventh-century map of the heavens like this hundreds and hundreds of years before you have telescopes. I mentioned this because it's bound up with astrology at the same time. So you study the night sky in order to also understand horoscopes, right? And look, I'm a horoscope girl and I don't care who knows because it's a practice way of ordinary in the world. And it can be useful. But I think that there's something is so nice about seeing this tendency across time. Yeah, no, and that's something, I guess,

now we tend to think about things as, I mean, for instance, astronomy and astrology, we would never link them for one is seen as a science, and the other one is, I don't know, superstition, before a lot of people. But then in this document, like the Dundong Star Chart, you can really see at both were actually completely interlinked in ancient China. And that was not, a divide. And the reason for this was that astronomers who often work in the imperial court, because that sort of knowledge was seen as absolutely key to maintaining the mandate of the Chinese emperor, where monitoring stars, the movement of any celestial objects to ensure that it could predict future events, keep track of time. And so in that sense, it was also a very scientific approach. But to

then there was absolutely no problem linking that, as you say, to astrology. So, for instance, seeing what days would be good or not for an individual. And the star chart, I think, shows that obviously this divide was not as we would think of today because the document itself is a long scroll that contains two different texts. And the text that directly precedes the Dunfong Star Chart is actually a divination text based on cloud formations. So it's divided into registers. So at the top of the scroll, you basically see depictions of various clouds, including some in the shape of a wolf or a fox, for instance.

And below you have the Chinese text explaining what this means if you encounter such a cloud. And yeah, again, seeing both texts together really shows that close link between divination or, in this case, astronomy and astrology. I think that's so neat too because it shows this incredibly inbuilt desire of humans to sort of observe nature as well. I still like looking at clouds. I'll do that all of the time. But I think it's a nice little connection that we have with these people from a god, a millennia and a half ago. Yeah. So when you think about it?

Yeah, absolutely. Checking the world surrounding you and trying to find answers in it. And I think there's also a very incredible document that we have on display, which is a Tibetan scroll with different divination charts. And this one is actually the first two, which are not on display, are basically concerned traveling. So it's for someone, often I think, based on the context, going on business, wanting to decide when is a good time to go on a journey. And then the other charts which we wanted to showcase are basically matchmaking between different zodiac animals. So for instance, if you're a rat, by your means you should avoid the tiger and so on, because nothing good will come from that union. What's really interesting about these is that you see that the concerns for people was like things as mundane as love.

how to secure a successful marriage. And then at the end you have a little animal, which is described as a frog, but it's considered the golden turtle. And that one, that particular diagram was meant to help people find objects that they would have misplaced or lost. I like this because it also gives us this real slice of Dunn Wine, right? Because we have, of course, you know, all of these nuns who are working away and praying. But the backbone of like why you could have so many nuns here is that there's all these people who are involved. in the trade, which is why the city was established in the first place. And these are people who are going to be concerned about getting the right marriage

so that your money is getting passed to the right person, going on trips at the right time, because, yeah, when you need to get across a giant desert, you're going to be pretty concerned about reading the cloud formations first, right? So it shows us that these are pragmatic concerns from people who are living in a really well-connected place. Yeah, very pragmatic concerns. And then again, we see also the transmission of that knowledge.

So this scroll, although it's written in Tibetan, it's actually really influenced by Chinese tradition of astronomy, astrology. So, yeah, the same way we showed with the Soxians, that obviously they brought some religions from the West. Here we see that astrological knowledge from central China, from the capital Chang'an at the time, traveling westwards and going through Dungpong. So, yeah, we really wanted to give that sense of things converging and blending

and being transmitted across cultures in the area. I mean, that absolutely comes across. Just one of the things that is really striking is how many languages are represented in this particular exhibition. Yeah, that's something that we absolutely wanted to really put to the fore. Because I think that's what also makes this collection absolutely amazing. It's the richness of languages but also scripts and the interplay between both, because you could have a language written various different scripts, which I think before joining the library and starting my job is not even something.

something I'd been that confronted with. And I think that's absolutely fascinating. And that's something we really wanted to emphasize through the design itself, but also by building those clusters around personalities that you could have met at Duong. So for instance, a case about the merchant focuses on our Sogdun materials, Shazanod, the Rangnam language. Then we have the diplomat. And then we also withdraw on our very rich collections in Cotanese, but we also have documents in Tibetan, Chinese, or Turkic. And the diplomat here, this is an incredibly important role, right? Because in the first place, it started as an imperial measure.

This is a... So it started as a military place established to basically protect the Han Empire from nomadic invasions. It was very strategically placed, northern and southern routes going around the Taclo-McCand deserts were joining and then merging to go into central China. So obviously that was the sort of spot that you would have wanted. to keep an eye on and make sure we're safe. But because it became this military place, this military garrison, it was enabled to thrive as a very sort of lush agricultural district. And oasis that would

then make a very safe haven for people traveling between east and west. After having to cross deserts and really going on perilous journeys, then you would need to sort of refresh, stop, have a break, sleep, refill your food supplies and so on. So that enabled. Dung Huang to thrive. And I guess through it also it became a place where people were obviously traveling as diplomats, basically maintaining those contacts between the different kingdoms in the area and ensuring that they were all leaving in peace or not. I think that's why you see Dung Huang playing all these important role. But we wanted to give a sense of that, but through the lens of people who lived or traveled there. I think that it's an incredibly exciting exhibition.

I am so delighted to have been able to see. These are a text that are kind of like whispered about among other medieval nerds who hang out in the British Library. We know that they exist, but because they're so special, you can't always access them. So I just want to thank you for making them accessible to the public. It's just an absolute showstopper of an exhibition. Well, thank you. I guess that was for us the main motivation. The Resolentat of the exhibition was really to make sure that these documents,

which obviously we are completely mesmerized by, I don't think there's one day in my job where I don't pinch myself, and wonder how I get to, you know, work on those collections, but also make them accessible. And I felt that the exhibition is just the best way to engage with visitors, make sure that those documents. As you say, they're well-known of nerds. But we just wanted people here to be aware that they're here, that they can also come in and see them.

So the exhibition will be one way, but then for us, it also ties in with the British Library Mission to make the collections in its custodianship accessible to everyone. And as something that I've been working on in the library since I joined is the International Dongwang Program, which is this very large-scale international collaboration between over 30 institutions worldwide that also have collections relating to the Eastern Silk Road. And together, these institutions are basically working to put information and images on those items accessible via the IDP platform, which anyone with an internet connection can access,

and then discover those amazing collections. I think that it's a real testament to the importance of the Silk Road because there's nothing that can be better than these objects that were born on it being all across the world, which is what the Silk Road always did. That's an absolute treasure and an incredible delight. Thank you so much. Thank you. A Silk Road Oasis, life in ancient Dunwang,

is on now at the British Library until the 23rd of February 2025, and I can't recommend it highly enough. Thanks to Melody Domi for taking me through its treasures, and thanks to you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you enjoyed venturing down the Silk Road with me, you may like to check out our previous episode, from Genghis Khan to Tamerlane, The Re-Awakening of Mongol Asia.

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