Historically High - The Silk Road

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

If you had to compare the ancient Silk Road to something we're all familiar with today, it would be the internet. The Silk Road was a network of travel routes that spanned across Asia through India, the Middle East, Africa, the Mediterranean and all the way to Europe. This route was the main mode of transportation not just for the all the goods (silk being just one of many) being traded 4,000 miles away, but for technology being sourced from different countries, not to mention the ideas and intellectual advancement that spread from those traveling the road. Kings, Khans, and Emperors came and went, countries fell and rose, but the road remained. It's not an exaggeration when we say the world would look much different if not for the Silk Road. Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Love that sound. We should have used a gong. We should have used. Did we use a gong previously when we did a, I'm trying to think when the last time we were in China and Asia was. China and Asia last time was Opium Wars, time before that, I believe was Great Wall. I believe we used a gong for one of those. Yeah, probably great wall. How's going, everybody?

Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the show for most of you. Today is one of those topics where really didn't know a lot of. about it, knew of it, knew it was an important thing. I've mentioned it a million times in episodes. Oh yeah, it's been, it's going to tie in to so many episodes we've done throughout a huge span of history. And it's kind of one of those topics that it's behind the scenes. What did I compare it to if you're a Marvel fan? It's kind of like until he was revealed, it was kind of like Thanos during like the buildup for all the Avengers movies. You knew there was something behind

the scenes, but you didn't really know what it was. Well, that ends up being for history, at least history in Asia, Europe, that entire area, and even Africa. The Silk Road shaped that portion of the world, and then by extension, shaped all the rest of the places that were then colonized by those countries in ways I don't really think that people understand. If you're not a fan of the theory of globalism, this is going to be a tough episode for you because this was globalism on an ancient scale. Yes. Because the globe, the world back then was just Eurasia, basically in Africa. And it spanned that entire, that entire area and parts of Africa.

It had its grips into Africa as well. Well, we're not going to keep you guys waiting any longer. We're going to get into it. Just a reminder, rate, review, subscribe. Five stars on any of the podcast platforms that you guys listen to and? New listeners. First off, welcome, like Chris said. And that's the easy introduction.

Chris is my co-host. I'm Adam. We're working on a new intro. We've got to freshen things up. We got new logos. We're pretty much legal at this point. We've got to come up with something new. We're barely legal.

Yes, welcome. Welcome back. and we need to get on down the road. The Silk Road wasn't called the Silk Road until, was it the 19th century? Yeah, we got Great Wall again, too. Yeah. Because was it, I'm sure it was referred to as a Great Wall by dynasties over the years. Oh, yeah.

But it was just never the Great Wall of because they were in China. Yeah, and they were also Great Walls. Yes. Everything was split up, but it was great wall. Chris was referring to, what was the guy's name? What was the German's name? Baron von Richthoven. Sure.

Just like we have the Aztecs, where the Aztecs just weren't their names, this was something that was given to it. The Silk Road wasn't made of Silk, and it wasn't just a road. They were more like routes that were kind of started in a nomadic way. Yeah, it was a linear path that essentially, made it possible for commerce, trade, any type of travel from the Pacific Ocean over on the side of Asian China, all the way to the Mediterranean and into Europe. And that may not kind of just from a, you know, from a glance seem like a big deal, but essentially what that means is

to have these types of routes, they have to be safe. And to have a recognized route, which was basically just a path that then branched off into other paths, but then also met back up in certain locations. To have someone be able to travel as far as merchants, anything like that, those places have to be safe. And a lot of the reason why the world doesn't expand and start this, you know, your Asian trade is because these areas aren't, you know, some of these areas, there's these giant swaths of territory that aren't friendly. And one of those kind of going back to it and what is kind of the origin point for the Silk Road is going to take place on the Eurasian step.

We have two routes that kind of would come to define the bones of the Silk Road or the backbones of them. We have the step route and we have the T-horse route, the horse-tree route. It was just basically the southern route. But these things were born out of... The Silk Road was almost controlled by large settled cities or large settled empires. But the reason that the Silk Road worked was because of nomadic people that would then become traitors.

So you had established points. But when we start talking about the step route and the horse tea route, this was more of just an area of nomads that were traveling without a big empire behind them. Yeah. And so the T route, you know, kind of where they would split is kind of where the Himalayas would be. They would actually split around to not have to traverse the Himalayas. You could either go north of that or south of that. North would take you essentially through more of like, I guess, more of central Eurasia.

Basically, whereas the southern route would take you to the south of the Himalayas, you would then be going down into like where India is today. They would then actually, after that mountain range and everything, they would then meet back up in certain locations. But when the, you have this trade that's occurring within China at this time, but it's not really branching outside of China because on the Eurasian step, which goes from China all the way to the Ukraine today, you had these nomadic tribes. And basically, they weren't really that friendly to the Chinese. And they couldn't really expand their territory because they would be encroaching on their territory. War would happen. It was just a constant thing. Well, certain advancements that come into play as far as domestication. This goes even as far back as the domestication of horses. 2000 BCE is when they start kind of tracking this top step route. I forgot that I wrote it down.

So this route would go through Central Asia to the Middle East, like Chris said. It would go through Kazakhstan, northern Mongolia, South Russia, along the Caspian Sea, Ukraine, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Crimea. So you're above the Himalayas, and you're going through areas where I would say it's just always more of a nomadic lifestyle. Like those are countries that we know of now, but back then they were just lands. They were, you know, they were cultures, those nomadic cultures. Just like we talk about, kind of you don't get to make certain advancements until you were able to set down roots. Yeah.

And at that point, not everybody is just working for the survival group. You have people that are actually able to take that additional time and kind of put their thought and efforts into other studies. With the Silk Road, I mean, this thing, as far as the time frame that it actually operates, the Silk Road was active from about 200 BCE to the mid-1400s of the Common Era. So this thing is used even when other routes are found, even when sea lanes are discovered. You know, going around the tip of Africa, we talked about that and it's going to tie back into the Columbus episode. Even when that occurs, the Silk Road is still being used very, very heavily. And it goes through, you know, the Silk Road seems to be this one constant that is there in Eurasia, despite the fall and rise of all of these different empires, the Roman Empire, the Persian,

empire, caliphates, all of that kind of stuff, the Silk Road is something that is always there. And kind of the trade and the commerce that occurs on that is what leads to some of the rise and falls of these civilizations. One thing that the Chinese have to do before they're able to even, like, expand their trade, and they don't have the intention of opening this giant, you know, trans-Eurasian trade yet. They're just trying to kind of branch out a little bit. They've already explored as far as they can to the east. east, they've hit the ocean, so they're trying to spread west a little bit. Well, there are, you know,

a few different, not really tribes, but different cultures of people kind of living around the step. And so this guy, one of the emperors, I think it was during the Han dynasty, he ends up sending this envoy, kind of basically a diplomat, to go out to try to create, like, diplomatic military alliance ties with these other tribes to then be able to kind of take on these nomadic horsemen. And was it at that point, it was not, it wasn't the

Scythians. What were they were in Zhang Nu, correct? Was that the name of the province that they were in that like the step nomads were in? It was like, uh, Jungnu was another nomadic tribe. I guess you'd say

they were the Uzahi, that why, U-E-Z-H-I. Sure. And this envoy that was sent was led by a guy named Zheng Kian,

Zhang Chen. It's been a minute since we've been in Asia. These pronunciations are going to get rough again. Zeng Kwan. Zen Kwan. Part of the reason they needed to get up there was to get up into the steps. The steps had started to kind of spider

out and finger out more towards the west. One of the reasons that they know that they had a higher reach was because this was during the Bronze Age. And the step was very, very rich in copper and tin, which is what you need to make bronze. And going back through historical records and finding artifacts and things like that, they were able to start to figure out the reach of that area because there was a certain percentage of copper to tin ratio when they would be smelting the bronze, that they could go back through and check these chemical makeups of this bronze to see that it was the same formula that was being used. Find like the geological markers in it or the mineral components or, yeah.

Yeah, if you have something that's 86% copper and 14% tin, in order to get that mix, you would have to know that from somewhere. And there were other places along there that would smell that had kind of big forges. But at the same time, they had. to have learned that from somewhere in these original artifacts that were coming from the step were matching everything that was everywhere else up there yeah and these some of these places along weren't super rich in copper and tin so it had to come from an area in eastern asia yeah so part of the reason why the step nomads you know also being horsemen where they weren't really

calvary in the sense of they were doing you know making war on horses cavalry really didn't exist around this time because there weren't saddles or stirrups. That eventually does get invented and allows these step nomads to kind of ride into battle. China didn't really have horses in the same sense that the step nomads did because the step nomads covered such a wide swath of area that they already had some contact with these other places further to the west where they had actually been domesticating and breeding the larger horses that they would then be known to use. So just imagine you're out on a battlefield. You're on foot.

Yeah, you might have better weapons, but all of a sudden these guys are riding at you, lightning fast on these horses, they're firing arrows at you. You have a long bow, which we talked about this a little bit before the podcast. One of the things that really made them much more effective on their horses is the invention of the recurve bow.

And the reason that a recurve bow was needed instead of a long bow is as you're riding a horse, you have to be able to fire to each side. Well, a long bow, as kind of, you've probably seen like in stuff in Europe, like medieval type shit. Yeah, they're six feet long. Yeah, exactly. And so that's why they were able to generate such force in order to go ahead and, you know, just rain arrows down on their enemies from far, you know, long distance. Well, you can't use that on a horse and the smaller the bow gets as far as the length of the stick. I'll just say stick.

The stick that it's made from or, you know, rod, whatever. Bo? I guess, yeah. I thought the bow was, no, that's bow string. Yeah, you're right. The length is what determines the strength. So you can't just make a little three foot long one because that's not going to penetrate armor. It's not going to go very far.

So what's invented is they basically take this length of wood and instead of compressing it making it shorter, they add curvature to it to where now you have a four foot to three foot bow, whereas you had a five to six foot long bow. all of a sudden you're generating the same amount of power, but that thing's so much more compact that you can fire it from each side of the horse. You can turn around. You can fire it behind you. And it basically just turns the step nomads into a conquer machine.

Horse warfare is kind of what the step nomads think Mongols, think Genghis, you know, Jenghis Khan, all that kind of stuff. That's kind of what they were known for. Well, I'll say it. I'm not too afraid to say it. The Chinese horses were the JVs. They were the B team. They were not the superior horses. Well, they were small enough that, and this was fucking crazy to me, when it came to actual battle, chariots came before Calvary because they couldn't get it down to be able to sit on the horse and stay stable enough to fight from the horse due to the fact that they really didn't have strips.

If the horse goes to turn or someone just pulls your fucking cloak or whatever you're wearing, you're coming off that fucking horse like a cartoon. Chariots were able to be, the horses were able to be hooked up to the chariot. you'd have one guy driving and one guy firing arrows or, you know, being able to fight in it. So chariots actually came along before cavalry, which was actually insane to me that that was the case. So the Chinese are sitting there trying to use chariots when the Mongols are much faster on their individual horses. They don't have a guy steering a guy fighting. And they just, the Chinese can't keep up. Well, eventually the envoy and the diplomatic ties do end up making their way to where there are these horses. available and China starts this trade a little bit further to its east, oh sorry, further to its west

to start acquiring these horses. They're able to go ahead and train their military. They're able to acquire some of these recurved bows. And because you have these people in China that are an established stationary society, you have people available to essentially mass produce these bows, train them as far as the Chinese army goes. Whereas the step nomads, they were making these things. out of wood and like water buffalo or oxhorns. And that's where they would actually get the curvature as they would shave off parts of like the oxhorn. Yeah. And be able to use the curvature and attach to wood to be able to make these bows.

So the Chinese were able to produce these much faster, arm their soldiers. And eventually the Chinese were able to go and meet with these horses, with these recurved bows, go and meet the step nomads kind of on their turf, but then also be able to beat them, which allows them to to pacify this territory, making it safer, which then opens up the opportunity for traders and merchants and safe travel to start going further west. Well, this is where the horse T route comes in because the horses that they were using to fight off the steps were traded out of Tibet. And China and Tibet had a close relationship. I wouldn't say it's a good relationship now.

because I've heard free Tibet for pretty much my entire life. But these Tibetan horses that grew up in the Himalayas and they were just bred to climb mountains, they were bred to not have to drink a lot of water, to have to run on less grass.

And they were called, I forgot the real name of them, they were called blood horses. And they were called blood horses because they would start moving, they would actually just start bleeding. And Archaeologists, historians, whatever, have

gone back and looked at it and said that it was probably because of like a mite infestation or something that was eating on their skin. So that's why these horses would just randomly start bleeding. Because don't horses, they actually like start, like they sweat, right? Yeah. Yeah. Because that's why they say rode hard and put away wet is because

so if there are those type of open wounds, you start sweating, it mixes in, you see a red coloration. That makes sense. Yeah, very interesting. But these horses were what won them a lot of battles because they were so hard and just they were very very tough horses um Himalaya was just a better way to train what you were getting out of china because china everything's fairly flat you're not working them a lot there's no real selective breeding you don't

have any super dominant horses coming out of that breeding i kind of have a theory and it's probably insanely incorrect but i feel like animals are always adapted into the environments in which they're in as far as even size goes. That's why like in certain forested areas we didn't have fucking like we don't have tigers in the US or anything like that. We have cougars but we also have like smaller like links, bobcats, things like that.

I kind of see it as because of China being a place where maybe some of the area wasn't as good for these horses or you had the step right there. Yeah. That horses in China may not have developed where it was like survival of the fittest

or they had no reason to get large whereas on the step, they were probably thriving a lot more and being able to kind of advance as far as size goes and probably living in that environment having to travel further, they probably had to just naturally be a little bit bigger. Well, exactly. They were nomadic

horses. So these weren't just horses that were living in stables. These things were traveling every single day. I see like two Shetland ponies towing these Chinese chariots. Everything has to be small, right? They had to look like a monopoly piece when they were taken off. But in exchange,

for these horses, these blood horses, they would give up their tea. And the stories and legends behind stuff like tea, uh, silkworms that we'll talk about, everything seems very,

I don't know, fishy with all their legends. I guess legends are always kind of fishy, but their mythos behind the stuff. Yeah, their myth is that they fell into a pot of boiling water that this king or member of royalty was boiling because he wanted to drink,

I guess, just flavorless hot water. And then instead of just dumping the pot, he tried it and realized that the leaves that fell in there fragranced the tea and made it tastier. So that was how it all began. Of course it was an emperor.

Yeah. It had to have been that guy. He's like, I'm the guy that had given you guys tea. Yeah. It wasn't the fact that all of the peasants and everything that were living out in the open where they would have just water boiling on open fires for a myriad of reasons.

Maybe threw a few leaves in there or some leaves did fall in there. It had to be somebody of noble blood that would definitely be outside starting a fire. The tea was also widely available. Like, why is this tea even in the royal palace if you're not using it to make actual tea? So along that route,

or the route, one of the routes, we were just talking about Zhang, Zheng Shen. Sure. Zheng Shen went to visit this western region of a friendly tribe, did Uishi, I think that might be it, Uishi. This is going to be the record for the most mispronounced.

We've had some episodes where we've probably butchered names pretty horribly. But along that route, they had to go through an area that was patrolled by some unfriendly, the Jung Zhao, Zhongju. Jung Yu, I think. And on his way over to meet the Uichi, the Zhong Yu imprisoned him. and this was 13 years that he was imprisoned kind of on the front end, and then we'll talk about it here in a second before he actually escaped. He was actually then recaptured coming back from contacting the Uji.

So we left 138 BC, he got back 125 BCE, but when he got over to his friendlies and we're talking to him, they were trying to establish trade routes. They were, excuse me, also trying to team up with them to try to take out. these Zhong Yu because these were their neighbors basically, their hostile neighbors. Yeah, but they were the technically the marauders on the trade route between the two

of them. So if you can get rid of them, that's all it's going to happen. That didn't really establish trade relations, but at the same time, it kind of formed an understanding. Trade relations would be established between China and Persia by 119 BCE. So we're talking

138 is his first incursion out and by 119 BCE, they are starting to make relations with the Persian Empire. I can kind of, you know, how you try to kind of piece together what the series of events would, could possibly be. Yeah. Seeing him get taken prisoner by them, I'm sure he wasn't put in chains the entire time and just dragged around. He was probably made to do certain things, serve as an envoy, give, you know, whoever was in charge of that band of nomads, information about the Chinese, all that kind of stuff. Part of that probably also included him being present or knowing about meetings in which these step nomads would meet these other cultures,

like going into Persia or whatever was there at the time, India, all these other areas. So he's getting this information like, oh, all these people are from farther west. So once we can take care of this issue with these step nomads, we know that there's stuff that we can start trading with and establishing trade relations. even further west of this. And after this area was kind of pacified and everything, China even extended portions of the Great Wall to actually kind of cover and protect portions of the Silk Road while they were still within China. And there came a point when the Mongolians became kind of the dominant step power and everything, where they also kind of took over that entire area of portions of China.

and they weren't, unlike other nomadic tribes and other step tribes, they were very interested in all of this trade. They loved all of this shit. They loved going back and forth. But instead of like raiding and stealing and doing all this shit like previous step nomads did, they encouraged this and they actually created this thing called the Pax Mongolica. And basically it was a Mongol enforced piece throughout the entire area that was basically due to the case. to the Kahn's rep. And there were many, there was Kubla Khan. There was Jenga's Khan. Khan was like essentially the title of like King. It was the great Khan. Because of the reputation, the

punishments that these bandits or raiders would hear about, which was I'm guessing just fucking horrid torture. If I didn't take many guys, be like, let that one go, but make him watch everything we do to his friends. Didn't probably take long for those rumors to get back to all of the bandits. I mean, if you're going to have one force to enforce peace, the Mongols are probably the best one to make sure peace stays, right? So fast at traveling, could patrol the Silk Road, could catch you at any point, you know, you're not going to get away from them.

Did not care what they did to you. Oh, yeah, exactly. As long as the Khan was fucking happy and he wanted this road to be open. So this Pax Mongolica opens this safer path for more traders, more connection from China heading to the West. And this is when it really opens up this trade. Now, things that were going, you know, you're only going to trade for things that you don't have available to you. And try to put yourself in a time when certain things just you didn't know about. They grew in another part or they were made in another part of the world.

And like the first time you ever saw a fucking, I'm going to date myself here, the first time you ever saw like a fucking, like a eye or an iPod. But imagine that 50-fold. You were seeing things that were heading from east to west. So China over that direction, Silk, which is where the road gets its name. Wasn't the main thing that was traded upon this. I think the name Silk Road ends up just sounded kind of flowery, so it ends up sticking. So silk, tea, of course, dyes, perfumes, porcelain, and what will eventually be paper. and then the big one that's probably had the most impact of anything ever created in the history of mankind, gunpowder.

Ooh. We're not getting to there yet. We're going on that a little bit more. But these are just some of the things that it'll explain essentially how all of that went west into Europe and what brought in the age of castles and cannons and all of that crazy shit. Because over in Europe right now, you're still just fighting with fucking swords and all. all of that. Cannons are something that can't even be dreamt up of this time. Well, there are certain things also that the Far East doesn't have. Things like horses, camels, honey, wine, and gold. Those were a huge flow of the exports that were heading from the west over back east.

So these are just the tangible items. There were, you know, criss-crossing, going through these different routes, making their way to these different areas. And when we first started kind of like bringing up the idea of this, I kind of had it in my mind that like a guy would just take off from somewhere in China and go all the way to like the Aegean from the Black Sea. And it was just like, hey honey, I'll see you in maybe a year. If I'm not back, wait another year. And if I'm not back after that, I'm probably dead. So also don't remarry. But that wasn't really how it worked.

and when we kind of break down how it does, it makes so much more sense. Yeah, we're talking about a swath of land that covers the Silk Road Network, the trade routes covered approximately 4,000 miles or 6,437 kilometers. So I want to say the United States is about 3,000 miles wide. Sure, I'll look it up. Even longer than that. a thousand miles longer than the United States. That is, it would be impossible to travel unless there were certain stops along the way.

New York to L.A. is 27, uh, 2,800 miles. Okay. So about there. So another 1,200 miles on top of that. Another quarter of that, yeah. 25% on top of that. All these little places along the way kind of turn into these sort of trade hubs. getting back kind of loosely with our story as far as any of that goes.

There were further incursions into Western Asia. They actually encountered Greek kingdoms in Central Asia. Thank you, Alexander the Great. And they also encountered Roman legioners. So you're starting to see we're everything that's over here in the Far East. Then we meet up with the nomads. We see that there's something else going there. Then we go even further and we run into,

Macedonian, Greek Macedonian, whatever you want to call them at that time, Alexander Kingdoms, and then you're also running into Roman. So you've finally gone west far enough that you've seen that the other side of humanity is trying to push east to sort of find you. You kind of meet in the middle,

which to me just seems crazy. Along that route, there was a Han general named Ban Chow. He led an army of 70,000 cavalry to secure trade routes all the way through Asia to the Caspian Sea from these Zhang, or, yeah, Jung Nu Bandits.

I mean, that's a long way. That's a long, and you're thinking, 70,000 is a lot of guys, but when you're covering a swath, that's that, like, let's even cut it back, because that's the final, you know, silk rail.

Let's even say 3,000 miles trying to secure that area. You're basically just having to ride up and down that area. And a lot of these cities that will, you know, eventually, like, kind of pop up,

some of them don't even exist at that point, but if you're going to build a city somewhere, you're going to build it along a place where you know that not only can you receive supplies and all of these different items and everything, which could possibly turn your city into like a trade hub, you can start taxing people, you can start imposing import, like all that kind of stuff. You start to see these places actually pop up along the Silk Road. And some of these cities end up becoming like major cities throughout Eurasian, some of them still existing today. Well, and that was a huge part of the Great Wall was because if you could put a wall around or near

or across your Silk Road, you control ports of entry. You control what crosses through that area saying, well, we're protecting you, but at the same time, you have to pay us. Look at this wall. You think this wall was just free? You think we didn't have just a bunch of people die to build this wall?

You think we didn't just have like a bunch of like commission, like possibly slave labor build this wall? I mean, we did, but... We still need to make some money. They didn't die in vain. They died to make us some money. We still fed them. Yeah.

So you have this taxation kind of coming along that same route too. And these overland routes become very fascinating. Because like we were talking about before, when you look at the way that everything is set up, these major empires are sort of what fuels the Silk Road. But at the same time, you need these kind of roving carriers to bring everything that direction. So they had created a way, you're going to have to go through like the Gobi Desert. You're going to have to skirt the Hindu Kush Mountains, the Himalayas, just different areas like that. So you could only travel so far in a day.

I think it was about 20 miles a day. They said it was an average travel day. And there would be places that were kind of like an oasis that would start to pop up. 20 miles from the last one where you had lodging, where you could put your horses in stables. And it was almost like they were nomadic cities, but they were never going to be empires. It was just like a pit stop. It was a flying J. It finally just clicked what I was trying to remember what you were talking about earlier before we started recording. So in one of the documentaries, the archaeologists that was talking got really excited when they discovered this one outpost.

Sorry, blanked on the name for it. but it was basically left in really good condition because it was in a part of China that was very desolate but was also very cold most of the time so it preserves a lot of stuff one of the things that preserve there was the remnants from like the toilets and and remember when we were talking it was an episode a long long time ago probably didn't get a lot of love but it was like the history of hygiene the rags wrapped on the sticks and you would just run the stick and your ass crack and just wipe the shit that's what we're what they found was this horde of these cloth-wrapped sticks and just hearing the technical terms and how excited they were about feces and being able to look into all this stuff. But they even took it as deep as looking from a microbial bacteria standpoint and went through and were able to detect what type of bacteria and parasites these people had. And because they were able to tell what type of parasites they had and were the origination of those parasites had occur, they could confirm that people had passed through this trading point that were from, you know, the Mediterranean or were

from this area far, you know, far to the east. And so in just a weird way, the amount of like, you think that like research maybe isn't still being done on this stuff. But yeah, there's still guys digging through shit sticks. Oh, tons. Trying to figure out where these guys were. Tons and tons of research. But these would also be places where diplomats that were traveling over on trade missions or to establish, you know, commerce or, you know, alliances, these guys would stop into some of these checkpoints because they would be safe. They would have lodging. They could possibly, you know, take a fucking bath or actually use one of these stick shit toilets.

And so these places ended up kind of becoming a little hubs or little centers themselves and like cities would sometimes develop around those. Well, along with that, you have these overland routes, but you also have these port cities that are showing up. the, um, kind of the water silk routes is what I kind of referred to them as to think about them. Um, that sounds like a brand of lube. Water silk routes.

Which is water silk. Um, they're going to kind of start where modern day Vietnam is in like the first century. So we're talking about a ways down from the, uh, over land routes. they would extend ports along India, Sri Lanka, Roman Egypt, Navitian territory. So shout out to the Navitians and then to the Red Sea. So one of the things that kind of they had the overland routes, which most of the trade, I think, probably did occur in the overland routes because you're thinking of who could afford in the access to ships versus the access to maybe some pack animals and moving things overland. I feel like just for the sheer amount of things, it probably went over land more so

than it did trade during the sea, just because anyone could travel over land. You didn't have to have access to shipping or anything like that. And where they would, some of the hubs they ended up getting set up in Europe for this. So like Adam was saying,

you would have these ships that would basically sail down the entire coast going past India and you would come to what kind of is modern day like the area, what we would know is like Arabia. Or what is it today? It's, um, oh, Saudi Arabia. So you have the two inlets there, the one right next to Africa that takes you all the way up, which is what body of water is that?

I forgot. Uh, Caspian? Always forget. The Red Sea? There we go. You have the Red Sea. So you could go through the Gulf of Aden and that would take you between, you know, the Sudan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.

you would just, and even though that didn't connect where the Suez Canal is going to eventually be, if you could get your stuff all the way up to that point, you could then just transport it over land into the Mediterranean, and now all of a sudden it can go, all of your goods can go anywhere in the Mediterranean, and the two main hubs or ports going into Europe itself kind of went up both sides of Italy. One was, I think, controlled by the Genoese, and I can't remember who controlled the other one. Venetians. The Venetians and the Genoese.

Yep. Marco Polo was Venetian, correct? And he got captured by the Genoese. Columbus was Genoese. Yes. In a weird callback. So like I was saying, it does end up opening up these routes in order to not only access it overland, but to also access it via sea. The overland routes would eventually expand through the Persian Empire, would expand all the way and go through

the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople. And one of the reasons, calling back again to the Columbus episode, when we talked about what led to that kind of great age of exploration, was all of a sudden the Silk Road got shut down because Constantinople got taken over. So they had to find other routes. So the Silk Road a lot, essentially, the Silk Road is like a kind of a pivot point in history where so much, I'm trying to kind of think of how to put it, so much was done in the background and it was kind of this overarching thing that would determine kind of the outcome of other parts of history, I guess. Oh, yeah.

Well, it wasn't necessarily, and I think we leaned on it maybe a little bit more in the Columbus episode, it wasn't necessarily that Constantinople had fallen. It was that once it was taken. and over everything had to go through a new empire. Or they just didn't let it go through. They wanted more money. They wanted to raise taxes on anything that was going through there. They wanted first shot on anything that would come through their ports.

So in order to, A, make any money or B, get what you wanted, you had to figure out this new route. And that's where Vasco da Gama decides to go all the way around Africa just to get there. and Columbus thought that you could just go the opposite direction. So it's so much of the age of exploration because DaGama was trying to get to Asia. It wasn't like they were trying to look for new trading partners. Because they couldn't use the Silk Road anymore. Everybody was trying to get back to Asia because they still wanted that shit. I kind of see that Constantinople area as the parent right after your kid gets back from trick-or-treating,

where you get to go through the back first and pick out all the Reese's and all the good shit and everything. thing. Look for all the razor blades or drugs that cost more than the candy they would give you. Yeah, razor blades. Definitely not priority as getting the Reese's. Beater cups out of there. But basically just be able to pick and choose like, hey, we want first crack at this or hey, this isn't getting through us. We don't want the rest of this getting to Europe because some of those people are our enemies and we don't want them utilizing whatever you guys are trying to send them to come back and try to fight us. So that puts a huge squeeze on Europe. But we're kind of getting ahead of our cell.

because there's a whole bunch of other shit that takes place before this. Just to talk about how quickly this all happened, there are early first century BCE tombs that were discovered in Guangzhou, which was a port city in China, that had Roman glassware in it. So we had already had Roman glassware travel from the Roman Empire all the way to Guangzhou in China that were being buried in these tombs first.

century BCE, so less than 100 years after this first kind of communique started. All the even better. Sixth century BCE, they discovered a burial site in Stuttgart, Germany where they found Greek bronze and also Chinese silk. The Chinese silk blows me away.

How far was Greece and Germany? I mean, not like super far, because that was part of the territory that Rome had as part of the Roman Empire. I mean, it's not... And that the Germans had partially during World War II.

Yeah. But I mean, not as in comparison to like Silk Road distances, fucking hop, skipping a jump. But at the same time, then you get the silk that's found in Germany that there's no close way that that's ever going to get there unless it was the Romans passing it on, which is still just a continuation of a Silk Road

because it's still goods coming from China ending up in Germany. And the way we're kind of breaking this up, it's kind of hard to do it chronologically because quite frankly a lot of the dates are kind of speculative because these things are getting exchanged and, you know, at all different times. Like we kind of said before, one of the biggest things that came out of it, we're going to get to gunpowder here in a second, but paper. I had no clue about this and until I stopped to actually think about it, I didn't realize how much the invention of paper has completely altered

the course of human history. Well, and it's not even so much the thought of just being able to write stuff down because they had papyrus. They had other different types of material to write on, but at the same time- Animal skin, something like that. Nothing lasts like paper does. And we'll talk about the whole procedure as to how they made the paper and how it wasn't even just the paper that was a significant part of it.

It was being able to understand how it was made so then they could start producing their own goods. It was the almost more of the intelligent, the, yeah, the intelligence to make it over the invention. The IP. Yeah, yes, the intellectual property for sure. So, and stop me if I end up

getting in this correct. So I don't know what type of plant it first started, because it ends up being made out of so many different plants as the knowledge kind of spreads out in China. But basically, you just take these plants and the stocks and you just grind them until they're nothing but pulp. You then, I

think soak it in water and then over time what you do is you're able to this pulp ends up breaking down and they would just take this water and they would scoop the pulp onto like these fine screens just in these small fine layers and then once it would kind of solidify and dry they would kind of add more to the layers as well and you would eventually get these thin sheets of what would become paper yeah you would have to compress everything down to squeeze as much water out as possible. You pop these then wet sheets. Almost, you felt wet construction paper. Yeah. Probably something very similar to that because again, I think there's kind of a, all this paper was more like construction paper is today. Not like printer paper or anything

like that. There was never anything that smooth. It was still very rough because this wood pulp could only be ground down so finely to be then soaked with the water and turned into kind of this paste. But they were using trees. They were using different plants. they used hemp. They created hemp paper all the way back then that then once these things were dried out, it would have a very rough consistency, but it would stay together like paper. So you have China being able to finally not just rely on almost like an oral passing of information. It's like playing the telephone game. You pass it between enough people and it kind of loses the message. You're able to write down not only just like historical information or, you know,

things to do with like the politics or the emperor. But now you're being able to go ahead and create things that can be sent to elsewhere, trade agreements. You're able to go ahead and write actual books and those books are finding their way to other places. All of a sudden, this knowledge of how to create this paper after people kind of discover what it's all about, this knowledge ends up working its way out of China and into places like, you know, India and into the Persian empire and eventually even further west until it reaches the Mediterranean and then Europe. And had the Silk Road not existed, it may have taken longer. Like, I'm one of those people that think, like, things will eventually happen.

Yeah. It's just the timing of it. But had that Silk Road and that commerce not been available, China could have technically held onto that. And as stupid as it sounds, the technology of paper, they could have held onto that for another three or four hundred years. at what point does that then put all of those things that were learned off of written documentation through you know the written words stories myths legends information that occurred all across

the persian empire europe the mediterranean think of all that not being able to happen for another 400 years think of the library of Alexandria not being able to be full of all of those documents of all of that recorded history and science and philosophy and all that kind of stuff the The invention of paper and the spread of that throughout the Silk Road allows basically civilizations to keep records of what they're doing. So we know that history. We know that written history today. Not only that, but it allows you to like, I know, was it, they used to do it on bamboo, right? Well, China used to actually send stuff on bamboo, the bamboo strips that they would then kind of like, you know, there's those mats that you can actually, like, roll out.

They're made of bamboo. Yeah, grasslands. Yeah. Kind of like that, except they would just have things written on these strips. That's what they used to have to travel. You'd have to roll these things up and take them with you. Whereas you could now take five scrolls of paper, and you could transmit more information, and it held up more.

Information was less likely to be lost because it was on a more durable medium. Well, and along that, everything can kind of go into a uniformity, because I'm sure they probably made papyrus look as perfectly square as possible. But you're doing something repeatable with these screens that makes everything the exact same size. It's also, you don't have to scroll everything up and roll it all together. You can actually have a book form as opposed to having a scroll. Yeah. And you're able to bind these into a book instead of having like 36 scrolls on something that are all...

And then all of a sudden you lose two of them and it had the key. parts of the information. Okay. Gunpowder. Let's wait until we get to the exchange across. Okay. Because gunpowder is going to be huge. Okay.

We still got to talk about just how everything kind of jump starts once the Romans, once their conquest of Egypt is complete, because the Roman Empire still kind of has that, the area between them, but is. soon as you start your conquest of Egypt and then you gain Alexandria, then your seaport, your water route is just basically straight to you. You're not losing anything over land. You're not having to wait that long. And I think that's more of the beneficial route. I think that there's a good chance that you're right. They did transport a lot more over land. But I think the water route was so much faster. Oh, it was definitely faster. And I think probably more, probably perishable stuff,

because a lot of things that were grown over in China, you know, those luxury items, like certain foods that people had never seen before, spices, things like that that have shelf lives, that would definitely be stuff being sent the quicker way over the water route. Probably more expensive stuff was sent that way as well. Yeah. Like porcelain, things like that. God, can you imagine trying to travel with porcelain across that entire fucking Silk Road and not expect everything just to be in pieces when you get there. Overland had to be impossible. There's no way that you could ever wrap them enough for horse travel for that long

anything. Yeah. But the Roman Empire had a certain proclivity and much like the English had a proclivity for the tea that they were really, really excited about, the Romans loved silk. They fucking loved it. And the whole... Do you think that's because, okay, Roman garb Toga, right? Yeah.

Whatever the material that they were. making those togas from before. I don't know if it would have been... Yeah, I would think. Maybe cotton. I don't know. But when you compare that shit to be able to wear a silk robe or a silk toga,

not even a comparison. And not only that, guess what? These silks come in so many different colors because of the access to all of the different dyes and everything, that it is a huge status symbol in Rome to even own any piece of silk. You can weave gold into silk. And just imagine the optics of just a beautifully silk flowing toga and the wind will always separate you.

And this was a situation where even back in Asia, the silk making process was held within the royal kingdoms. And it took a very long time before I'm sure they realized that they could make a ton of money by exporting this. But it even got into the peasant's hands to be able to make it. Yeah, it's like a state secret. it. Well, and I see it too, kind of going back to the Rome thing, imagine just everyone's robes or everyone's togas are white, because you always kind of see that when you're seeing portrayals of Rome. And then all of a sudden you walk in and you're wearing a fucking purple silk

toga, I see that as being like you're looking through a monochromatic lens, and then all of a sudden you see just this bright flash of color. You're like, that guy's a fucking boss. Well, and we know that too, because so many civilizations, we see stuff now is usually it's either, light brown, dark brown, maybe a red or a gray, something like that. But back then, everything was painted. All of that pigment has just worn out of it. So they did love pops of color. And especially,

like you say, yeah, if you can differentiate yourself from everybody else, I guess I always just thought maybe Toga's just always being white were a sign of purity, but at the same time, they just didn't have dyes, right? For the most part, and maybe it was just like, kind of a, it showed your station, like the wider it was, man is a clan thing, or the wider your robe was, the higher station you were. But also, anytime that you see images of Roman emperors, always dressed. Then that stuff had to have been probably silk at some point, but it's always colorful. Yeah. You wonder if it started with somebody doing one of the, like somebody royals laundry and accidentally spilling a little bit of wine on it or like trying to get the wine out of a white toga.

Yeah, but you can tell when it's that ugly faded pink color. There's a difference between a flashy pink silk. or purple silk and something that you know is like it's washing a red shirt with the whites. But you just go all in. You just shove the whole toga into the wine and change the color. Yeah. And then all of a sudden the next time they show up to a party, they're wearing like this pink toga when everybody else is supposed to be wearing white. But silk was a very, very big deal to the Roman Empire.

So much so that the division that would happen within the Roman Empire was partially because they nearly bankrupted themselves trying to get Asian goods into Rome. And this is where we see the split of the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire. Now, we know from our episode on the Byzantine Empire that the Byzantines were the Romans. We just decided to name them Byzantines. Like we decided to name this the Silk Road. They were the Western Roman Empire. Yeah.

Yeah. So the Western Roman Empire still has this desire for all of these Asian goods. And it's not the total reason why the Western Empire collapsed. because there was so much more to it as far as religious reasons and things like that. But it ate a very, very large chunk of money out of their pocket because this, just like we were talking about during the Opium Wars, the Western Roman Empire just traded silver. There wasn't a lot of exports coming out of Western Rome all the way over there. I'm sure there was probably some wine or a few different things like that, olive oil.

But mainly they were paying cash for a good, which means you, just are emptying out the bank. It's keeping up with the Joneses, man. Exactly. So the fact that silk coming over the Silk Road sort of started to bankrupt the Roman Empire is just absolutely amazing to me. And then, yeah, as we were talking about Byzantine rule in Constantinople was then taken over by the Ottomans. And once the Ottomans get in there, it just sort of changes everything. but Constantinople was one of the gateways for both land and water routes from both directions from the 6th to the 14th centuries.

So it was a very busy hub. Well, if you think about it geographically, so with that area, and if you haven't listened to the episode on Constantinople, it's really fascinating how much of a key part that that place played. So when you're traveling and you're trying to find yourself, you know, getting into the Mediterranean or getting into Europe, if you're traveling along the Silk Road and you're going through. you know, almost like southern Eurasia, that area, the Persian Empire, which I also have to kind of give a side note here. There was prior to the actual Silk Road itself, the Persian Empire actually had this thing they called the Royal Road. The Royal Road sounded awesome. I know. Also, the Persians had the first mail service. Yes. And so the Royal Road itself actually existed 300 years prior to the Silk Road. I see this as one of those situations in which once the trade

was open, that road has to connect somewhere. And if they're like, hey, we already have this established system of trade. If you guys just want to go ahead and kind of just like join into it and plug in, you guys can just kind of use this because all of our trade hubs are already set along this Royal Road. It works out for everybody. How long

do you think, or how many people do you think made it to the Royal Road and just stopped? Like, the thought of going over all of these mountain passes and getting around the Hindu Kush Mountains and going around the Himalayas just to get over into Persia to this Royal Road.

And then you're driving through and you're like, I don't want to keep going through this shit route again. I'm just going to stay here. Well, I think we kind of like danced around it, but I don't think we actually talked about it was the thought process is you start over here in China and you travel all the way across. What actually happened is it was more of just like small transport or small transfers of the goods.

So these merchants would maybe travel 200, 300 miles. They would then sell their goods to some of the goods. who was stationed at that location or that city or that hub or whatever it was, that person would then transport it the next 200, 300, 400, however long they transported it. They would then sell it to somebody else. Of course, all this is getting marked up and everything. So by the time it gets to its final destination, that's why all of these goods were so expensive and why Rome was basically emptying the coffers trying to keep up. But you had these guys that were basically little experts of the areas that they were traveling through, which also made the Silk Road even more efficient. It wasn't

just someone traveling and being like, well, I've traveled the entire Silk Road. It takes me a year to get back and forth. And this route can change drastically. You know, it can become unsafe. Whereas if you're only going 200 miles, you can know that 200 miles like the back of your hand. You can know where to camp. You can know where the safe spots are. Your goods are, you know, you're getting your goods there intact because you're probably also not having to travel as far and you can carry more goods with you. Yeah. And so much of it is just like you say, being an expert in that strip of road, it's just like short-haul trucking compared to long-haul trucking. You know that route inside and out. You know if there's going to be any sort of raiders or anything.

Your last trip, maybe you ran into some people that were trying to steal your shit. So you know in that area that they're active and to try and avoid them. But you could also have like areas that are being protected. You're not having to monitor that entire strip. Maybe a garrison is able to monitor like a 50-mile stretch. So it's able to be a little bit safer. kind of what I was getting at, though, talking about Constantinople and what would eventually become Istanbul, is once you get to a point where you're passing through Persian Empire, you're getting to the area what's going to be like Afghanistan, Iran is today, you start to run into areas where you're kind of separated from the Aegean or from the rest of like Italy and Europe by some bodies of water unless you're willing to travel way north, but there weren't really any Silk Road routes. So if you're traveling, you end up, you know, at the Caspian,

sea, you're having to go either north or south into Iran or into kind of like Kazakhstan today to get past that. You're basically looking for the shortest route to get your goods where they need to go. So you would have people going to the western edge, or I'm sorry, the eastern edge of the Black Sea. Shifts would then transport everything over or through the Black Sea. And the area where it actually goes through is I believe it's like the Straits of Propontas, part of the, what's that little channel called right there? I can't remember the name. It's, um, the boss for a straight. The boss for a straight. So where it pinches really, really tight, that's where Istanbul and content noble. So nothing can get out of the Black Sea without passing

Constantinople. And it can't, if it can't get past the Black Sea, it can't get into Mediterranean. And so you're basically, at that point, it kind of, I don't want to say it completely takes the route out of the equation, but it really makes it harder for any place west of there to kind of get the good shit. Well, these large cities start springing up along these routes over land. You have Kashgar in China, Bukhra in Uzbekistan, Ashbaat in Turkmenistan, Tehran and Iran, Mosul and Iraq, Malacca, Guangzhou, Antioch in Syria, Aleppo in Syria, and then Alexandria. and to get to Alexandria and Venice,

there were all these other little stopping points that were in these kingdoms. But the Persian kingdom, the cities would grow around where these trade routes would come to because that's where the business was. And that's what the commerce was. And a guy that sort of, after we just did this whole long talk

about how it was kind of like a relay race and handoffs and all that stuff, we go right into a guy who just did the full shoot and match in Marco Polo. Yeah. Which Marco Polo is one of those historical figures that part of the most interesting thing about Marco Polo is if this is just a story and he didn't do all of this stuff,

it means somebody did all of this and he got this from because I don't think there's a way that this guy with the knowledge that he would have could make up the story in which he did. So I like to believe that most of it is true. But Marco Polo, wait for the episode on that guy, basically makes the trip from Venice, goes over and ends up going into Israel and Palestine because you can access that through the Mediterranean, goes through Iran, Iraq, ends up going into Afghanistan, and then finding his way to Kashgar and China. There's even an amount of time after going through the Gobe Desert, finding his way to Beijing. Um, he goes to Zanzibar. That's where he ends up meeting Kubla Khan. And he ends up spending years in the court of the con. Now, whether that's as a willing participant, whether it's, I think it was an unwilling participant, kind of up in the air. But I mean, this guy, Kubla Khan is with this Venetian dude who's just hearing all of these stories about this other part of the world. And they, the, the reach of Django con and just the cons in general was huge. I mean, they even went into Europe. Yeah. It blows me. That's so far away. I know. Well, here's one thing, too, that we were talking about that, like, just kind of, because there's so much shit that, like, finds its way

throughout your Asian, advances different countries. Food is one of those things. And not just, like, you know, delicacies or these little, like, luxury items, food that's able to sustain a population. You had this type of plant. It was called millet that grew over in like central Eurasia and China and everything. That was basically, it was a grain, right? A type of grain. It was very, the way it grew, like look up a picture of it. It's weird.

It's like a weird grassy plant that then has all these little bulbs that grow off it. And that's actually the grain. It's like a mixture of alfalfa and wheat. And kind of looks like big quinoa. A little bit, but the actual grain. The actual grain itself. well over in Europe and further to the west you had wheat and so throughout the trade on the Silk Road you get the introduction of wheat into China where they had just previously had this millet stuff

before and you get the introduction of this millet over into the western areas where they just had wheat before now you're probably like well if wheat's wheat's really good why would you need something different these areas had growing seasons as well and in order to who would advance the civilization. We've talked about this on so many different levels, so many civilizations, you have to get your civilization past a point where it's not all about all hands on deck for survival of the civilization in the community. Once you're able to advance your agriculture far enough to where it only takes a smaller group of people to maintain all of that, you then free up other people to pursue other things, which are, you know, advanced, you know, learning,

mathematics, science, all of that kind of stuff. So science does you know good if you're starving. Exactly. Or you don't even have time to try to figure out the science of something. So the thing about this millet stuff is it could actually grow within like 45 to 50 days. So it wasn't as dense or as like nutrient rich. So you would have to have these different growing periods where you could just grow crop after crop, after crop, after crop. And this was something that the nomadic step people did by just kind of like throwing this stuff all over the grasslands and then coming back 45, 50 days later and they would be able to survive off this stuff. Well, over in Europe where it's just growing wheat and you're trying to grow it for months out of a year, you have one chance, one harvest to gather all

this wheat. You were able to grow in a large enough area to cultivate it and have enough for the whole rest of the year. But sometimes if you didn't have a good harvest, that meant that people were going to die. So this millet stuff, what would happen is they'd get through the growing season of wheat, get as much as they could to get them through for the winter to build up their stores. And then they would plant this millet stuff and basically have this stuff to back them up or if they had a bad harvest to get them through the winter until the next year. On the other side, the Chinese were still using this millet to grow their food, but then they were bringing in this wheat that was more substantial and growing that along with the millet. So you have this trade of agriculture between these civilizations that basically allows these civilizations to free up people for other pursuits, which are going to advance them even further. And that's kind of, in the background, it's kind of silly to think about that something simple like food or anything like that. But when it's literally a linchpin, for how a society can advance,

that's huge. You've now just freed up so many people that can pursue other things to advance your goals. Well, and I think that's where it kind of gets lost in translation is, yeah, it's just wheat or yeah, it's just millet, but at the same time, it gives life. And life is what continues to thrive and make these changes in sort of, if you don't have the baseline of what you need,

if your hierarchy of needs isn't covered, you're not going to be able to do anything else. So even though it is a very elementary step, it's a step that then pushes everything else forward. It is actually life or death for this kind of stuff, but I think we're so far removed from it. So far removed from the fact that food isn't just so readily abundant. Oh, buddy.

They will always have it. We have the hot pocket now. Yeah. They could never dream of a hot pocket. No, but it's just it kind of puts both, both, you know, all the civilizations in between Europe, Eurasia, all of that, it puts them now in a position where they can start making some really interesting discoveries.

Yeah, absolutely. And we'll go into it. We've got to give Marco Polo a little bit more of his due. I just don't want to cover so much that we can't do an episode on him. No, we'd need to point out that Marco Polo started this voyage that took four years of this journey that took four years at the age of 17. he was traveling over there with his father and his uncle who had already been over to China and met with the Great Khan, I think is what they referred to.

I don't know if that was Genghis or Kublai. Whoever was just in that position was the Great Khan. But they were given a passport. It was like the first passport ever given that they were then to return to Venice and come back. That passport that they were given that was signed by the Great Khan was able to find them housing, shelter, food, water, any of their necessities, anywhere in Asia. It was a golden ticket. Yeah, this Pax Mongolia was.

Like having a black card. Exactly. And they could go do it anywhere. And so Marco was traveling over there with his father. I think it was his uncle. And just to think of a 17-year-old making this journey, that's why there's so much of Marco Polo that I feel like is bullshit, but it's such good, like, fun adventure stuff. Like, he said that, excuse me,

once they entered the Persian Empire, he wrote in his journal or his entry or whatever it was, saying that these were the most beautiful women that he's ever seen in his entire life. Well, I'm not going to argue with Marco because I tend to, it's a good argument to make. They have a very strong case. Just get it out. Some of the most beautiful women in the, well, I want to give everybody their due. Yeah. Because there's a lot of countries that have beautiful women.

But at the same time, this dude is 17. He is nothing but hormones and a rager traveling through these countries with this black card, with the mark of con. The guy that I'm sure everybody knows about. You're saying this guy was cleaning up. Yeah, he was definitely cleaning up. Cleaning up and getting dirty. At an age when he was like traveling a life or death route. He was just sowing his wild millet.

It just blows me away. So before we do kind of some of the things that traveled along the Silk Road, do you want to take a bathroom break? Yeah, let's do it. Oh my God, Adam. What is that up in the sky? It's a bird. It's a plane. It's socials. Oh, my God. It's faster than Instagram. That's historically high pod on Instagram. More powerful than X? It's historically high, historically H.I. on X? Able to leap tall threads in a single bound. Back to historically high pod on threads. And, I mean, I guess there's still Gmail, right? We got that too. That is historically high podcast at gmail.com. All right, guys, back to the show.

All right. We've talked about goods. We'll probably come back to goods in a second, but it's not just about the cool shit. It's also about ideas that are traveling along the Silk Road. And what's always been the biggest idea at any point in human history? Where do we come from? What's going on?

How is this all here? Everyone's got an answer for it, and they're all different. This, when you were talking about gunpowder being the single most important thing that traveled to Silk Road, I think religion holds a higher weight just because the idea of religion is almost more powerful than gunpowder. It is, and I was just going through my head, I was going to try to challenge you on that. I was going to say, but is it more deadly? And then I heard it come out of my mouth that religion is not deadly. Um, no man, I mean...

I mean, the Crusades were pretty deadly. No, no, no, no, no, I'm saying I agree. I'm saying that was an entirely horseshit argument that I was going to try to propose there. Yeah. Thinking about that, I actually think that the death toll due to the spread of different religions and the clashing of that kind of stuff was probably more deadly than what gunpowder has led to. It's also been around a lot, lot, lot longer. Yeah, very true. Um, but the first one we can start out with this.

I guess maybe if I really sat down and thought about it, I could probably trace it back because it does sort of make sense with some of the imagery. But Buddhism traveled from India to Northern Asia and then into Mongolia and China. Buddhism, I feel like on the surface you would always think of like as an Asian religion, which India is a part of Asia. So it is technically an Asian religion. But when I think Buddhism, I think more like Laos, Vietnam. Cambodia. In those areas, I thought Buddhism more thrived, but came from India. Which is weird because you think Hindu when you're thinking India. And I know that's a generalization. I don't mean to make a generalization. A ton of religions down there. Yes. What I'm saying is that if you were to go ahead and think of the main one you hear out of certain regions, I think Indian, I think Hindu. But yes, I think China, I guess if I've never really applied that much thought to it, because I assume that it would just kind of be. But yeah, every place has.

it's a major denomination in Buddhism in China, not to get stereotypically in, but walk into a fucking Chinese restaurant, there's always a Buddha. And not to be even more stereotypical, but I've never seen an Indian man the size and shape of like a happy Buddha. That's true.

Sure there are. Yeah. Yeah, but just to think that this free flow of ideas that turned into one of the biggest religions in China, I would say, just spread out of the Silk Road

travels of it showing up to one stop. Somebody converting, somebody believing, somebody spreading the word. Then you get a few followers out of that that then travel to the next place, into the next place, into the next place. You're not just going on the Silk Road as a Buddhist monk in traveling straight to China. It's slowly inching its way along the lines. And what can you now carry with you because of this crazy paper? You can now go ahead and write down everything.

in multiple copies, you can now spread the word even when you're not there. You can leave people that you can stay there and teach them about it for a few months or something like that. But then because you're leaving them with this book, they have a guideline of how to bring these other people into the fold. And if you're, you know, Buddhism isn't just the one thing. Think of it in the sense of if the Silk Road reached someplace that had a differing, what am I trying to say, theology, a different, yeah, theology, that was then being brought somewhere else. So you had the spread of all these conflicting religions coming into areas that they'd never, you know, been to before. And when you get religion coming into different areas, you're also going to go and be creating conflict as well.

So this is kind of, I mean, this does kick off a lot of, a lot of different conflicts. Well, and if you have a religion that might be a mainstay of your empire, spreading that religion into other empires is almost like you're making inroads into places that you shouldn't be. Part of the Persian Empire lives in Asia because if Zoroastrianism, which we'll talk about because it's fucking awesome, came from that area and it's taken hold. over in China, that's almost like your kingdom has extended out even further. You have a reach. Yeah. But at the same time, now you have this new thing that you never had to worry about before where all of a sudden because you have this influx of trade from all these other areas,

you could have the Silk Road coming into your empire at five different points. All of a sudden, these people from all these other places that have all these other religious ideas are coming in and spreading this information as well. So while you're trying to fight the good fight outside, you're all. also trying to fight to fight that you have going on in your own borders. Following that, Christianity, of course, as it does everywhere, spread through a lot of missionary work, pilgrimages, and just like always conquest all along the routes. They relied a little bit more on mission work than some of the other religions that we'll

talk about just because that was the, I guess, maybe outward appearance that they wanted to show was this missionary work of showing up in some of these port towns, I'm sure, and like doing good for the people based upon the Christian word of God. This is what we're supposed to be doing. Yeah. Yeah. Very, very true. So this one, I've heard of this term before.

I had to look it up just as we did this. So this is new information to me. And I think like people that hear new information that blows them away, they kind of attach themselves to it. That's sort of what we do every week. but Zoroastrianism came from Iraq and Iran and it actually predates Christianity. It predates Islam. It runs a little bit after Judaism starts, but at the same time, there was a little bit of a mixture.

It's almost like the OG monotheaic, what am I trying to say? Monotheistic. Monotheistic idea. And it's sort of hard when you, look at the duality of Zoroastrianism where you have good versus evil, you have heaven and hell, you have, just like you said, monotheist, one god. You're not spreading around to all of these other gods. It's just one that rules above everything. Those are kind of tenets of Christianity. Those are kind of tenets of Islam as to maybe that was a precursor to

these offshoots of Christianity and Islam from potentially Zoroastrianism. Well, in any of the episodes that we've talked about where a religion comes into a new area or like a conquering nation or empire conquers another area, they don't try to just completely do away with their religious mythology. What they try to do is they try to tie something to it. So whereas we go into an area, you know, if Rome goes into a dramatic area or something like that and they're like, well, we have these different gods and they're like, well, tell us about your gods. He's like, well, this God, is of this, this one's of this, and it's like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. We have those two. You guys just don't know the right names form. It's actually like, you know, or like Jupiter or whatever

the Romans had. They had all the planetary names, I think, for their gods, right? Which one? I'm trying to think. So there were equivalents, this is getting off topic, but remember they took the Greek gods and they basically just made the same guys. But they made them Rome, but they changed their name to something else. Everything had more Mars and things like that. So you have this, please pronounce it for me, this Zoroastrianism. Where you have kind of this set ideas of a paradise and a hell, heaven, hell. You have this one guy that's in charge.

You have this ultimate evil. When this travels into other areas and it starts to gain steam, all it has to do is make little ties to all these other places and like, oh, well, we like this idea, but we don't believe his origin was here. We don't like the name that you picked. So we're just going to use this name for it. We're just going to use God. We're just going to use, what is it for, Islam?

The main, is it the main prophet? Allah? Yes. Just the different names for all of that. And that's where you get the branches coming off of that, like where you get Judaism. If you really track it back, and this may sound kind of weird, you track it back far enough, Islam and Christianity at some point were kind of had a shared ancestor. And then they just simply had a differing of opinions on what, in what capacity I think Jesus served or something like that.

He was either a messenger or a son, something like that. And they were just like, okay, well, we're taking it. But you go back far enough and that divide gets even further because your beliefs change and you alter and tailor them. So to kind of have an idea, we're not saying that everything came out of this or Aastrianism, but to kind of be able to tie it back there very logically and say, like, I can definitely see how this just got put into. a different place and they were like, it sounds cool. Let's just put our own spin on it. Yeah. It wasn't, it, you know, this wasn't having polytheistic, right? Yep. It's like Greece where that was kind of the more normal thing. This kind of set the groundwork for what we know is modern religion today. Well, and it takes the framework and like you say,

it sort of renames things. And as long as you have that framework to be able to work off of, there's always going to be similarities. I, I, I, I, I, don't know, you know, I think it's all logical that it would come back to one solid, um, one solid just original origin story that, uh, monotheism branched off of. At the same time, it almost targets the lazy polytheistic people, because if you're tired of giving a sacrifice to the sun god and then to the moon god and then to the god of rain, gods or milk can be dry man. Yeah. And all you have to do is just have one god that controls everything. it's so much easier.

So you're going to keep track of your gods, man. Yeah. We got one guy. Yeah, exactly. You got eight guys? That sounds like a lot of work. Yeah, in a weird way, kind of when we were doing the Mercedes Benz episode, that's what kind of clicks in my head is you had this origination of the automobile.

And then everybody kind of made the same automobile. They just all put their same spin on it. Like, if you really want to boil it down, like take a fucking Dodge Ram, take an F1, 50 and take a silver auto. They got four wheels. They have an engine. They have a transmission. They got C's.

They got a radio. They have all that shit. It's just the styling and location of things and the way that they manufacture them is a little bit different. And in their own ways, yes, those are also really weird religions that we have here in the United States between fucking truck people. It almost is a religion, huh? Yeah. A little bit. To go along for Zoroastrianism also has something called fire temples.

And they were temples where they would go and worship. And it was just a large cauldron that was just set ablaze right in the middle of the temple. It was a bonfire. Yeah. Yeah. So pretty sweet. And these things still exist today. There's still some fire temple, not, I don't think, fully functioning and running.

So I think Zoroastrianism kind of fell apart. They're called high school parties in sports. But like, there's always a bonfire. Actual religious places over in China still or Zoroastriism reached in where they had these temples, there's still artifacts from these temples today. Should have shortened the name. It's a, it's a mouthy name. It's a mouthful.

Yeah, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Judaism. I'm not going to lie if we're talking about it just from strictly a marketing standpoint, Islam kind of got it right. Very simple, yeah. Easy to say syllables down low. Yeah. It's not a T. Mm-hmm.

But Islam spread in a very similar fashion of Christianity. Surprise, surprise. But they rely. more on merchants and missionaries. So it was more of the people along the way that were doing the transporting. You could get a lot more people that way. Yeah. Yeah.

It was the blue collar religion. It was the working people's religion almost. And those people are probably able to reach so many more people because they're sitting there always interacting with somebody when they're in these different cities or in these trade hubs. Yeah. Judaism created larger settlements along, I believe it's smark. Samarkland and Bukhra in Uzbekistan and in Kai Fang in China

and also in Iran which all of that surprises me so much thinking that Judaism but I mean there's probably a Uzbekia version of Judaism yeah I mean if you wait long enough it's gonna eventually you're still going to have like the core the hardcore original version it's like it's like fucking Coca-Cola man you have cherry cocake

got Diet Coke, you got vanilla coke, you got, but there's Coke, but then there's also all this other stuff. Yeah, it's just somehow China and Judaism don't really line up that they would be something that would be a combination in my head. Yeah, that's true. But along that, I mean, not only was it just religion, there were European, Chinese, Russian, Arab, Armenian, and Persian traders that would just settle along points of the Silk Road. So if you were to travel three stops instead of just back and forth, if you were to travel four stops and you found an area that was better that you believed that you could live in, that you could work in efficiently, and you needed a little change of pace, you needed to,

you wanted to be in a different place, you could still be able to pick up and move and change your situation in a completely different country. you probably get the first real instances of like melting pots yeah like societal melting pots and it wasn't even in the big cities though it was still just along this trade route yeah so it's just people that were working along this corridor i i also think at certain points that the silk road at certain points in time was kind of fluid and what i mean by that is i think you had your core routes that you would go along this kind of like east to west west to east area but then I also think is there were also like established cities that maybe weren't along the Silk Road, but we're 10, 15, 20 miles away. They would just reroute it. Okay, we're no longer using this section of it. We're actually going to loop it around here.

It's going to come through this city because then we can take advantage of everything else. There was massive flooding this year. There was a landslide. Just any sort of different reason. Like the snow melt didn't happen through this pass or something like that. But then at the same time, being able to just, from a. economic standpoint and from a trade standpoint being like, no, no, no, why don't you guys come over 50 miles this way? This is going to be the new Silk Road. We'll make it worth your while.

Our pass is much easier to get through these mountains. Along the technology, we already kind of knocked out a couple of these, but paper, when it spread westward from China was huge. We talked a lot about that. At the same time, printing was the thing that also traveled with paper. So you're able to start mass producing things. So if you want... ties into the religion thing. Yeah. They go fucking hand in hand. You're not mass producing legal documents, I guess to a certain extent, but not the way

you would a Bible or a Quran or anything like that. But that's a major change because you can start printing things in mass. Gunpowder was huge from the Mongol Empire and it would be utilized all over Europe. It would be refined for different cannons and things like that. And I love that you immediately gravitated towards gunpowder because it's on brand. It's perfect. Because it like war. Which almost sucks because you can't really say, I guess there were times that Europe and Asia or like the British or the French went over into Asia, the opium wars or anything.

They used it against them. We gave you fuckers this stuff. What are you doing coming around and using it on us? Without us, you wouldn't have it. to take the tea that we introduced you to as well. You're not going to try to rob us with tea for anything else, are you? So the reason that gunpowder is so crazy is, okay, so simplified version of how it's invented, basically a combination of sulfur and saltpetre.

It was done by some, like, Chinese alchemists that were trying to develop, like, potions for the emperor or something like that. We talked about this during an episode, and I want to say it was a great wall. probably because i remember you explaining it before but yeah continue because it's awesome so they end up it gets exposed to like an open flame it ends up like exploding and it could have possibly killed them but at the same time someone else comes in is like what the fuck were they mixing together this is you know we got potential with this thing what was that noise so kind of tracking its movement so essentially chinese invented they start using it they're using it against who they're

fighting. That could be the Mongols. Mongols find out, oh my God, they're using these things. They explode. They're terrifying. We need to fucking have those. They find a way to go ahead and get it. Now, they have gunpowder. Now, gunpowder at this point, I'm calling a gunpowder. It's not going to actually be used for guns when it's first invented. We'll call it black powder if you want. But essentially, it's used for almost like explosive devices, like launched out of catapults, things like that. rudimentary grenades yep just some type of like not really used to fire projectile but it's it's used as the projectile itself so as the mongols because their stretch of territory covered the entire eurasian step all the way into europe they would use these weapons that they got from the chinese that they you know figured out how to make and they would use them all the way over in europe so you had these guys you know medieval fucking knights and all this kind of shit that we're fighting against the Mongols and all of a sudden they start lobbing these fucking exploding barrels at you well after that happens guess what all the

people in Europe are like fuck what was that like that was crazy and fucking deadly we need to get our hands on that too so through trade everything they're able to find out where it's acquired and all of a sudden Silk Road starts essentially becoming the first I guess arms trade yeah as well and black powder starts finding its way over, you know, into the Persian Empire, Italy, all that area, but ends up coming into Europe. And I want to say one of the first instances that it was actually used in like cannons was it was the battle of, fuck, it was against the British and the French, of course. And the way that these cannons were set up is the cannons were probably about maybe like a foot to 18 inches long, probably, I don't know, how many inches around would that be?

It probably had a diameter, maybe like 10 inches. Yeah, small. I think what it probably fired out with like golf ball size cannonballs, and they were basically mounted to like saw horses. But they had never been seen before. They'd never been introduced on the battlefield. And so during this battle between the French and the British, the British, I think had like 20 or 30,000 less soldiers, but as the French forces were attacking, they sent for it.

I think they were using like some higher Genoese archers. Send them out first. Send them out as the cannon fodder. And as they're approaching, you know, the British archers are firing errors at them. They get close enough and all of a sudden they light off these cannons. And I was trying to put myself in a situation where I was like, what would that be like if you had never heard anything remotely close to that before. The only thing that I could think of would possibly be a crack of thunder that could be just suddenly that loud. Rock slide, maybe. I don't even think that. But to hear something so loud and deafening like that explosion, to smell the burning black powder, to see the explosion come out of the barrel, the smoke, and all of a sudden, for maybe one of the

10 shots that ends up hitting home, you look over and the guy next to you has a golf ball-sized hole right through his chest that went right through his armor. That makes these Genoese turntail and just fucking bolt from the battlefield. While they're running back, all of a sudden, the French are sending in their horse mounted knights and everything. Well, the British or English are just loading up these cannons again. And as soon as the French get a little bit closer, they fire them all off again. your horses have never heard anything like this before. Again, the French have never heard anything. I don't even know why they charged in after hearing all these explosions going off.

But they end up getting decimated too by these cannons. And so all of a sudden, the French are looking at this and like, what the fuck did they have? We need that now too. And at that point, it just becomes an escalation of cannons and guns and fucking weaponry. There was a long time in history where an explosion had never been heard, right? Yeah, for the greater portion of human history. Because it wasn't like they had large caches of gasoline, maybe a little bit of oil or something else that was explosive. I mean, maybe you heard, maybe you potentially heard a methane pocket explode at some point, like on the surface or if you were close enough to a volcano.

I've never heard a volcano, but I imagine if there's a blast, like I'm going to make a stupid Dante's Peak reference here, but that periclastic cloud that explains. I would imagine you could possibly hear something like that, but... A ceramic explosion and a kiln? No. For like a brick? Still don't think so. Yeah, that's wild to think about. Medical practices change things quite a bit.

The idea of quarantine went from the east to the west, which sadly enough, we'll talk about something that would need some quarantine a little bit later. But pharmacological botany was huge. because you have Eastern medicine in Asia studying the way that plants affect the body where you didn't have that in Europe. It was the Battle of Cressy was the first time

the cannons were used in Europe, yep. Nice. So we talked about this too beforehand. You were like, I was kind of surprised that they didn't mention any type of drugs or anything like that being traded. I just think it's because at that point that wasn't a thing.

They weren't drugs. They weren't drugs. They were just things that made you feel a certain way. and there was no explanation for it. So there was never any taboo around it. Yeah. Must be nice. To use plants as like an analgesic or something to clean out a wound.

Wasn't really on the European radar as far as the thought process of how to use these things around you. Did you say anal-what? Analyzics? Anesthetic? I think anesthetic puts you to sleep, and analgesic numbs it, I believe. Oh, I hope that's right. I think it's analgesic. Something like acupuncture that is so purely Chinese medicine would spread across Europe.

Massage. Yeah. Do we have massage, if not for? Just a bunch of tent. That's probably why Europe was so tense all the time. Yeah. Because nobody in Great Britain, nobody in France were getting backpubs. That could be it.

something called Vicenna's canon of medicine from the Persian Empire was sort of a collection of what was known about different medical practices throughout Greece

and Iraq, Iran, just the whole Persian Empire. Was it Hippocrat? It's where they get the term Hippocratic oath. Was it Hippocrates? I think so. Yeah.

So he was like supposed to be like the Greek father of medicine where you would have also because of the invention of paper, the ability to actually read about his philosophies and, like, teachings about it. Yeah. You have these copies of these books that are being translated into different languages. You're getting this exchange of ideas as to how to treat things.

Do you ever feel stupid that something comes to you while we're talking about this? Constantly. Okay. So, if you are just an isolated place, you only have access to certain types of, like, medicines, plants, things like that. You only have a certain number of ways that you can cure something. But when you open up intellectual trade, which is one of the things, religious trade, actual like physical trade and intellectual trade on this Silk Road, you now have a way to pool together all of this information, all of these

different resources for different chemicals and drugs and plants and everything, to where now all these people are trading ideas and advancing as a whole the, I guess, science of medicine, because now all of a sudden you're being able to mix this with this and you get a different effect. You have a different type of anesthetic or a different type of like painkiller or a different type of something that, you know, cures your headache or some shit like that. But that stuff wouldn't have been possible because you didn't have access to those resources or those other minds that were thinking that way until essentially this intellectual trade has. I don't know why that didn't occur to me.

Well, and I think so... It's pooling your resources. Yeah, and so much of it is your scope of knowledge grows to where if you had 50 people die that you couldn't save with whatever medicine back then, but then you get this book. And anytime you run into a problem that may be mentioned this book and it has some sort of a remedy, then only 30 people died the next year. Then only 15 people died the next year. Then only 10 people die in your society. continues to grow because you have this new knowledge

that you didn't know about before. You're decreasing the mortality rate of your society. Yeah. Which, again, is a net positive for a lot of these places. Something that stood out to me, you made perfect sense of it prior to the episode, but wine production practices

would make their way into China. Now, I just immediately assumed that they probably already had wine, but you pointed out, like, a rice wine, a sake, something like, I think sake is more Japanese, but they had fermentation processes that they were making alcohol, but when you introduce wine where you get a variety of flavors from different grapes and different regions or different countries, anywhere like that, different kingdoms

that are sending you wine, it opens up the palate more. So it's not that you're still trading necessities, you're trading commodities now too. And it's the fermentation process is there throughout human history, there's always been civilizations have found their way to it at separate points in history, but it all just depends on what resource you have to ferment. In those areas where maybe rice was the predominant thing, they were making rice wine. In areas where grapes were like a predominant thing, they were making, you know, and in the same way, you're not fermenting it, but with grapes, you're crushing it, you're squeezing out the juice. Look at, like, do you think that had anything to do with, like, the production of olive oil?

Or they looked at how olive oil they were squeezing it. like essentially taking the liquid out of it and they were like do you think we can do this with all kinds of stuff yeah let's try it with grapes and they make grape juice and all of a sudden someone leaves grape juice in a sealed container and all of a sudden it starts to ferment they go to drink it they're like oh this tastes like shit it's kind of bitter but i don't have any other than anything else to drink you get through off the ball and you're like i feel fucking fantastic i'm going to start leaving my grape juice out all the time fucking horses talking to me out in the pasture but other than that this is a pretty good brew but yeah it's i mean it's just how

run. It's not shocking that Russians are famous for vodka when they have a bunch of wheat and potatoes. Like, wherever you were, you were going to find a way to distill it or to ferment it and just get lit on it. Yeah. But wine in China,

again, just mind-blowing to think about that that would be something that they would have over there, just grape wine. It's just, it's not synonymous with it. Mathematical concepts that came over from Persian, Greece were huge. This is stuff that I kind of figured that the Greeks were in on, but there was a lot of Persian influence.

A lot of Islamic influence came through arithmetic, algebra, which both sound like Islamic words. Geometry, trigonometry. The decimal place value system, I believe, came from Alexandria because wasn't that what was used in the library for the sorting? Like the early Dewey decimal system? I'm not sure about that. I'm actually going to have to look that up. I think it was cataloging by like name or what like type of like writing it was, like what category of writing it was.

Less mathematically. Mathematical. Yes, I think it's less cataloging, more mathematical is in like, you know, 5.25 being 5 and a quarter, a way in order to fill in the gaps of whatever fractional systems were being used because decimals can get so much more precise than fractions. Yeah. your your mathematics goes up so much when you can figure out how to take those little roundoffs essentially to be more accurate with stuff. Well, and think about it even from like a trade perspective of a new system of weighing things or things may have only, you know, gold may have been weighed in, you know, pounds.

And if it got closer to this pound, it was just 11 pounds instead of 10 pounds. where now all of a sudden you have this decimal system that's widespread, that you're like, no, no, no, that's exactly 10.656, you know, units or measurements of gold. It allowed probably a much more refined system of like an economy, basically. Yeah, I love that you brought that up because it reminded me. The Silk Road is so long that coinage and money, it was just all different everywhere

because everywhere had their own currency system and the generally agreed upon currency system for the Silk Road area was any of the coins that you had it would go by the price of the weight of gold or silver that was in each coin. So your coin could be gigantic and you could say it's worth this much

but if it only has 3% silver in it or it only has 5% gold in it, it only counts as much as the way to the gold or the silver that's inside of the token. You have a much, much smaller coin with a higher concentration. They're like, this guy's, it'd be like saying like, you know, you have a $20 bill and you're like, well, this is much more valuable where I'm from. They're like, there's no gold in that, but this guy comes up with a tiny penny size gold coin. They're like, this guy's living large. Yeah.

And there were a lot of times that if you were carrying, you know, a heavy amount of gold, if you just had a big sale or something like that, you had a bunch of gold. one of the other things that we hadn't really mentioned was, excuse me, coming from the east, there was a ton of precious gemstones. So in order to cut down on your weight, you would then trade or sell your gold off to buy a gemstone that you could then like sew into your clothing.

And that way, if you were to get robbed or anything like that, you're not walking around to the chest full of gold. You're walking around with a shirt that's got a bunch of diamond, sewn into it. You can try to sew gold into that, but then it's going to be like trying to walk around in cargo pants with pockets full of chorus, like they can just hear it. Whereas gems, you could like, you know, they're not going to be clinging against each other. You're going to look like Eric Cartman if you try to sell all that gold into your shirt. Also, something that,

you know, going kind of along with math, something that completely changes the exploration game. The magnetic compass was invented in China during the Han Dynasty. This was between the second century B, C.E and the first century AD, the magnetic compass. So all of that exploration, all of that colonization, all of that, what they call it, oh yeah, age of exploration, all of that, only possible. I mean, you can navigate by the stars and everything like that, but you know it's much more reliable than navigating and trying to track which stars are coming out at night, having something that just points to a sort of certain direction. You're like, oh shit, we're going that way.

And at that point in history and time, you don't understand magnetism, I don't think. Those things are just magic. You know that this area is magnetic and you know slightly which direction you have to be pointing in to get where you want to go. You don't know why it's pointing that way. You don't know what that way technically is. Well, and also to think that you have to have a, what is it, a ferrous material that you can magnetize to be able to put inside of a compass. Yeah.

You have to figure out that heating schedule to magnetize steel or some sort of ferrous object to be able to always point north in a compass. You look like you're pondering. I'm pondering hard. So kind of going back to what I said, if Silk Road doesn't happen, those areas aren't made safe, all this trade doesn't happen. It eventually does happen via sea routes, things like that. but at the same time, how long does it take for that to happen? And if that does happen, China makes all of these developments. If the British and French and Portuguese and Dutch and everyone in Spanish don't get their hands on this exploration tool or this ability to navigate using a compass, China keeps that to themselves, does that mean that China is going to develop that, you know, that, um,

that navy, those ships to go explore and to colonize other lands, or because they have so much land that they're able to spread out on their own inland, does it take that need away? There's no need for exploration because they have enough. Yeah, because they already have enough because that was the thing is like there were so many resources, their area was so vast that they could get kind of whatever they needed. That's why everyone wanted so many things out of China and out of the United. the east and so, you know, a few things being needed in them, you know, in China. I do think that there will always be that feeling of exploration, just like we had moving west

and the westward expansion in the United States. We always wanted to figure out where the land stopped and the water started again. Yeah, we did. But at the same time, even after we did that, and yes, we did colon, even the United States did, you know, colonized. and everything. But once we got to that point and we were content with the area of land that we had, I mean, we really didn't do any exploration. I don't know if that's simply due to the fact that the age of exploration was already kind of done and everything. It'd already been explored and claimed. That might have had like the bigger part of it. But what I was getting at is just without

even the compass finding its way out of China, you know, what does that look like for the rest of the world? Yeah, it's, you have to figure out that. technology without really. I assume that it was accidental. It had to have come from somewhere of them heating metal and somehow the magnetization happened and all of the pieces of metal just pointed one direction. Or they got stuck to each other first. They figured out then how to actually make magnets that stick to each other maybe.

And then at that point, they discovered that maybe. If you floated, it will always. Somehow it was floating or something like that. and then it pointed, they're like, whoa. Probably in water. Yeah. This is a too dumb guy trying to reverse it here. Listen, during the break, we talked for 15 minutes about how watches work and about how, because watches and, you know,

timepieces had been invented so long ago, like how that process was even figured out. This is kind of the same type of stuff. For all of our British and listeners and everybody over there, I filled Chris in on the repair shop. I think he's in. But those are just the technologies that got traded. We still have, we've touched the surface of the goods, but there's a couple different areas that I think really drive home just how interconnected this web of roads was.

But as far as goods, we can't start the Silk Road goods list off without just starting with Silk. It traveled from Asia all the way across the Silk Road. We talked about it during the Byzantine episode, during the Constantinople episode. The Byzantines were nasty. They were tricky. They sent a couple of emissaries over into China. I'm assuming along the Silk Road had to have been. They got over there.

They somehow found out this state secret of how the silkworm worked. Silkworms eat off of mulberry wood. And then to create their cocoons, they use the silkenes. They use the silk strands to do that. Supposedly the lore and legend was that there was a princess that was drinking a cup of tea again. Shocking that tea enters this picture a second time. When a silkworm in its cocoon fell into her tea and as the cocoon unraveled, she would pick up the strands and was fascinated by the strands and decided that she was going to try to weave them into a fabric, boom, all of a sudden we get silk. along that route

wool was something that was pretty sought after in Asia and China just because it's going to get cold in the steps you're going to need something that's very insulating. Felt also went from the west to the east. I think that was more of India

kind of excuse me the Arab influence so there's this fabric exchange to go along with all of the dyes that coming out of China that change everything in the world. Because before that, I mean,

there were probably certain colors that you could get out of like different stones or something like that, mud, clay, you could do browns really well. Like flowers and stuff like that. Earth hues. Mixing of different pigments as well. But to be able to have a dye and change the color on everything that you wanted to and any sort of fabric, you start getting not really individualism, but you start seeing a culture who has ideas and stylings kind of be able to have a canvas for that.

I feel like that movie Pleasantville when all of a sudden the black and white little things start to become colorful. And, you know, someone walks by. And again, like we were talking about, you see someone wearing just a brightly colored, like, silk, just outfit. That had to have been the craziest thing. Like, I wonder what that even felt like. Go brush up against him. See what it feels like. It's so fucking soft.

Well, did you have like tie-dye back then? Would you tie up your, your robes or your togas or whatever you had and dip them in different colors? Maybe. Was there an ancient grateful day? I don't know, man. You see someone up there arguing in fucking in the Senate. We're for the people, man. Oh, God, it's fucking.

Jerias Garcia. Yes, it's Jerrys Garcia. Up there, try to preach his ways. Food was very big. fruits were coming out of Asia and heading west, whereas you would get spices that would be coming out of the Arab states, also spices coming from China. You would see spices kind of going those directions towards further west, but you would see more herbs coming from the west to the east just because their growing patterns were different. And they would have things that were more natural that then could be sent to China. They're looking for anything and everything to send to China that they can.

They're like, we got to find something to send. Have we tried, you know how we use the weeds sometimes to put on the chicken and make the chicken a little more palatable? Can we just sell them the weeds? And they're like, I guess if they don't have them over there. Yeah, like, basil. I mean. But can you imagine also like culturally or just from a culinary standpoint?

Oh, buddy. What spices could have done just to like everything was fucking boiled back then. Imagine if you could add a little bit of flavor. You'd taste something and be like, with the. Fuck is this you put a little cinnamon in with your biscuits or your scones you find some fruit that has only been grown in the far east that you get there and you make jellies or preserves out of it and like salt dude salt yeah salt would have to come you didn't have salt mines or anything like that back then I'm sure I think it's probably a lot lower than that But you would get salt from these places that were along the ocean and these seas that they had and you put salt on anything, the taste just changes.

Yeah. You can eat a lot. The option for what to eat that you couldn't eat without salt opens up complete. Not only that, preserving food. Yeah? You don't get hard tack. You don't get salted pork. You don't get those things that make long sea voyage as possible if you don't have access to like salt and everything.

Your best thing is probably smoking food, smoking meats. And even then the shelf life is going to be less than it would if you just preserve it with salt. It can't be understated enough that the spice trade was just so important. Along with that, you would have glass coming from the Roman and Islamic societies into Asia. Did you know it originally came from the Egyptians to the Romans, from the Romans kind of spreading it out the rest? Yep. So that's interesting because I think you have to have 1,500 degrees to start melting glass. Or to melt sand into glass?

Correct. But what did they also have an abundance of that they would be trying to make use of it in any possible ways? Cow shit. In Egypt. Sand. Yeah. Yeah. And especially if you're able to create the fucking pyramids and all that shit, I'm sure you would have a way of creating an enclosed oven or type, like kiln type thing in order to heat stuff up that hot.

Yeah. You would have to have, maybe you wouldn't have to have a better source than wood. Maybe you could get it out of wood. Yeah. It's just nuts to think about that it was something that was mass produced. And it was a commodity. This wasn't necessary in life. These were like glass dishes. Well, think of it in the sense, too. If you had, what were the most coveted items? So you didn't have glass in China. So if you could get glass this clear. Oh, my God, what is that? Lackerware. Yep. And then all of a sudden, over in Europe, in those areas, you're like, what is this beautiful white, smooth? Like, they're like, oh, that's, that's China. Like, why do you think they call it? porcelain like dishware and all that kind of stuff china yeah fine china it's fine china it came from china but now all of a sudden you have this introduced like go watch any fucking english show go watch

down to abbey and see them drinking no they're not drinking tea out of glasses they're drinking tea out of porcelain cups porcelain only came from china and it the trade happened along the silk road oh my god we're figuring it all out i feel like charlie kelly when he's trying to put the pepe sylvia thing all together. Yeah. Carol. Let's talk about the porcelain, Carol.

We talked about it earlier. Horse trade was absolutely huge just because it provided the Chinese with kind of the war machine that they needed to settle areas to get to where they needed to go. Also, with that much domestication of horses, think of how much

that sped up the travel along the Silk Road. Oh, tons. Yeah. You're pulling caravans, and not only that, you're, you have two horses that are drawing wagons or drawing chariots. Yeah, you're hauling 10 times the amount of goods. You're making more money. More stuff is able to be transported. It's just, it can't be understated. They were just the machines of the Silk Road. Jade and other gemstones were huge, like we talked

about. Jade is maybe one of my favorite stones. I don't know why. There's just something about Jade that I really like. Jade and turquoise seem like two things that are very cool to me. just the coloration of it. For some reason, I always thought jade was more green. And maybe it's because I'm associated with the color known as jade. But jade is more of a light green, almost like opaque, perlessent type stone, right? And it was only found in China. And it made its movements across the Silk Road to touch everywhere, not only just for looks

and not for the styling, but prior to the Bronze Age and prior to them making metal tools, they made everything out of jade. because it was just a hearty material. They coveted it so much as well, is that they thought it had some mystical, magical properties. What they looked like it. Is they would build entire, they would make panels,

and they would build entire suits out of the panels for burial rights, because it felt that it would give them some type of power in the afterlife, because it would hold in their spirit or something like that. And so you have these burial suits that are basically look like suits of armor that cover the entire body, like a jade body bag. And they're just like, you're wondering how intricately done because each corner is, you know,

held together by a little piece of wire and it's just... Yeah, man. It was so big to everything in their culture and nobody sees anything like that. Like gemstones over there had to have been so shocking. We see that stuff all the time. But now it's because it's everywhere. It's commonplace. And it's because the Silk Road made it kind of commonplace over in that area.

It's not as shocking as cannons to the French, but... No. Certainly not. Along with the spices and tea, we were talking about prior to the episode, this story about, I think they were Arabian spice traders, excuse me,

maybe Indian spice traders that were bringing cinnamon up. And when they would run into either the white folks or the Asians, anybody along the route that hadn't made inroads then into India. I don't know if white folks existed back then. Because even if we think about it, the Italians, the Romans, all of them. They were still pretty olive skin.

Yeah. That's true. Okay. So why he hadn't entered the country yet? We were still way up north. He's off to the side. He's still getting some stuff. Stuttgart had.

That's why shit's getting done on the Silk Road is because the white man hasn't come in yet. But they had a, what do we? It was called like a cinnamon, yeah. And it was a giant ancient bird that they said live down in India. And it would make its nest. of cinnamon sticks. And the only way they were able to harvest the cinnamon stick was to knock the bird off of its nest and then knock its nest down so they could collect the cinnamon sticks to take it along the soak road and trade it.

That's just a story that you say so nobody gets curious where you're getting your cinnamon from and you can probably charge more if you say that it's harder to get. Think of how like think of the story behind it. Like someone's sitting there and they're eating a fucking biscuit at your house. They're like, this is fantastic. What is in this? are like cinnamon. It's from India or from wherever it came from. Do you want to hear the story of how they get cinnamon?

That biscuit's going to taste that much better. Yeah, it's a big part of it. And tea, obviously, I mean, the opium wars, tea, all that stuff. It was tea. Yeah, it's a huge deal. The dyes and perfumes from China, we talked about a lot. Frankencents coming from the Middle East. The perfumes.

Yeah. Had to have been massive because everyone fucking stank back then, especially in Europe. And it's also going to lead into something we're going to talk about here in a second from the hygiene perspective. But perfumes, guess what? That bath you took once a week or once every two weeks, I can change that to once a month now because I got this perfume. Yeah, you might still be sticky. You might not feel great. I can't imagine anybody actually felt comfortable besides the five minutes after they took a bath back then. But yeah, it prolongs the ability for people to be able to stand being around you.

Yeah. Along with all of that stuff, pottery from China like we just talked about, we travel all the way to Venice and into Europe. Porcelain was huge. They used a lot of lacquer crafts on ceramic as far as glazing of pots would become a thing. And it's not only the goods, it's also the reverse engineering to be able to try to figure out how to make porcelain. because you can kind of get an understanding of what it is when you see it. You can figure out that you can try to start just importing like the clay or the other goods that were used to make it. The firing process.

Guess what I have here. I just got a book sent from China that gives me the entire process on how to make lacquerware. On that newfound paper stuff. On that newfound paper shit. Those are a lot of goods. Maybe the one real bad that came over. it's believed to have come from Asia and from China. And it really only makes sense when you look at the incubation times of people

catching the Black Death and then spreading it across the Silk Road. There was just enough time when somebody would stop into a port, stop into some trading town and oasis. You spend enough time around somebody while you're not sick. All of a sudden, they take off for their next leg. A couple days later, you start to come down with the sickness. nobody is any wiser headed towards the new town that may be carrying it. Nothing gets down with the sickness.

No. Well, and that's the thing too is I think they said they were trying to track it back where the black plague started and where they think it happened was there was a Mongol siege of a city that had been holding out for like two years. And all of a sudden, the Mongols started actually die off a little bit because of this disease. And I think they said what the cause of it, it was something about like bug bites or like flea bites or something like that. Wasn't it rats? Oh, no, no, no, it was. The flea bites would infect the rats. The rats would then spread it everywhere else.

So what ended up happening is before the Mongols ended up, you know, turning the other direction and heading back home, so they took all of the dead, diseased bodies, then they launched them over the walls into the city. Well, this was a very large city. So what happened is these people started to get sick. Well, it wasn't just people that were living in the city that were locals. Once the Mongols left, they were able to go ahead and then travel outside the city.

So this thing ended up spreading across all. of Eurasia and all of Europe. We're going to do an episode on the Black Death, so we're not going to get into it. And it's going to be a bummer. It's going to be so much fun. But this explains where the drawbacks of having this ease of access through trade and commerce can come to really fucking bite you in the ass. So they said that the Black Death traveled about five miles per day. That's fucking nuts.

That's insane. It traveled and affected every European country, Northern Africa, and all of Eurasia. And I think they said the total death toll for that one. I remember what the death toll was because there was the Justinian plague. There was waves of it. And there was one that came out of Constantinople. Actually, they called it the Justinian plague because it was after... Justinian.

Emperor Justinian. But that one ended up wiping out. I want to say it was a third of all of Europe, which ended up equating to being, I think, roughly... I want to say, like, 20 to 30 million people. but the Black Plague even killed more people. I think they ended up saying that the Black Plague ended up reducing the population because most of it was centralized in Europe at the time. It reduced the world population by almost half. I could be wrong on that.

I'll correct it during the Black Plague episode if I am. But it's the city concept. Once it gets into the big cities, once those traders take those goods into the capital cities where the population is so dense, it's just a matter of time. Well, and the thing that made it so successful were those people just running that, you know, 100 mile stretch and then dropping off their goods, you didn't even have a stretch of area where it would have been different if it was like 500 miles where there was another settlement or someone to drop off. You could have dropped dead in that 500 miles and it might have actually stopped the spread of that. But when you're meeting people along the path, even going the opposite direction, you're stopping and trading food and all that kind of stuff.

Now the disease is heading the other direction while you're still carrying. it and before you die, you can go through two more cities and spread it that way. So this thing, the thing that made Eurasia so successful with its advancement in its trade also ended up being kind of part of its undoing for a while there. Yeah, I mean, you're loading up stuff in Asia that is infested with rats. Yeah. And then at every single port city, you drop off a few rats that are carrying the plague. And you're not even safe out to sea either. Yeah. But, But what did this also lead to the advancement of quarantine, hygiene procedures, advancements in medicine? We need a little less on the perfume and a little bit more on the soap.

So, I mean, it's not saying that the Silk Road was directly responsible for the advance of medicine. But, I mean, if you're tracking it back because of this happening, I mean, it really, this stuff would have happened anyway, but it really advanced this and kind of put it to the forefront. And it just crushed since our large population. Um, just to kind of explain the scope of how the whole thing worked with the Silk Road and just the goods that were exchanged. Uh, I need that last little part. Um, there's an area that was discovered in Central Asia. I believe it was like Afghanistan. I, it is in Afghanistan now.

Um, in 1937 and it was called the Begrim Horde. The Begrim Horde was these two rooms that were completely sealed off that had objects. that they dated back to the first century CE. And it was, they were literally from everywhere, from every area of the Silk Road, it touched. It was like a greatest hits.

Yeah. And there's questions that I took myself down for at least about a half hour of like, what was this? There's some people that believe it was like a royal court that had just, excuse me,

collected these things over time because they were the people with the most money and the people that had the most access. because all of these goods were flowing through their city that they could purchase whatever they wanted. There's another belief, and this is the one that I like the most, that this was like a trading post. This was like a pawn shop of sorts. Like, it's so cool to think about a variety that could have been in a shop.

You're just walking into this shop in the middle of Afghanistan. It's like, what's this? Oh, well, this is glass from Rome. This is silk from China. This is ivory that came down from India. It was a Shoshky shop? Yeah. This is, in my wildest dreams, this is the thought of like quitting your job and moving to New Mexico and having like a Chachky leather shop or something like that that you just find all this different stuff.

And just locally, there was almost a dozen of these copper pots or bowls that they believe were to be made in this area in Afghanistan. probably the coolest thing that they had in there was a precious stone that was called Lapis lazuli. Lapis lazuli was mined in Afghanistan, and it's kind of tough to explain. It's a bluish color that's just very, very pretty. I think nowadays they said that the mines in Afghanistan are only open for like a month of the year,

and I think it's just to keep up how precious this is. Yeah. But these stones were, this lapis lazuli, was actually found to be in the death mask of Tutankhammon down in Egypt. Which makes sense because part of the Silk Road actually went across that little corridor where the Suez Canal is now and went into northern Africa. So we're getting Afghani stones in Egyptian death masks. Like that's just how far the reach goes. There were lacquer wares from China. So cups, bowls, any sort of vessels.

Lackerware was kind of like using the resin from the lacquer tree that they would then shape into anything they wanted. It's almost like, I want to use plastic, but it's really nothing like plastic. It's just able to be malleable and shaped the same way. I feel like you're just describing tuckerware. Yeah, except for from a tree instead of from dead dinosaurs. Yeah, that's true. There were Roman bronze figurines of horses and riders, even Greco-Egyptian gods like Serapus Hercules, which is the Greco-Egyptian Hercules. Oh, do you also know that China has their version of Hercules because the legend and the writings about the legend of Hercules made their way along the Silk Road over to China, and they have their own version of Hercules who did like labors and stuff like that.

So there's a Chinese Hercules, yeah. Interesting. very interesting um hypocrite or yeah hypocrite was another one of these little figurines that they found he was the god of silence and

kind of something that I say interesting a lot but this just sort of it's all interesting it breaks it down into a way of these were almost more goods that they just enjoyed having more than understood what it was because the figurine

um Its arm had been busted off, and the original figurines that they have at the time that were the same have the arm holding the finger up to the lips like you're shushing somebody? So with it being a statue of Hippocrates, Hippocratic Oath, Hippocratic Oath is that you don't, wait, that's weird. So you don't do any harm to your patient is what the, you're not supposed to do and harmed anyone is the Hippocratic Oath. But since he was also like, hmm, was he made then kind of into like a godlike figure or? was Hippocrates named after they got it. See, now I'm going to rabbit hole. Yeah, I don't know. But they didn't know the significance of it. So this arm that gets busted off is the arm that holds the finger to the lips. When they reconnected the arm and used whatever ancient glue that they had, they had positioned the arm. So it was just pointing up to the side of his head.

So they didn't understand the significance of the finger over the mouth and sees the God of silence. So it was almost like, well, yeah, we don't really believe in this. but this is a pretty cool figure to have. It was like going over to your grandma's house and she has such. She's like, I don't know what it is. I just like it. Yeah. There were two-handed Roman basins. That's the only people that created two-handed basins.

So just something that had two-hand or had a handle on each side to be able to lift up and carry that way. Probably the most interesting thing that I saw was in these was there were two bronze aquariums. And not necessarily aquariums in the. traditional sense that they held water. One of them was circular and one of them was rectangular. And they actually had scenes of moving fish where they had taken pieces of copper and put them in where like the flippers would be on these fish that they had in the actual bronze reliefs that were on the inside of them.

So it like when the wind came through, you would be able to see things flap. Oh shit. Yeah. So very, very intricate things that were coming from Rome. Um, enamel glass, they had over 180 pieces of tableware, which makes me think that there's a pretty good chance that this was a storehouse. Because if you have 180 pieces of anything, that's a lot. Uh, there was a vase that depicted a gladiator scene of Hector and Achilles fighting.

So Trojan war lore was found in the middle of Afghanistan from the first century BC. just it blows me away that all this stuff happened. It was just in this area. There were a bunch of plaster casts of Greco-Roman gods over 50 in total that they had in this hoard. Maybe the most amazing thing, just thinking about it as far as like how precious it is today, there were ivory objects and bone objects from India because where you get an ivory from. You got to get it from elephants. India is really the only place that had elephants.

at that point or at least enough to where they could harvest all this ivory. Close enough because, you know, if there were elephants in Africa, they're still not going down there. That's a long ways away. India's right along the Silk Road. Yep. Yep. So, and I don't know, were there elephants in Egypt?

Not in Egypt, but I think, like, more toward, like, the Serengeti area of Africa. So you have figurines that are carved in ivory and, like, different kind of plaques and things that were more of, like, the local Kushan art. stylings that were going on. So they were sending ivory blanks as well as other ivory figurines for these people to be able to carve and kind of make their own mark on a medium that nobody had ever really seen before. Along with that, they also found wooden furniture with just ivory inlays in it.

And the wood would be found locally sometimes. Some of the species were found in other places. So I could see it both ways. I could see this being like a very prominent person, like a very wealthy. or like a person in a higher position because this stuff is even rare stuff back then. Yeah. And there's so much of it. And just that it went untouched for so long to just run along that in the 1930s and be like,

wait, what is this? And why is all of this stuff from all of these different regions in this one area in Afghanistan? There's only one explanation. And it's just that it's in the middle of the Silk Road. And it's the easiest place that they could get all of these different wares from everywhere. more on the Chinese side. There was a place called the Dunhung Caves. It was on the edge of the Gobi Desert,

which plays such a role in my mind because you know that there were a bunch of people on the trade route that didn't want to cross a desert to get to their final stop. So if this Doniang area was the final stopping point, it was the final stopping point that 1900, they discovered nearly 50,000, ancient manuscripts, silk paintings and artifacts in these caves that were just perfectly preserved.

It had to be like a staging point. Yeah. Or a place where like merchants were like, we're going to store our stuff here and we're just going to be able to come back here instead of traveling twice the distance. Well, and among some of that stuff, they found Buddhist paintings, Buddhist sculptures. There were ceremonial instruments in a bunch of Buddhist manuscripts talking about the religion, just like you were talking about as far as being able to write something down and leave it. They have all of these writings that ended up in this one place that you know were spread everywhere because that's where they were found. It was basically like the point like when you ever get the fucking church pamphlets and everything. You know there's a church that all of these people that are like tagging your door or meeting at.

That's what it was. All their runners came back in and everyone's like, okay, everyone grab a handful of the Buddhist manuscripts and they all just went out door to door and were handed them out. Exactly. Yeah. Another kind of just to show the kind of meticulous nature that some of these places had because they had to be good in these trading ports. There were records of all the goods that were produced in the area and then traded into the region. Inside of the records, there were names of the merchants that they were selling and trading with. That'd be so crazy to see. Just to have logs of all these names.

Because anything that we get nowadays when you see it, it's, like a history of a king, a history of royalty, something like that from that era. These are just traders. They're merchants. They're people that live within the city that you're getting an actual look at the daily life of just a peasant or a regular person in these places. I wonder if they have circumstances. This would be much smaller scale.

But because of that, I wonder if, you know, how some people try to track their lineage back to Ellis Island and they go and they try to find the name of the person that came over, you could go back if you're in China and been like, oh shit, one of my ancestors was one of these guys that was coming, you know, into the region and was trading on the Silk Road. Genealogy. Yeah. That's my people's thing or my former people's thing and I had to come up with the name of it. Yeah. Like you could track your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, 50 times great grandfather that was a merchant on the Silk Road. What was he transporting? I guess nowadays it would be known as horny goat weed. Are you telling me,

that my forebearer was actually hawking like boner boner herbs. Yeah, that's what I'm telling you. I can't imagine that that didn't cross the Silk Road. I can't imagine aphrodisiacs weren't everywhere. Where do you think you get like the powdered rhino horn? Yeah.

All that crazy stuff. Guess what? There weren't any rhinos in China, I don't believe. I believe there were probably rhinos in India, maybe, and then also in Africa. Uh-huh. A few of the things that we forgot to mention

didn't, how do we put this? Trying to dance around this. Yeah, it's not really that we forgot to mention it. It's just kind of something that I think everybody assumes, along with all of these goods, people were obviously transported. This was a human trafficking hub. There was slaves. We were going to make it through a whole episode without talking about the slave trade. No, as long as history has been fucking history, people have been taken as slaves in captive and they've been traded.

Yeah, human capital was moved all along these. places in, I mean, it's just a fact of life that that's what they did. Anywhere that was taken over, I mean, when you start talking about the Mongols using the Silk Road, the Mongols, stealthed in a lot of slavery. Yeah, they covered a lot of ground. They're going to be taking a lot of spoils. We didn't talk enough about camels. No, we didn't.

Camels were such a huge, I want to remember what they're called. I think they're called back to eel camels. I'm going to refer to them as two humpers because that's what they are. But those fatty deposits were able to store enough water and kind of sustenance that they could travel these very long distances. I didn't know that camels had two sets of eyelids. One to kind of like protect them from sand and everything. Yeah. They also have something in their breathing pathway that kind of filters out sand that would be blowing in there.

They were just perfectly bred and built to be able to withstand going through these deserts. and that would definitely be a slow time. I mean, a camel versus a horse, but if your horse can't stand going through the desert, you would just have to use something that was reliable like a camel. And that also then leads to the spread of all of these animals and different types of like domesticated animals throughout all of, you know, that's why probably when you look, you know,

there's a difference, of course, you know, in build size, musculature of probably like an Arabian horse and a horse that's bred up in fucking like Yorkshire. but if you really put them all side by side, I don't think there's that much of a genetic variation between horses throughout that entire area. There were a long, long time ago, but because of all of this trade made possible,

everything almost has kind of a more, especially probably like from a biological, like fauna status or fauna standpoint, probably more of like a kind of a baseline. Yeah. All of these tools that were used to just travel this road and connect everybody. I mean, it was always probably going to be something that happened,

but the fact that it was the starting point, the ending point of some of the biggest empires that ruled that area, it's nothing short of amazing to know that these people were doing this so long ago, but it was just, it wasn't necessarily even out of necessity. It wasn't necessarily a necessity. It was a lot of goods that, were just an exchange of culture.

Yeah. And it's one of those things that is kind of like an unsung hero of human advancement is that without something like this, without the Silk Road, we're not where we are today. And you can say that about so many things throughout history. But when you look at everything intellectually, material wise, religion, anything and everything that was like kind of cross-pollinated across all of Eurasia due to this. It might have happened eventually. It might not have.

But this is definitely the lynchpin and the reason a lot of this stuff happened. And so much like we talked about, this drives home the point so much more from the Aztec episode, that the Spanish were coming over armed with all of this stuff and all of this knowledge and all of these weapons because of the group think that when, through the Silk Road that when they showed up to meet the Aztecs or the Incas, they were just that much further advanced because they had so many other ideas that had been there. That's it.

It's just it's a committee. They're able to, it's advancement through committee over there. But yeah, this one is, again, one of those things we really didn't have a whole ton of knowledge about going into the episode and it ends up being one of those week-long studies where you catch

yourself just branching off and going through so many different, you know, rabbit holes of research because this is responsible for so much. And it's, we've mentioned so much in so many different episodes during the ancient times. I mean, we talked about the Nebateans in this one, Petra was another huge stop along the Silk Road. They got all of these goods coming off of it that turned Petra into a super city. And I don't know. It's pretty incredible just how many things were going. to continue to reference in history that involved the Silk Road.

It's an interconnected, like in a way, you know, the road and everything like that. It's an interconnected thread because it was in existence and was used for so long, you know, the 200, again, 200 BCE to the mid-1400s of the common area or common era. It's a thread that is so just intrinsically woven throughout all of human advancement of civilization that it should get more love than it does. Yeah, we're talking the 1400s as far as the road in its entirety. After the 1400s, you still had the Silk Road being used on either side of Constantinople. It was just two shorter routes, basically.

And you had developed all of these trade relations that just the methods in which you were transporting the materials changed. The partnerships kind of stayed the same and all those partnerships were made in thanks to the Silk Road All right You got anything else buddy No this is a good one All right enjoy it Well we hope you guys enjoyed it too

And we'll catch you on the next one Peace All right ladies and gentlemen Thanks for joining us for another episode If you like what you heard Hit that subscribe and like button Follow us if you didn't like what you heard Still hit that anyway

Because we'll probably cover something in the future that you do like Please follow us on our social media Adam hit them with it Our Instagram is historically High Pod, historically high P-O-D, and we are on Twitter at Historically High. That's historically H-I. All right. And if you guys want to send in any feedback suggestions, hit us up on those two or you can even do it on Gmail. It's historically high podcast at gmail.com. Thanks again. Peace.