Chinese archaeologists are striking out along the Silk Road
wsj.comUnlike many commenters here, I actually read the article, and this quote seems to be the basis for the tenuous link between archeaology and geopolitics suggested by the title:
> The extent to which present-day politics hovers over China’s archaeological ambitions became clear during a Wall Street Journal reporter’s encounter with an Uzbek researcher at the ruins of an ancient Kushan city near Chinor. “Tell the Chinese that they will not find any traces of the Chinese here,” he said.
Kind of an interesting story if you can look past the attempt by WSJ to shoehorn in a geopolitcal angle.
> Asked whether Beijing could use the Yuezhi to make territorial claims, Wang said the notion was absurd because the nomads are a historical people and no one serious would put forth that argument.
"We're just asking questions", etc.
Archaeology does not take place in a vacuum. It has always been a product of political human beings. Archaeologists are keenly aware of this. Mussolini excavated Pompeii with bulldozers to reveal the past greatness of Italy on a schedule compatible with his ambitions. British archaeologists conducted digs around the globe through the lens of empire. Natives in the Americas, to this day, hesitate to trust archaeologists because they have, far too often, ignored the culture and concerns of descendants while digging up their ancestors. Most archaeologists strive to tell the truth, but truth is often a matter of perspective.
It's not being anti-Chinese to observe that China is currently an expansionist totalitarian state, and that Chinese archaeologists will be under pressure to support a state-approved narrative. Their research should be viewed with their cultural context firmly in mind.
> hesitate to trust archaeologists because they have, far too often, ignored the culture and concerns of descendants while digging up their ancestors.
Or more likely: because they have, far too often, proved the natives wrong and also shown that the people the natives called ancestors weren't... or, if they were, they were also the ancestors of those terrible people from the Evil Enemy Tribe that Nobody Likes.
Natives have political agendas, too.
Part of recognizing the full and equal humanity of indigenous peoples is to accept that they're just as greedy, deceitful, and chauvinistic as the rest of us.
What a fabulous comment. I'd upvote it twice if I could. These kind of issues of cultural identity over time are one of the topics in Frank Herbert's Dune series.
Their political history also included a lot of slavery.
Slavery was and is depressingly common -- and has very little to do with skin colour. Sad that so many "educated" Americans think otherwise :(
"Can we get enslave those guys over there? Is the cost/benefit analysis in our favour, at least for the short term? And there are no (incredibly strong!) social taboos against it? Then let's go ahead and do it!"
The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Yep. They also did partial reconstuction work of the great wall in modern times and passed it off as ancient. Similarly, Stonehenge in the UK was also partially reconstructed in the 20th century.
Sensoji temple in Tokyo was also rebuilt to its original design in the 1950s.
The giant stone Buddhas of Afganistan could do with reconstructing IMHO as well.
> Yep. They also did partial reconstuction work of the great wall in modern times and passed it off as ancient.
Do you have a source for "and passed it off as ancient"?
Not off the top of my head, but a lot of the misleading is done through omission, for which there is no source obviously. The stretch near Beijing gets a lot of tourists and by default they're led to believe they're walking on an ancient wonder. I think it's not made clear enough any of it was rebuilt in modern times, let alone which bits were. But also many historical buildings have been rebuilt multiple times over a long period of history.
With Sensoji, which pieces of wood represent the temple? It's a sort of ship of Theseus situation in any case.
Modern history is still history, and also forms part of the story to be told.
The difference is when the Brits collected, it is not to prove Brits were there and we are all Brits. Also china is 1/5 of humanity. It is of different scale when it goes rogue.
One day Soviet Union or Russia will remember the if china can claim Mongolian empire theirs and it reached Moscow …
But if chinese really studied its own history, its history are full of expansion then totally collapse. Anything went into the core land collapsed in it no doubt. But the core is not stable. There is no political solution to solve an empire which abhor difference and only use exam to do social cohesion and inclusion.
Don't expect them to unravel the mystery of the tocharians.
> truth is often a matter of perspective.
This is nonsense. Truth is patently objective. Narratives fail to get at truth, but that doesn't change the nature of truth.
Exactly, the Yuezhi is about as Chinese as the Japanese are, both first entering into the historical records in official Chinese dynastic history during the Han Dynasty.
Travellers from Asia journeyed to the Greco-Bactrian kingdom of Ghandara (whose name is a corruption of Alexandria) and took Buddhism back with them to the east. This is fictionalised in the story 'Journey to the West'. Nippon TV in Japan did a cool TV series adaption of this story that was dubbed into English and shown on kids TV in the UK as 'Monkey', which was quite popular back in the day. If you spend enough time wandering around the British Museum you learn all this stuff.
Gandhara (not "Ghandara") is mentioned in the Behistun inscription of the Persian emperor Darius, from about two hundred years before Alexander, so it's clearly not "a corruption of Alexandria".
Oh really? Maybe that's wrong then. Is the name a transcription or a translation? What script were the records written in originally? Names can be retroactively applied, especially in translation. Looks like I've got some reading to do. Edit: Maybe I got confused between different folk etymologies for the name of the city of Kandahar.
From what I understand (and I could be wrong), Kandahar is the modern name of Gandhara.
Kandahar is a city; Gandhara was a kingdom. (But, yes, there is a theory that the name ["Kandahar"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kandahar) derives from Gandhara, as opposed to deriving from "Alexander" -- though it seems generally agreed that there was a city -- [Alexandria of Arachosia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Arachosia) named after him built on that spot.)
That's what I thought as well, but clearly there's more debate there to be had than I realised. Was the city not founded by one of Alexander's generals or was it? Or ever called something like Iskanderha? I don't know.
> Nippon TV in Japan did a cool TV series adaption of this story that was dubbed into English and shown on kids TV in the UK as 'Monkey', which was quite popular back in the day.
Nah, HN readers might be more familiar with its anime adaptation, "Dragon Ball".
Or Starzinger, Saiyuki, The Monkey... there's a zillion anime adaptations (or rather, vaguely inspired stories).
It's kinda like Pinocchio, which you may find in Ergo Proxy or a thousand other stories.
Interesting. I've not watched that show and didn't know it's the same story. I know the same graphic artist who worked on the design for the band Gorillaz also did idents based on this story for the Olympics in Beijing a few years back.
Toriyama exercised a fair bit of artist license in his work. I am reasonably sure the original texts were more about hitting opponents with a big magical stick rather than Kamehamehas.
It's less an adaptation, more just loosely inspired by journey to the west (disclaimer: I have not read journey to the west)
And Journey to the West is a fairly modern book, only a few centuries old. It is based on many older folk tales of China (including many that weren't originally Chinese) and connects them with a framing story, a bit like Decameron or One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights). Some of them had already been connected before the book was written.
> whose name is a corruption of Alexandria
No.
Gandhara finds its name in way older documents such as Mahabharata. The people of Gandhara were called Gandharva. According to Mahabharata, these were people skilled in archery, wars, and also fine arts.
I am not sure about the history, but I am sure the name doesn’t come from Alexandria.
How do we know that the Mahabharata wasn't changed some time after Big Al's "gap years to find himself"?
This sort of thing happened a lot with the Old Testament (despite being written down). I would be shocked if it didn't also happen with Mahabharata, which is famous for not having been written down (much).
There were (loosely) almost checksums for the oral transmission of the Sanskrit versions of the Mahabharata for ensuring consistency and accuracy.
Priests were highly trained in recitation and memorization and the oral texts were consistent across vast regions.
My source is vague memory but I think it was from JAB van Buitenen speaking about oral transmission and accuracy in the intros for either “The Bhagavadgita in the Mahabharata” or “The Mahabharata; Book of the Beginning”.
Scouring trade route history is a two-edged sword: which way did influence run?
I’m sure ideological archeology can solve that though. That path also has a lot of history.
I read a book with a collection of papers about the history of bronze in China and it was eye-opening how aggressively Chinese scientists fight the idea of bronze technology being introduced together with horses and chariots from the west.
>which way did influence run?
Usually the way of the site of higher riches and more advanced technically, organizationally, etc, to the less one?
The West really isn't winning this one if that's your standard. The Mongol empire which amassed all the wealth, technology and military prowess of China during their expansion destroyed the Arabic world (arguably the most advanced civilization at the time), Russia, and the West they encountered like a bulldozer through wet cardboard. And did so with armies 1/3-1/5 the size of their opponents.
We don't really acknowledge in history class just how lucky the west got with Temüjin dying and stopping the expansion that was literally right at our door.
Edit: The sibling comment is grossly misleading, the west barely won against a scouting battalion that we had time to prepare for that was frozen and starving because the greatest wingman in history tricked the army into taking the long dangerous way through the mountains and sent us a heads-up.
The Mongol army wasn't primitive, it's that their purposeful strategy (and what made them so dangerous so far from home) required they plunder food and supplies regularly along the way. It made it so they didn't need huge supply lines and could outmaneuver armies that did.
There were structural, geographic, and ecological, reasons for why mongol invasions stopped before they reached western Europe (aside from some relatively short-lived attempts at imperiogenesis in eastern Europe). The same reasons were present for Arab "invasions" up from Iberia.
Walter Scheidel has written a fascinating book that takes a very hard historical look at possible historical counterfactuals comparing post-roman Europe to imperial China and finds the chances of Mongol success in Europe to have been very small despite their incredible string successes leading up to that point. Europe's greatest benefit was an incredible political polycentrism; Europe was hard to invade while China wasn't. That pushed China into sustained imperial centralization like many other empires with close steppe proximity.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691172187/es...
> aside from some relatively short-lived attempts at imperiogenesis in eastern Europe
Hm? The Golden Horde seems to have lasted for a fairly respectable period of time as far as empires go. Mongol rule in Russia outlasted Mongol rule in China by more than a century.
Mongol rule in Russia posed no serious threat to western Europe in terms of imperial conquest. The horde was fragile on its western frontiers. Steppe invasions and conflicts on the east between the Mongols and Chinese empires shaped that area for millenia. Russia, as an outlier, if we consider it a part of Europe, is uniquely exposed to the steppes in a similar way to China. The Mongol threat to greater Europe, however, was not that great. The tactics, ecology, and technologies, that made them a remarkable threat would not have been effective in western Europe during the same time periods.
It's certainly an interesting "could have been", but you need to move very far away from what actually happened to make it a convincing possibility.
Why does that make their attempt at imperiogenesis in Eastern Europe "short-lived"?
Fascinating, the takes I've seen from most historians was that polycentrism was actually likely to be Europe's undoing because the Mongols were the best to ever do it at recognizing that armies weren't as united as they first seemed and, before the fight, made deals with fractions to get them to stand down (and then kill them later) and, during battle, taking advantage of split command and breaking ranks.
I don't think that there was really anything that could stop the Mongols at that time because they had Chinese siege engineers to deal with fortifications and plenty in the way of "normal" soldiers but I'm happy to read the argument. The strongest case I've heard against them was that away from the steppe the conditions that produced hardy soldiers with their talent for shooting started to fall off.
The case of the Mongols was the example I was actually thinking of. But there’s a long history of ideologically interpreted archeology in the west as well.
I don’t understand why your comment was being voted down.
I was reading about Keraites recently:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keraites
Some of the invading Mongols were Christians, with a particular reverence for the biblical Magi (the three wise men), and Genghis Kahn, and his son, and his grandson Kublai Khan, all married into this group.
Thats not so weird before Christianity became big in Europe it was big in west and east Asia. At least from what i can remember from Peter Frankopan's book The Silkroads mentioned this. Also Dan carlins mongol series also talked about a big Christian king/savior in the far east.
> just how lucky the west got with Temüjin dying and stopping the expansion that was literally right at our door.
For geographical reasons they would have gone further west than Germany.
In an alternate timeline, the whole world population look like some mixture of Chinese.
Well the mongols weren't "chinese" to begin with. So...
They became Chinese pretty quickly…
imagine a way of the sword and a way of the cloth. The cloth ways prosper while the sword ways train to fight. The sword way group then kills or threatens to kill the cloth way group, demanding payment. So it begins.
Later, roving hordes on horseback arrive without warning from far away, and simply take everything, breaking any balance. The horse masters are the new rulers. Later, the horse masters lose. etc
You leave out the bit where the sword way freeze to death because they have no technology to deal with the harsh weather (which obviously is present because there's a need for cloth in the first place).
> ideological archeology
A short, memorable, oxymoronic, and yet accurate description of these efforts.
I like the term so much that I'm going to start using "ideological [scientific field]" to refer to similar pseudo-scientific efforts in other fields.
Yes, sometimes research is funded due to political motivations. The researchers could discover and publish interesting historical facts anyway. Hopefully they will still be able to do good work? It’s good that someone funds it, even if their motives aren’t pure.
It’s unlikely that this is really going to move the needle as far as rivalry between China and other countries goes; it’s more of a side effect of that rivalry, like national museums, the Olympics, and moon landings.
You see this in cross-Atlantic history education too. In US and European history, everything seems to flow out of Europe, or at least the Mediterranean. Menes becomes king of Egypt around 3150 BC. Then we fastforward to Honer and the Olympic games in 7th century Greece. Then there are the Punic wars and Rome wins the Battle of Cornith in 146 BC. Then the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and so on. With some things like the revolts in Judaea against Rome as a kind of dialectic counter-narrative.
If we look at what was happening in India, in Mali, in Japan and China, in Tenochtitlan or Caracol or Cusco, we see a different history happening.
From the failure of the siege of Vienna in 1683, to the end of World War II, Europe and the US did dominate the world. That has been fading, and the narrative is facing too.
There was a cartoon of a high school history teacher asking "So how should we cover this - dialectical materialism, or Kings and Battles?"
The CPP repudiated Old China back in the day. Now they want to embrace Old China because it gives the CPP legitimacy.
So the world turns.
CCP*
CPC
PCP
It makes sense because Old China was guilty of putting them in that situation. Even Older China was the richest country in the world for many centuries tho.
The myth of China being China for millenia is such a propagandist rewrite of history in that region; I hate to see NYT headlines fall for it.
It would be akin to Italy claiming that they are Romans...sure Romans lived there, but there is a whole lot of history between then and modern day state that would make this claim at best tenuous.
Mussolini was fond of making that claim. Wikipedia says "the entire Mediterranean was redefined to make it appear a unified region that had belonged to Italy from the times of the ancient Roman province of Italia, and was claimed as Italy's exclusive sphere of influence."
it's an excerpt from a book, that presumably has a lot of things to say about China. Why focus on that to elevate some petty point that China does not have 5000 years of history. So what? it still has millennia, counting only written history.
It's a bit tiring to see the average tech guy on HN demonstrate their critical thinking about everything China. Being able to write some code and read your own country's propaganda does not mean you're well equipped to talk about other countries.
Every place has millenias of history. The countries in the American continent start to count from when they were invaded by Europeans, that's their (our) loss.
>The countries in the American continent start to count from when they were invaded by Europeans
That's because it is hard to learn about pre-Columbian America because we have very little writing from that period -- mainly because they didn't write much down compared to for example how much was recorded in writing by people in China 3,000 years ago.
That there is history in the region is not really in contention, but rather that the concept of single "China" has endured millenia as a single civilization, and not the multi-cultural, multi-national, mileau that it was.
> mainly because they didn't write much down compared to for example how much was recorded in writing by people in China 3,000 years ago
Civilisation in the Americas started later than in the Old World. Columbus also arrived in the wake of wide-ranging ecological disasters in Meso-America and the ancient Pueblan territories.
Also because the colonial period that followed intentionally destroyed much of the written record.
> myth of China being China for millenia
Pardon my ignorance but why is a culture's existence for millennia such an extraordinary fact that it has to be seen as a myth or popaganda? Did humans just pop out of nowhere?
If your goal in research is to p-hack your way to a conclusion, you will always succeed.
I’m wondering how often p-values are even used in papers about archeological digs? It seems like historical arguments are often made without doing statistics at all?
I don't think they're talking about literal p-values, but the more general practice of defining your question in terms of the desired result.
Yes, but I’m annoyed with the low-effort use of science-based metaphor, and taking it more seriously leaves an opening for someone who actually knows something to elaborate.
P-hack?
In statistics, the p-value is shorthand for “how unlikely was this result.” Smaller p-values indicate less likely results, which in turn creates evidence of a relationship between variables. Many naive approaches to statically analysis place an almost magical value on the 5% threshold, but that’s not actually a rare event if you run dozens of tests. P-hacking generally refers to running tests and discarding the values that do not support what you want to be true. It’s a big problem in academia.
Technically it’s how unlikely of an event under a null model.
The null model is key: if you are mischievous, you can just define a seemingly benign but incorrect null model and generate extreme p values without discarding: all values will be significant!
FTA: “We are studying the past to understand and shape the present and future,” said Wang.
I was of the persuasion that "History is written to say it wasn't our fault" - Sam Phillips, but it may play a more active role than that.
I recently read and enjoyed 'The Silk Roads', Frankopan, which, to oversimplify, takes as its thesis the idea that "...for millennia, it was the region lying between east and west, linking Europe with the Pacific Ocean, that was the axis on which the globe spun." I was persuaded that he has a point.
I'm currently reading 'The New China Playbook', Jin, together with an ideologically-varying friend as a way to base our discussions more on knowledge than opinion.
So I'm particularly interested in what others have found helpful in understanding China's past and present. Any recommendations?
The british re-wrote history from the east, revisionism is part of any major empire, China is just doing it back
The next step is to start taking "1421: The Year China Discovered the World" seriously.
I read that book when it came out. Really liked it, but, from that link:
"The reasoning of 1421 is inexorably circular, its evidence spurious, its research derisory, its borrowings unacknowledged, its citations slipshod, and its assertions preposterous ... Examination of the book's central claims reveals they are uniformly without substance."
Whelp!
If that were true, when the Portuguese and Spaniards got to tne new world 90% of the people would have died recently of disease.
Those chinese ships were small floating cities and disease would have spread throughout the continent.
That did happen to the big Central American civilizations. Killing by a mix of inter conflicts and mass desease
If I'm interpreting parent correctly, they're arguing that had the Chinese recently visited the Americas, the Portuguese and Spanish would have encountered native populations which were already decimated by disease. As this isn't the case, the epidemiological argument against shortly prior Chinese encounters with American populations is strong.
That post Portuguese/Spanish contact native American populations were annihilated by disease is now well established fact. That again argues against earlier Chinese contact.
>native American populations were annihilated by disease is now well established fact
Conveniently formulated historic fact absolving settlers IMO. Apropo to topic.
Convincing argument from indigenous is that indigenous in NA didn't get wiped out "because of" disease, worst historic pandemics wipe out like 50% of population over ~10 years before some sort of immunity kicks into population and gen pop rebuilds a few generations after that. Indigenous NA got wiped due to generations of increased deprivation enforced by settlers over 100+ years that made them suspectible to disease/fatality. It's like how malaria, dysentery, starvation was primary cause of death in prison camps, but really it's the fact that prison camp conditions allowed those diseases to spread in enviroment of artificially sustained deprivation.
90% population wipes over multipe generations isn't how disease operates, it's not natural epidemiologic behavior on continental scale. 90% population wipes happens because of coordinated genocide over generations across continent, blaming "contact" and "disease" is deflection. Hence if prevous visitors (can be whoever) didn't stick around for 100 years to coordinate a genocide, the indigenous people would still be around to greet Portugese/Spaniards, because they would have had ~100 years to recover/rebuild from whatever contact disease from prior meeting.
Smallpox alone killed way more than 50%.
I'm sorry but contact alone with people from Eurasia or Africa would have innevitably almost wiped out native american populations.
I don't think this is even debatable.
And those populations would recover within few generations, like every other continental spanning peoples that's dealt with small pox since 1500BCE and before. No disease keeps populations across large span of geography at 10% pre outbreak over 100 years. It takes human intervention to force a specific people below replacement level for that long. When smallpox epidemics explodes, it wipes out 50%+ within a few YEARS. And then population RECOVERS, within a few generations. Populations develop some level of immunity OR social learned epidemiological responses to curtail outbreaks. Of course disease can kill, but it does not explain why indigenous population levels did not recover, especially on multi generational timelines. Not debating whether disease increases mortality, but saying disease is cause conveniently ignores the fact that persistent deprivation maintained by settlers over generations caused conditions where disease spread/has increased lethality, combined with repression prevented indigenous populations from recovering.
So yes, IMO it's completely debatable 90% of population would STILL be wiped out after 100 years in event of an earlier, pre Columbian exchange where new disease is introduced to the continent. Because unless those visitors stuck around and active took effort to genocide the locals, but using disease as a weapon AND creating conditions where disease can proliferate without response, local population would recover after multiple generations (european population took ~80 years to recover from black death).
The new population would have had immunity when the europeans arrived and they didn't.
You write way too much for too little information.
Only if spread continental scale which implies prolonged exchange. Otherwise can be isolated to small cohort. You claim there would be 10% population in prior disease exchange. You claim it's not debatable. I use too much words demonstrate otherwise. You seem to agree. Useful information was exchanged.
You seem to be arguing against your first comment to this thread.
Why take an account from an author of dubious qualifications and veracity seriously if the most significant evidence of such an encounter is entirely lacking?
> Why take an account from an author of dubious qualifications and veracity seriously
Your reading comprehension is severely lacking.
I mean the next step for the Chinese is to take such bullshit as true and start laying claim to the Americas.
Clear now?
Why didn't you just write that? Your comments were excessively cryptic.