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Francis D. K. Ching Mark Jarzombek Vikramaditya Prakash 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1500 BCE In the middle of the second millennium six hundred animals were plying trade routes BCE, Central Asia-from the Bactrian across the desert plains. The Hittites and Margiana Archaeological Complex society the Egyptians became the preeminent land in Turkmenistan to the Indus Ghaggar- powers in western Asia, with Egypt embarking Hakra region in the south-went into a on a remarkable period of temple architecture period of turmoil and decline. An ecological epitomized by the constructions in Luxor. disaster-the drying up of the Ghaggar-Hakra In 1600 BCE, the Bronze Age Shang River-certainly played a part in creating a dynasty in China controlled a large area in political vacuum. During this period, large northeast and north-central China, with cities groups of people who called themselves such as Zhengzhou and Anyang arising-the Aryas, or Aryans as they are now known, former encompassing a region of roughly moved into northern India and introduced 1.5 by 2 kilometers; it was one of the largest novel cultural elements. Since their structures planned cities in the world at that time. The were built of wood rather than brick, very little period is noted for extraordinary bronze tangible evidence of this period of conflict vessels used to hold wine and food in rituals and turbulence has survived. The newcomers linking rulers with their ancestors. Chinese brought with them iron and sacred oral iron technology differed from that of the West texts that are among the oldest in the world. insofar as the Chinese did not forge the metal Around 1500 BCE these were assembled and but cast it using multiple ceramic molds. written down. This was the so-called Vedic The region of coastal Louisiana today period, named after a Sanskrit Inda-European called Poverty Point, on the Gulf Coast of word that means "knowledge"; this period North America, emerged as the center of lasted to approximately 500 BCE. an important chiefdom. Its people built West Asia also experienced a state of enormous earthworks as part of an artificially flux and instability. Assyria, Babylon, and constructed, sacred landscape. Unlike other Mesopotamian cities were overrun other native American tribes in the region, by invaders of unknown provenance, the who relied only on local raw materials, the Mitanni and Kassite people, who had moved Poverty Point people developed an extensive in from the north and east. A similar situation trade network. Meanwhile, in the Andes, existed with the so-called Sea People, who improvements in irrigation technology progressed eastward along the coast of the enabled farmers to move upstream, away Mediterranean, conquering the Nile Delta. from the ocean, expand their economies, and Among the newcomers there were also build large sites such as Carda! in present the Hittites, who settled in Anatolia. There, day Peru. Among the numerous aspects of in the north-central region, they founded their agriculture, it was the development of Hattusas, a capital with numerous temples. cotton that was most revolutionary. The ritual They brought in scribes from Syria to centers that were built involved enormous maintain their records in cuneiform script, U-shaped complexes, the architectural creating voluminous state archives. They also elements of which would remain part of the recognized the importance of the camel as a Peruvian architectural language for millennia. beast of burden: by the middle of the second The Andeans had neither the wheel nor millennium BCE, caravans with as many as beasts of burden. 800 BCE By 1000 BCE the agricultural and water It was within this context of improved Further to the east, in India, the Vedic lndo canalization techniques that had been weaponry that the Dorians established Aryan invaders who had imposed themselves developed in the coastal communities of their hold on the Mediterranean ports and as a ruling class in previous centuries had South America were also being applied in extended their power toward the west by by this time occupied large sections of the ihe highlands, from which it was easier to founding colonies in Sicily and Italy to secure lndo-Gangetic Plain, where they established control trade. Several ritual centers were the newly developing, grain-producing sixteen mahajanapadas, or kingdoms. founded, such as Chavfn de Huantar, which regions. Magna Graecia, as it was called, Initially, the state of Kashi, with its capital was located at the intersection of important was so strong that by 500 BCE it had become at Varanasi, gained supremacy, but it was trade routes. In Central America meanwhile, a single economic and cultural continuity. subsumed by Koshala. Varanasi, however, the Olmecs had drained the tropical, marshy It was thus in Sicily and Italy that one finds remained an important center of learning lands of Veracruz and converted them into some of the most developed early Greek and became home to scholars from all the thriving agricultural fields, yielding surpluses. experiments in stone architecture. The mahajanapadas. Around this time, and probably because of 9th and 8th centuries BCE saw the rise In 1046 BCE the Zhou replaced the Olmec ingenuity, maize (corn), which was to of the regional importance of Palestine in Shang, establishing the longest-lasting change the culinary history of the Americas, relationship to the Kush in Nubia and the dynasty in Chinese history. They built two of was first cultivated. The resulting prosperous Sabaean kingdom in Yemen. Kush was China's four great cities, Xi'an and Luoyang, trading economy formed the basis for the first an important source of metal, and for a codifying urban planning principles that major ritual centers of Central America, such period its kings took control of Egypt. The were cited, if not always adhered to, in all _0 as San Lorenzo and La Venta in modern-day Sabaean kingdom in Yemen had a monopoly subsequent Chinese capital cities. Little, Mexico. on the production of frankincense, an oil however, remains of these cities, since they Whereas Mesoamerica had just entered derived from a plant that grew only there. were constructed largely of wooden buildings the Bronze Age, the Eurasian world was Frankincense, which was very expensive, was on earth platform foundations. The Zhou entering the Iron Age. By 1000 BCE iron a requirement in many religious ceremonies. created the ideology of imperial rule as the smelting had become fairly widespread, In order to reach the markets, it was brought "mandate of heaven," which was later to having been introduced by the Hittites. Its to Palestine, with its connections to ports and be extolled as the model of governance by usage spread all the way to China. Iron trade routes. Confucius and others. They also began a weapons changed the power structure and Between the 8th and 6th centuries BCE, process of consolidation, which resulted in was presumably the cause for much of the the Assyrians and Babylonians established the exile of "barbarian" tribes, mainly to the period's upheaval and displacement. New themselves as the controlling powers of south, who became the ancestors of the Thai, cultures arose and flourished, almost all western Asia, but though their empires were Burmese, and Vietnamese. of them iron-making cultures. In northern extensive and their new cities famous, their Italy, we find the Etruscans; in Greece, inability to establish coherent financial and the Dorians; along the coast of Turkey, the trade policies made them vulnerable. The lonians; in Armenia, the Urartu; and in fall of the Babylonian Empire to Persia in southern Egypt, the Nubians. In the eastern 539 BCE marked the beginning of the end Mediterranean, cities like Byblos and Sidon of a Mesopotamian-centered culture that flourished, as did the Israelite kingdom had, for over two millennia, been one of the centered in Jerusalem. dominating regenerating forces-culturally, economically, and politically-in Eurasia. With this collapse, and the power shift to Persia, it can be argued that East and West developed along different tracks from this point onward. 400 BCE From China to Greece, religious, ethical, to conquer Greece, however, was to have and social thinking was undergoing various unintended consequences. It stimulated the evaluations that contrasted with centuries fantasy and ambitions of Alexander (356-323 old traditions that had accepted the notion BCE), who conquered Persia and its territories that power was imposed from the top, with the help of the highly trained infantry rather than that it should be examined of hoplites and their fearful phalanx fighting from a theorized point of view. In the 6th techniques. For a while it seemed that the century BCE, ethical and civic notions of Greek Empire would stretch all the way to government and personal conduct began the Indus River, but Alexander's ambitions to take root in many parts of Eurasia. In were cut short by his premature death in China, for example, Confucius (551-479 Babylon in 323 BCE. The conquered lands, BCE) envisioned a world governed by reason divided among his generals, turned into and proper conduct, while Daoism, which quasi-independent states and regional existing alongside Confucianism, stressed power centers. The strongest of these was a sort of quietistic noninterference and the Egypt, ruled by the Ptolemies, who governed paradox of complementary opposites. In from Alexandria. An equally important India, Buddha and Mahavira challenged the city was Pergamon in Anatolia. The tiny highly stratified world of the Vedic orthodoxy, island trading city of Delos overtook Athens emphasizing the discipline of self-abnegation. as the cosmopolitan trading hub in the Buddhism might have remained tangential to Mediterranean. The aesthetic of the time, in history had it not been made a state religion retrospect called Hellenism, tended toward by Asoka (304-232 BCE), the creator of the realism, delicacy, and emotional expression; it first empire of South Asia.