448 nicholas doumanis
The fact that societies and communities across much of Asia, Europe and North
Africa had always formed part of a world system, or series of overlapping networks,
provides an important context for an understanding of the Mediterranean and its
external relations. West Asia’s major role in the transcontinental order was as a clear-
inghouse for the distribution of goods, innovations and ideas. One reason why the
Levant and Mesopotamia were always highly urbanized was because they provided
some of the key junctures and termini for trade routes that fanned across Iran and
Central Asia, and which also linked to the Persian Gulf. The Levant and Egypt, and
to a lesser extent the Black Sea, were the Mediterranean’s access points to the two
greatest gravitational centers, India and China, as well as to ecological zones that
offered all manner of exotic and desired products.
A critical role was played by those who purveyed materials between the continents,
namely the seafarers of the Indian Ocean and its tributaries (Red Sea, Persian Gulf),
and the nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples that eked out an existence along the
Silk Roads, in Arabia and the other arid spaces that separated the great agrarian
civilizations. To be sure, Central Asia did more than merely connect these
civilizations. An indication of the great variety of commodities found within this
vast area was provided in the writings of the medieval geographer Al-Muqaddasi
(Collins, 1994). He confirms that Central Asia featured many ecological zones (for-
ests, steppe lands and deserts), and peoples that traded an endless variety of raw and
processed materials. These included soap, asafoetida, fabrics, carpets, copper lamps,
grease, the skins of sheep, sables, steppe foxes, beavers and spotted hares, grapes,
raisins, sesame, satin, Aranj fabrics, bows, rakhbin, yeast, copper vessels, stirrups,
bridle-heads, straps, quivers, cotton, scissors, fine bows, silks, melons, porcelain and
paper. However, central Asian peoples had their greatest economic impact as
conveyors of goods, ideas and microbes between China, India, Persia, West Asia,
and the Mediterranean. Mobility across the vastness of inner Eurasia begins with the
domestication of horses, and movement was always quickest along the fringes of
steppe regions, where pastoralists, as David Christian reminds us, transferred not
only goods but “languages, genes, technologies, styles, and lifeways ... with an
intensity unmatched in the less mobile communities of Eurasia’s agrarian civiliza-
tions” (Christian, 2000: 12). The speed and volume of exchanges increased along
the Silk Roads from the first millennium bce, as the formation of steppe empires
such as that of the Xiongnu, who flourished during the second century bce, pro-
vided more secure conditions for the movement of goods. The Türks did the same
during the sixth century ce (Christian ,2000: 16–18), as did the Mongols in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (Bentley, 1998: 241). Christian suggests that
movements along the steppe roads shaped the destinies of civilizations throughout
Eurasia and North Africa: it was from here that the movement of the Indo-European
family of languages, shamanism and the great organized religions and most of the
great diseases were disseminated and shared throughout the Old World (Christian,
2000: 22–23). Jerry Bentley cautions that domestic needs were the primary
explanation for resource specializations in every part of the Old World, but that
long-distance and cross-cultural trade, which was once deemed to be of minimal
importance by economic historians of pre-modern times, can be shown to have led
to the inexorable economic integration of the eastern hemisphere before the onset
of globalization (Bentley, 1998: 245).