fringes poured in. China lost control over Central Asia; indeed, China itself
lacked a central government between 220 and 581. On the opposite side of
the land mass, the basic structure of Western European society was so dis-
rupted that the region remained a backwater for trade and commerce for
many centuries, skipping the next up cycle completely. India was also out of
sync but in a different way, enjoying an upsurge under the Gupta Empire
(320–550) in a period of general downturn, then experiencing a downturn in
overland traffic to the north when other regions were experiencing a recov-
ery. Southwest Asia and China were in sync, enjoying a great period of
commercial prosperity from the seventh to ninth centuries under the early
Abbasid dynasty (749–1258) in Baghdad and the Tang dynasty (618–907)
in China. The revival of long-distance Chinese trade is especially impressive
since the knowledge of sericulture, along with the silkworms themselves, was
smuggled out of China in the sixth century and silk industries established in
the Byzantine Empire and Persia. Nevertheless, Chinese silk continued to be
a major export joined by hand-glaze ceramics in the form of porcelain and
stoneware.
The most important addition to the Afro–Eurasian world system in the
latefirst millenniumCEwas the complex of routes known collectively as the
Trans-Saharan, which made it possible for the commodities grown, mined,
and manufactured on one side of the largest desert in the world to get to the
other side. In doing so, it tapped into the commerce of a whole new part of
the world, Sub-Sahara Africa. Products had reached West and Central Africa
from North Africa and vice versa since the prehistoric period through trickle
trade and relay networks between oases and nomadic tribes. This willy-nilly
process would become a viable commercial enterprise only with the coming
of the camel (dromedary), which, for reasons that are not readily apparent,
took an inordinately long time to become fully integrated into Saharan
commerce given its usefulness much earlier on the Incense Road in not-too-
distant western Arabia.
The Trans-Saharan system was built by Berber merchants beginning in the
eighth century. It was not a single highway but rather three major routes
running southward from commercial centers in North Africa, one starting in
western Morocco and running parallel to the coast, a second crossing the
heart of the desert in modern Algeria, and a third connecting Tripoli with
Lake Chad. They were not just unpaved and unmarked but sometimes not
even beaten into paths, and they changed over time according to conditions.
At the southern edge of the desert, they connected into another system, the
Trans-Sudanic, which ran across the grasslands and into the tropical forests of
West and Central Africa and was operated by a class of African merchants
known as the Wangara. The connecting points of these two systems were
cities like Awdaghust and Tadmekka in the early centuries and later
Timbuktu. Caravans, the largest of which were reportedly up to 10,000
camels, brought metal goods, textiles, and an enormous variety of other
138 Epilogue