'Silk Roads' as it lives and breathes

One of the most formidable tasks of this year was to finish this book in a record time of 3 weeks. The bibliography itself is 120 (fine print) odd pages, so you can imagine the content in each page - filled with names, places, incidents that can drive the detail oriented into an excitable frenzy. I was exhausted. I do have copious amount of notes, do ping if you want to know more!

I don't know enough to completely agree or disagree with every fact, hypothesis and there are as always reviews speaking to both sides and the middle. But almost all reviewers can agree there are some nuggets which are spectacular. Here are the ones that made me sit up and reread:

1. Globalisation was a thing of the past as much as it is off the present. Vibrant, profitable, exchange of currency, stories, art and culture.

   1. Was it the Aeneid that had glimpses of the Mahabharata and does the Ramayana shows traces of the Illiad, one shall never know for sure.

   2. The flourishing nations/people changed over the millennium, it was almost like every land got its turn at riches and utterly mad wealth; Baghdad was built as a monument of prosperity, Chinese silk was amazing currency, Venice was at the centre of trade (sometimes by unscrupulous means) etc. Also meant someone was always trying to take it away.

2. The Buddhists's ways of bringing people into their fold was the foundation of conversion strategies across the world. They had a structured and strong approach to it, smattering the countryside with stupas as they went about converting interested and uninterested folk into Buddhism - all the way into Persia and beyond. The existing religions (Zarathustra for example) and emerging ones (Christianity for example) felt compelled to respond, and we see that compulsion to respond to this day in all religions. At one point or the other one religion has oppressed another; the evidence seems to be clear, but we (IMHO) don't 'see' it or just don't want to.

3. Most of the time, most of the wars were fought because of underlying greed - many were disguised under the aegis of religious indignation. The fact that we humans subscribe to the thought that some of us are less than or more than others is a sign of our own stupidity and not of God's creation.

4. Slavery was the most lucrative of all trades and was started by the vikings (known as 'rus', the fore-fathers of Russia). We cannot alone hold them responsible as the Romans, the English, the Venetians, the Persians etc. all bought the slaves and saw it as a symbol of wealth to own as many as possible. People were kidnapped, brutalised, torn apart from their homes and taken as slaves. The only version of the Vikings stories I heard (mainstream content) was of their bravery, coolness (farewell to their dead), strength, size and beauty but never about the slavery bit; quite unfair I think - that I had to dig deeper to find the whole.

5. In a complete 180 degree way the mongols to me were always know to be ferocious, brutal, violent and driven by the need to conquer and accumulate. The unspoken part of their story - high tolerance to religion, extremely sorted finance and revenue systems, insisted that the people in the lands they conquered assimilate into the Mongolian way of life as quickly as possible, had a solid reward and recognition system and much more. They were brutal in war for sure but would have really liked to know this part of them too. I want to know more of them now.

This book spans the length and breadth of the 'civilised' world's history - it is depressing and exhausting to read our travails, though there are moments of utter pride of being human, it is indeed a miracle that we are 7 billion strong today and not wiped out from the earth.

History is perspective, there are many ways to confirm a lot of events and significant moments but seems like there is really no way to 'know, know' intent, motivation, circumstance, state of mind etc. As I read more and more I realise that I need to leave so much more room for interpretation. I still share everything historical I read with everybody with the same enthusiasm but I make sure I say, 'One hypothesis/version is...