INteresting Topic about Ancient History...

I know very little about the Mongol Empire but I read that after the Mongols conquered the area between China and Austria, there was a period of peace, a sort of Mongolia Pax like the Romana Pax. People could travel safely across the empire. Maybe that could be a contributing factor to the development of the Silk Road during a certain period of time.

However, the Silk Road existed since around 100 BC, so I don't think that the fact that people did not use it anymore was connected to the fall of the Mongol Empire since the Empire was short-lived.

There is a lot of info on the Silk Road in wikipedia, you may be interested to check it out.

By the way, if I remember well, the Mongol empire was the biggest empire in history.

Genghis Khan had many descendants and people forget that Tamerlane was one of his descendants. From him came Barber who conquered Afghanistan and then India. The Mughal Empire in India is a Mongol Empire. 'Mughal' is Persian for 'Mongol'.

Interesting, talk72000. Did the Mughal Empire cover the whole of India or just a part of it?

Nothern and most of India. They were in control till the British appeared on the scene.

This is an interesting topic. An informative and interesting link with some pics is below. I wandered through a few sites to discover more about the Mongols and the Silk Road. What an awesome adventure!

http://www.ess.uci.edu/~oliver/silk.html

If there would be a Silk Road today, would it be called the Nylon Road?

That's impressive, talk 72000.

Thanks for the link, Herema. Yes, the Silk Road is very interesting history to read because it was the road that connected many different cultures and religions from China to Rome.

If I remember correctly, under the Mongol Empire, there was a lot of tolerance for many religions to co-exist peacefully. If you read the Travels of Marco Polo, you will see that he was very impressed by the Mongols. It was actually them who invented paper money.

To refer to the Mongol "Empire" beggars the meaning of empire. The Romans reckoned that their city was founded in 754 BCE, and that the Tarquins were expelled, and the Republic established circa 500 BCE. Although the exact date and nature of that latter event may be in question, the fact remains that the institutions of government and law which ruled the daily lives of Roman citizens were at base unchanged nearly 2000 years later when Constantinople finally fell to the Osmanli Turks in 1453. The modern languages of Europe all owe a huge debt to Latin, and many of the legal codes of Europe owe more to Roman code than to customary law.

Huang-Ti, the "Yellow" Emperor, is accounted the first true emperor of China, in the late 3rd century BCE. However, he employed the services of the Mandarin caste, which had by then been in operation for more than a thousand years. More than 2000 years later, the civil institutions of China, as well as the common language--Mandarin--which allowed the inhabitants of so diverse and heavily populated an empire to communicate, were still in place.

The Mongol "Empire" had no foundational aspects such as that. They did not leave a heritage of language or governance which survived even the few generations of ostensible Mongol rule. No modern legal codes, social systems or languages owe any debt to the Mongols. The Mongols were not even a unitary people, but rather a collection of tribes of the Mongolian steppes put under the control of Temujin through his military skills, but in particular through military skills of his lieutenants, Subatai especially. Temujin's "Empire" survived him by a bare generation, leaving aside the Yuan dynasty in China.

The reasons one would leave aside the Yuan dynasty of China are that the conquest of China had not been completed upon the death of Temujin, nor even of his successor Ogedei, and could hardly be considered to have been a part of some vast Mongol Empire; additionally, when Kubulai (the ruler to whom Marco Polo referred) made an effective dynasty in China, he relied, no less than any previous or subsequent ruler, upon the expertise of the Mandarin bureaucratic class. Those who allege that the Mongol "Empire" lasted 150 years in fact refer to the brief sway of the Yuan dynasty, which was in fact in power for less than a century in China. The Yuan did not attempt to control the complete extent of the area conquered by the Mongols, and after the death of Kubulai, it quickly contracted to the traditional boundaries of China and Mongolia.

Essentially, the Mongols were rapists and murderers briefly placed under the control of effective leaders, who laid a large portion of the Eurasian landmass under tribute. There is little to choose between any one group of barbarian plunderers, and the Germanic tribes in Europe who overran much of the western portion of the Roman Empire differed only in having displayed less savagery. In either example, the successful, established institutions of empire survived the barbarian invasions, whether one speaks of the Germans or the Mongols, and true empire is not possible without the successful establishment of a rule of law and the long-term protection of commerce.

Mongol "Empire?" Hardly.

The only thing I am surprised is why it took so long for you to speak up, Setanta. Thanks for the explanations, very enlightening.

Surely I have used the term empire in a very loose way. I am too lazy to check the meanings in dictionaries. And I can always count on you to correct me if I say incorrect things. :wink: (By the way, my knowledge of English is very limited.)

By the way, Setanta, please tell me, how are the Chinese and Japanese related?

You got me all curious in the other topic, but since you were using #@%$ words, I did not like to continue.

The Mughal Empire was truly an empire in every sense. The Taj Mahal, a mausoleum to Mumtaz. is one of the Wonders of the World, and there were 6 emperors. They, however, were Muslims and were the cause of much Hindu-Muslim clashes that survive today.

The Japanese and Chinese share a common heritage as much as the
English and Americans. A group left China few thousand years ago so there is similarity in the culture like chop sticks, picture writing, etc.

No, unfortunately it would be called the Heroin Road. Large parts of the former Silk Road are used for smuggling crude heroin. In Nagaland - Northeast India, you can get 1 unit of heroin (whatever that is, I forget - 1 gram? 5 grams?) for 1 kilogram of salt.

CIA up to their old tricks - growing and processing their black operation currency.

Mongols reopened the trade routes from China to Europe which had been closed for many centuries so that there was overland trade for about 150 years until Tamerlane shut the routes down again when he wasted Sarai and the Golden Horde.

At that point, Europeans had gotten used to spices and Eastern goods and were not in a frame of mind to go back to eating meat with just salt on it, and began the age of European navigation.

My understanding is that many if not most elements of Japanese culture are based on that of the Tang dynasty in China.

The parts of the mongolian empire that lasted for a while are those parts that already had an efficient and stable form of government to begin with.
It's still impressive, how quickly the mongols conquered asia and parts of europe. It's quite unlikely that the european armies, even combined, could have resisted the mongolian army, but lucky enough, Tamerlane had pressing engagements in his homelands.
As for the rest, I believe that the world would look quite different if the mongols had not been in it's history. If I recall correctly, the Persian empire, with an already weakened power base, succumbed completely and didn't return.
I am quite sceptical about any 'inventions' as made under mongolian rule. By and large, these were nomadic warriors. It seems quite likely, that any inventions made under mongol rule would also have been invented (perhaps even earlier) without any mongol intrusion.
Having said that, what was impressive was the religious tolerance. If I am not mistaken, that is, I seem to recall that european missionaries (rpiests) were quite astounded at the religious tolerance as it existed in the Mongolian empire in the Far East.

As far as the silk route goes... I'm not sure how much 'produce' was transported over it, as compared to trade by sea. I'd say that it's reputation was probably, in quantitive comparison, unaccounted for. I can't believe that a long, difficult and often dangerous trek over land would often be preferred over the relaitvely speaking saver and swifter transport over seas... But it has been shown that, at certain times in history, it was indeed the preferred route of trade.

Mongols invented getting around. Prior to Chengis Khan, nobody in China knew that Europe existed and visa versa.

Jesus, Gunga Din, every time you open your mouth about history, you display your appalling ignorance. Do you just make this **** up, or do you allege that you "learned" it somewhere in school? What the hell kind of school did you attend.

Aramaic confessional Jews carried their religion as far east as China before the time of the alleged "Jesus." Subsequently, Nestorian Christians followed the same paths through central Asia, so that Marco Polo reports the existence of both Jews and Christians in central Asia and China in the earliest days of the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty--these were already well-established communities. Do you allege that the Aramaic Jews and the Nestorians just happened to wander to the East, telling themselves they'd just see what was over the next hill? Do you allege that what they learned was never repeated to anyone else? Do you allege that the Chinese believed that Jews and Christians had just dropped from the heavens?

You peddle some of the most egregious bullshit about history in these fora, and you ignorance of that subject is only exceeded by your superstitious ignorance of science.

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Cello, you English is excellent, don't apologize for it, and don't worry that you won't be understood. I didn't answer your question about the Japanese and Chinese because i wouldn't wish to pretend to a knowledge which i don't possess. My knowledge of the most ancient Chinese and Japanese is sketchy at best and doesn't include anything about the possible relationships between them. The most i could say is that my reading has suggested to me that any innovative ideas the Japanese got from the Chinese came to them by way of the Koreans.