Having long been interested in
Chinese history and archaeology (since my undergraduate & graduate work)
let’s look at the trade routes that came from there and those that passed
through here; along with any similarities. When Meme & I visited Xian, and
the tomb warrior army of Qin Shi huang-ti (usually credited as the 1st
Emperor of China and the individual giving “the Middle Kingdom” its name: Qin =
Chin), you couldn’t help but notice that the great empires of Alexander and Qin
started inching towards each other. Many say Xian is China’s Silk Road
launch-pad. Of course the routes carried much more than silks; they carried
everything from customs to wealth to plague.
Beginning with Alexander in 329 BCE,
the Hellenistic Greek influence remained in Central Asia for 3 centuries. Meanwhile,
the Han Dynasty (ethnic Chinese still refer to themselves as Han [Children of
Han]) was reaching ever westward into Central Asia. Long before the song, it
was realized “Money makes the world go around.”
What does this have to do with
Petra you ask? Well, it certainly owed its development and prominence due to
its location on key trade routes, and even though maps show the Silk Road being
primarily north of here (to Damascus) the route here was certainly a trade
contributor. Petra was Nabataean and they were recruited by the Greeks as part
of the Hellenistic trade empire. This was continued into Roman times as well,
but the Romans did by-pass Petra as part of their strategy to vanquish the
military of the Nabataeans and have them join the empire (“it is for your own
good and you’ll prosper too…”).
The trading that occurred became
part of the life-blood of empires. Can you imagine the generations of
merchant-travelers that trod those various trails? Most were long before Marco
Polo’s time. In fact, the desire for silk became so disruptive to the treasury
of Rome that the purchase of same was forbidden: too much gold going east
(similar to what the British Empire later experienced and why Queen Victoria
became the world’s largest drug dealer in history: forcing at gun-point China
to allow opium to be imported & sold from her colonies in India). Hmmm, sounds semi-familiar to the news on BBC
& CNN sometimes…
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