Merv Project is UP

http://wavesofmerv.blogspot.com/

 Go there. Go there now. Appreciate my MS Paint skills.

Unesco in Afghanistan

Its funny how UNESCO puts out their desire to save "Afghanistan's" cultural heritage.
Lets think, what exactly are they saving? Oh, just all of that ancient Buddhist and Greek cultural crossover.

Heres the bigger kicker, did anybody ask the Afghans if they considered that their own heritage? Okay okay, so maybe UNESCO was referring to the World's cultural heritage, referring to such ancient past relics as heritage for the whole world.

But seriously, why are UNESCO telling Afghanistan that they're going in there to save Afghanistan's cultural heritage. Sure a past culture lived on that land, but they don't live there anymore.
I don't have an issue with what UNESCO is doing, just in how they say it. Don't go in there under the guise that you're helping somebody. They could care less about ancient art and archaeological sites given their astronomically high poverty and illiteracy rates.
Be honest, and go in there to grab the items that hold history within them. Go there to save such items so that we may study them again later, and come to some greater understanding in the future. Don't tell the Afghans that you're saving their heritage. Who are UNESCO to declare somebody else's heritage? I thought the whole point of identity was to know your own so that you could tell other people, and differentiate yourself from them, not to tell somebody else who they are.

There may be no such thing as a fundamental essence of "Chinese-ness", but the Tang Dynasty disagrees.

So it appears that the roots of Nestorian Christianity lies within Syriac Christianity. What is also interesting is the continuous notations of how Nestorians had attempted to meld with Chinese culture, and were doomed to be lost as a religion because of their lack of distinct identity within China. This is further underlined by the numerous instances of adoption of Chinese and Buddhist language in Christian texts. However, despite blending in, it is apparent that their early texts lacked fluency in Chinese.

SPAM modelling peaks my interest as well. The basic idea is a ranking of castes is based on the letters in the word "spam", Scholars being the highest, followed by peasants, artisans, and lastly merchants. So the Tang dynasty Chinese held merchants as lowly people, despite the merchants being typically wealthy. Could this be partly because many of the merchants in Tang China were foreigners? Sure foreigners were tolerated, but probably not held in high esteem. This may have also played a part in why foreign religions had trouble spreading into China, seeing how it would be an all-too-easy connection to place between foreign religions, and the lowly held caste of merchants that brought these religions in with their trade.

Trade brought foreigners with their customs and religions to China. However, the Chinese treated them in such a way to distance them from native Chinese culture, and also required them to assimilate somewhat, likely so the Chinese would have an easier time dealing with the foreigners. It is this interesting double standard that sought to both reduce distinct foreign identities within China, as well as keep them at such a distance from the Chinese identity to reduce the foreigners to a "lowered" status within Chinese society.

It is clear that the Chinese of the Tang Dynasty made all efforts to distinguish themselves from foreign entities, whilst holding their dominion strong and impenetrable. They had a clear idea who they (the Tang Chinese) were, who the outsiders were, and how to keep themselves identifyably separate from outsiders.

And now we return to the topic of labelling. It is interesting how in previous readings, we looked at labelling other cultures based on geographic location. Then there is the musings of how the ancient Greek's labelled outsiders as barbarians, because the language of the outsiders consisted of many syllables such as "bar bar bar bar bar".
So we come to the Hinsch article, "Myth and the Construction of Foreign Ethnic Identity in Early and Medieval China" (2004), and how he remarks how the medieval Chinese people labelled outsiders in such a way that the labels both served as a derogatory means, as well as a means of distancing the Chinese, providing a more noble identity for themselves. Even deeper than labelling, we see how the mythology or tales of these outsiders serve to distance the Chinese from them, or relate to them. Take for example how Chinese farmers saw wolves as a negative force, and how the Chinese placed a negative label upon nomadic tribes that saw wolves as positive creatures in their mythology.

I've never before thought of the abstraction of language, how some cultures have a name for their language, others use a simple phrase to describe language like "our people" or "this" or "us". Interesting how in labelling language, the name of a language given by different peoples differ from each other. This raises a question, before wide identification of separate languages, would people introduce themselves to foreigners with a decided label for themselves, or would that label develop over time? Would you introduce yourself as being the "people from over there" or let other people name you?

On the topic of the silk road, this raises the question, how did these trade circles communicate? From this point in the course, I can only assume that certain silk traders would trade with more than one different languages from their own, but how would they learn that language? If you one day found yourself on another planet full of people who did not speak a word of your language, how would you go about learning their language, given the limitations of the syllables that your native tongue taught you to use, the syllables you are unable to pronounce, and the limitations of the brain to learn new languages after an approximate age of puberty? So maybe another planet isn't entirely accurate seeing how the people living across Eurasia all had some contact with each other through the ages, and probably have some minor relations in language, but the question still holds, how were distant people able to come together in a trusting agreement to trade, when there was a wide language barrier? How did they break that language barrier? We can complicate this thought further by knowing that many languages lacked a written form in the past, examples include the Germanic and Slavic, who only received a written language as a result of missionaries' desire to write a bible in their language when Christianity spread through Europe, the specific example I'm thinking about are Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius, the creators of the Cyrillic alphabet.

Interestingly, we can assume that in trading goods with each other, these peoples along the silk road also traded nuances of each other's languages. Maybe traceable? We can only wait and find out.