What intrigued me was not the Rome-China connection per se but interconnectedness itself as an aspect of human history. And, of course, big events in Rome sent ripple effects the other way. When something big happened in China-like the construction of a wall that blocked invading nomads-it sent ripple effects through the nomadic world, which eventually reached Rome. China and Rome were two entirely different worlds and knew almost nothing of each other back then, but between them stretched the Central Asian grasslands of the nomads whence the Huns came riding out. The Great Wall of China going up had something to do with the Roman Empire coming down. The third one was about barbarian warriors such as Attila the Hun attacking Rome in its later days.īecause I was reading all three books concurrently, I noticed something that probably would not have occurred to me otherwise. Another was about Central Asian nomadic life in the centuries before the Mongol conquests. One was about the First Emperor of China, who put a million peasants to work building that Great Wall. This book was born some years ago when I happened to be reading three seemingly unrelated works of history at the same time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |