A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS
34.BETWEEN ROME AND CHINA
The second and first centuries B.C. mark a new phase in the history of mankind. Mesopotamia and the eastern Mediterranean are no longer the centre of interest. Both Mesopotamia and Egypt were still fertile, populous and fairly prosperous, but they were no longer the dominant regions of the world. Power had drifted to the west and to the east.
Two great empires now dominated the world, this new Roman Empire and the renascent Empire of China. Rome extended its power to the Euphrates, but it was never able to get beyond that boundary. It was too remote. Beyond the Euphrates the former Persian and Indian dominions of the Seleucids fell under a number of new masters. China, now under the Han dynasty, which had replaced the Ts’in dynasty at the death of Shi-Hwang-ti, had extended its power across Tibet and over the high mountain passes of the Pamirs into western Turkestan. But there, too, it reached its extremes. Beyond was too far.
China at this time was the greatest, best organized and most civilized
political system in the world. It was superior in area and population
to the Roman Empire at its zenith. It was possible then for these two
vast systems to flourish in the same world at the same time in almost
complete ignorance of each other. The means of communication both by
sea and land was not yet sufficiently developed and organized for them
to come to a direct clash.
Yet they reacted upon each other in a very remarkable way, and their
influence upon the fate of the regions that lay between them, upon
central Asia and India, was profound. A certain amount of trade
trickled through, by camel caravans across Persia, for example, and by
coasting ships by way of India and the Red Sea. In 66 B.C. Roman
troops under Pompey followed in the footsteps of Alexander the Great,
and marched up the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea. In 102 A.D. a
Chinese expeditionary force under Pan Chau reached the Caspian, and
sent emissaries to report upon the power of Rome. But many centuries
were still to pass before definite knowledge and direct intercourse
were to link the great parallel worlds of Europe and Eastern Asia.
To the north of both these great empires were barbaric wildernesses.
What is now Germany was largely forest lands; the forests extended far
into Russia and made a home for the gigantic aurochs, a bull of almost
elephantine size. Then to the north of the great mountain masses of
Asia stretched a band of deserts, steppes and then forests and frozen
lands. In the eastward lap of the elevated part of Asia was the great
triangle of Manchuria. Large parts of these regions, stretching
between South Russia and Turkestan into Manchuria, were and are regions
of exceptional climatic insecurity. Their rainfall has varied greatly
in the course of a few centuries They are lands treacherous to man.
For years they will carry pasture and sustain cultivation, and then
will come an age of decline in humidity and a cycle of killing
droughts.
A CHINESE COVERED JAR OF GREEN-GLAZED EARTHENWARE
A CHINESE COVERED JAR OF GREEN-GLAZED EARTHENWARE
Han Dynasty (contemporary with the late Roman republic and early
Empire)
_(In the Victoria and Albert Museum)_
The western part of this barbaric north from the German forests to
South Russia and Turkestan and from Gothland to the Alps was the region
of origin of the Nordic peoples and of the Aryan speech. The eastern
steppes and deserts of Mongolia was the region of origin of the Hunnish
or Mongolian or Tartar or Turkish peoples—for all these several peoples
were akin in language, race, and way of life. And as the Nordic
peoples seem to have been continually overflowing their own borders and
pressing south upon the developing civilizations of Mesopotamia and the
Mediterranean coast, so the Hunnish tribes sent their surplus as
wanderers, raiders and conquerors into the settled regions of China.
Periods of plenty in the north would mean an increase in population
there; a shortage of grass, a spell of cattle disease, would drive the
hungry warlike tribesmen south.
For a time there were simultaneously two fairly effective Empires in
the world capable of holding back the barbarians and even forcing
forward the frontiers of the imperial peace. The thrust of the Han
empire from north China into Mongolia was strong and continuous. The
Chinese population welled up over the barrier of the Great Wall.
Behind the imperial frontier guards came the Chinese farmer with horse
and plough, ploughing up the grass lands and enclosing the winter
pasture. The Hunnish peoples raided and murdered the settlers, but the
Chinese punitive expeditions were too much for them. The nomads were
faced with the choice of settling down to the plough and becoming
Chinese tax-payers or shifting in search of fresh summer pastures.
Some took the former course and were absorbed. Some drifted
north-eastward and eastward over the mountain passes down into western
Turkestan.
VASE OF BRONZE FORM, UNGLAZED STONEWARE
VASE OF BRONZE FORM, UNGLAZED STONEWARE
Han Dynasty (B.C. 206 - A.D. 220)
_(In the Victoria and Albert Museum)_
This westward drive of the Mongolian horsemen was going on from 200
B.C. onward. It was producing a westward pressure upon the Aryan
tribes, and these again were pressing upon the Roman frontiers ready to
break through directly there was any weakness apparent. The Parthians,
who were apparently a Scythian people with some Mongolian admixture,
came down to the Euphrates by the first century B.C. They fought
against Pompey the Great in his eastern raid. They defeated and killed
Crassus. They replaced the Seleucid monarchy in Persia by a dynasty of
Parthian kings, the Arsacid dynasty.
CHINESE VESSEL IN BRONZE, IN FORM OF A GOOSE
CHINESE VESSEL IN BRONZE, IN FORM OF A GOOSE
Dating from before the time of Shi-Hwang-ti. Such a piece of work
indicates a high level of comfort and humour
_(In the Victoria and Albert Museum)_
But for a time the line of least resistance for hungry nomads lay
neither to the west nor the east but through central Asia and then
south-eastward through the Khyber Pass into India. It was India which
received the Mongolian drive in these centuries of Roman and Chinese
strength. A series of raiding conquerors poured down through the
Punjab into the great plains to loot and destroy. The empire of Asoka
was broken up, and for a time the history of India passes into
darkness. A certain Kushan dynasty founded by the “Indo- Scythians”—one
of the raiding peoples—ruled for a time over North India and maintained
a certain order. These invasions went on for several centuries. For a
large part of the fifth century A.D. India was afflicted by the
Ephthalites or White Huns, who levied tribute on the small Indian
princes and held India in terror. Every summer these Ephthalites
pastured in western Turkestan, every autumn they came down through the
passes to terrorize India.
In the second century A.D. a great misfortune came upon the Roman and
Chinese empires that probably weakened the resistance of both to
barbarian pressure. This was a pestilence of unexampled virulence. It
raged for eleven years in China and disorganized the social framework
profoundly. The Han dynasty fell, and a new age of division and
confusion began from which China did not fairly recover until the
seventh century A.D. with the coming of the great Tang dynasty.
The infection spread through Asia to Europe. It raged throughout the
Roman Empire from 164 to 180 A.D. It evidently weakened the Roman
imperial fabric very seriously. We begin to hear of depopulation in
the Roman provinces after this, and there was a marked deterioration in
the vigour and efficiency of government. At any rate we presently find
the frontier no longer invulnerable, but giving way first in this place
and then in that. A new Nordic people, the Goths, coming originally
from Gothland in Sweden, had migrated across Russia to the Volga region
and the shores of the Black Sea and taken to the sea and piracy. By
the end of the second century they may have begun to feel the westward
thrust of the Huns. In 247 they crossed the Danube in a great land
raid, and defeated and killed the Emperor Decius in a battle in what is
now Serbia. In 236 another Germanic people, the Franks, had broken
bounds upon the lower Rhine, and the Alemanni had poured into Alsace.
The legions in Gaul beat back their invaders, but the Goths in the
Balkan peninsula raided again and again. The province of Dacia vanished
from Roman history.
A chill had come to the pride and confidence of Rome. In 270-275 Rome,
which had been an open and secure city for three centuries, was
fortified by the Emperor Aurelian.