Linking the Indian, Muslim Caliphates, and the Chinese worlds

On the first day of this spring quarter, you took a virtual field trip to the Asia Society in New York to examine the Tang shipwreck.  Evidence found aboard directly linked 9th century CE Tang China to the Abbasid Empire (Iran, Iraq, and surrounding regions).  Remember the cobalt blue and white pottery or the plate that featured a Persian man illustrated? (Top left hand corner of below picture) The curators concluded that "the objects in the exhibition attest[ed] to the exchange of goods and ideas more than one thousand years ago when Asia was dominated by two great powers: China under the Tang dynasty and the Abbasid Caliphate in West Asia."

We have now closed this (trade) loop by finished our final unit on Roman and Islamic Empires. Neither Song China nor the Abbasid Empire survived Mongol invasion.  Next year, all classes will consider how the innovations in Asia and the Middle East contributed to the resurgence of Western Europe in the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Europe received printing, gunpowder, and the compass from China, as well as the bubonic plague (Black Death), which arrived in Italy in 1347. (Southernization) The Byzantine Empire will fall in 1453, and many of its scholars fled in its final years to Italy, with Greek and Latin manuscripts in tow.

This story will continue in the fall of the 2017-2018 school year . . . . . .