Episode 103: The Classical Era in the East, or “They Built a Great Wall and Made the Huns Pay For It!”

[Music] Welcome back to the Anti-Saturdays podcast, a place for people who wish they had stayed awake in high school. Last episode we talked about classical empires in the Mediterranean. Persia created the perfect imperial model, Greece beat them in a war, Alexander conquered all of the things, and Rome grew from a city-state republic into an empire. If you missed that episode, you should check it out because I'll be referencing some of the stuff that was going on in that half of the world today. This episode I want to focus on India, where we'll meet the most popular Indian leader after Gandhi, and then onto China, where a guy named Shih Huang D basically sets up China to dominate the next one and a half millennia, but gets a bad rap because he kills a few confusions. Finally, we'll figure out how these incredible, powerful classical empires fell. Short answer, the Huns. Don't forget, if you like what I'm doing, please subscribe to my podcast so you'll know in the next episodes around. And if you really like what I'm doing, go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts and give me a review. Alright, enough business. Let's get to history. Today we're going back to the classical era in the East, or as I like to call it, they built a great wall and made the Huns pay for it. This is ANTI-social studies. I'm Emily Glankler, settle in and let's go back in time. Act 1. Thank God for Sanskrit. In episode 1, we were really able to talk much about India because their ancient language still hasn't been deciphered. We don't have a rose at a stone for the Indus Valley like we did for Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mesopotamian Quneiform. But thanks to the Aryan invasion, we now have a written language that we can read called Sanskrit. Briefly, the Aryans just refer to a general linguistic group of Indo-Europeans, these that conquered the Indus Valley came from prehistoric Iran. Some other Aryan groups began migrating westward and also are going to populate Western Europe, we think. These Aryans brought with them to India their language, and they also were nice enough to set up a strict social hierarchy or caste system with themselves on top. How convenient. Obviously, Aryans normally bring to mind Adolf Hitler. The term Aryan became a general term that referred to this Indo-European group that populated Western Europe and Western Asia, and it's sort of right, but it gets distorted. By the 20th century, Aryan just means white, and when they conquered the Indus Valley, they were lighter skinned, which made India's caste system highly racialized, with darker skinned people closer to the bottom. But these ancient Aryans really have no connection to Hitler's master race. Side note, the Swastika was also an ancient Indian symbol, actually for good luck, and it's important in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Over the centuries, it had become a popular symbol found all over the world. There are actually some U.S. infantry divisions that used it as their symbol, before World War II, of course, but the Nazis life-ended with everything ruined it. So, back to the classical era. Since the fall of the Indus Valley and the Aryan conquest, India had been in a time known as the Vedic Age. It's referring to one of the most important texts of Hinduism called the Vedas. Unlike most other religions, Hinduism doesn't have a founding moment. It sort of just evolves over time. It's probably a mixture of the ancient Indus Valley religion and the beliefs of the Aryans who invaded and took over. There were powerful kingdoms scattered across India, but not one overarching empire that controlled the subcontinent until Alexander the Great shows up. The threat of being conquered, again, by a group from the West, provided the motivation for a family to expand its kingdom and eventually control most of India. Note, for most of this season, when I say India, I mean the entire Indian subcontinent, so Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan. This empire is called the Marian Empire, and its most famous ruler is Ashoka. Ashoka was a military commander who used brute force to conquer India. But supposedly after witnessing one of the bloodiest battles in Indian history, he converted to Buddhism and followed his message of peace and enlightenment for the rest of his rule. The Buddha, or Siddharthikautama, had lived in ancient India or modern-day Nepal. Supposedly, he was a wealthy prince who lived a sheltered life. One day, he took a page out of Princess Jasmine's book and left his palace to see the real world. What he saw, death, illness, and poverty shook him to his core, prompting him to leave his entire family behind and become an ascetic, or someone who renounces all possession and lives a life of extreme poverty. That was terrible, so eventually he came to a thing he called the middle way or the middle path between extreme deprivation and his former lavish lifestyle. And this is kind of where Buddhism lives. But back to Ashoka, once he adopts Buddhism, he promotes tolerance and peace across the empire. He builds roads to connect and unify India, and he sets up rest stops and plants shade trees along the way for poor travelers who can't afford a place to stay. He also places pillars around the empire with his edicts carved into them. These mostly proclaim his belief in the Buddhist philosophy of Dharma, this idea is the same in Hinduism, so there's not really much of a conflict here. But his edicts also focus on social and moral concepts, and they replace near-the-rest stops for people to read. One of his big ideas is social welfare for both people and animals, and in general to treat each other well. So pretty nice, huh? Ashoka was probably influenced by his grandfather, Shandra Gupta, Maria, who founded the empire. Supposedly, Shandra Gupta, Maria was orphaned and abandoned at a young age, raised by another pastoral family, and eventually taught and mentored by a famous author. It's pretty humble beginnings for a guy who's going to create one of the largest empires ever in India. But Shandra Gupta, Maria was a Jane, he followed Janeism, which was an incredibly peaceful religion. So it's not such a leap for Ashoka to adopt Buddhism, another religion focused on peace and tolerance. But if I can be cynical for a second, there's another way to understand Ashoka's conversion. It's very possible that he truly saw the violence of his conquest and decided to find another way. But it's also equally possible that once he had conquered India with military force, he saw that he would need a more attractive platform for maintaining power and unity across the places he conquered. Ashoka ruled about 100 years after Alexander the Great, and maybe he learned a thing or two about the difference between building your empire, which is easy if you have a massive military and maintaining that empire, which is way trickier. So maybe Buddhism was a way to promote new policies that would make the people he conquered a little less likely to rebel against him. I don't know. Whenever his motivation, it worked and Ashoka is seen as one of the most successful rulers in all of Indian history. After he dies, the Maria and Empires slowly falls apart and India goes back to being ruled by a variety of princes across the subcontinent. And this is going to happen over and over again in Indian history. There will be relatively brief periods of unity followed by decades or even centuries of decentralized rule. It doesn't mean it's total like anarchy, but it just means that each region or kind of local province has its own system and its own government. And even today, Indian democracy is having problems because they have such a long history of local rule and different customs and languages around the country. But after almost 500 years of decentralized rule, another empire steps in. Their ruler is named Shandra Gupta. Now, if you can pay attention, you realize that this is incredibly confusing because the founder of the earlier, Marian empire was named Shandra Gupta, NoSpace, Maria. This new guy, Shandra, Space, Gupta, was probably named after the founder of the Marian empire, but it drives my students insane that they have to keep track of both of them. So Shandra, Space, Gupta, conquers most of northern India. But he's never able to conquer the whole subcontinent like the Marians were. Although the Gupta empire was never as large as the Marians, it ruled for 200 years of prosperity and growth and it's considered a golden age of Indian achievement. Politically, they divided the empire into provinces that were headed by administrative leaders, thanks Persia, and they had a uniform legal system that was tolerant and just. They exported precious materials like silk, cotton, and spices to other civilizations and they've even developed steel more than 1000 years before the European Industrial Revolution. Epic poetry flourished as did astronomy, astrology, geometry, and trigonometry, all the classes that I hated in high school. Their medicine was incredibly advanced for its time. They had doctors who were skilled in surgery and they inoculated their population against contagious diseases. Painting, sculpture, and architecture were highly developed. They had intricate coins, jewelry, metal sculptures, and other carvings that have been found across the empire. The Gupta empire will eventually decline for the same reasons the other classical empire as well, and more on that later. And Indy is going to go back to decentralized rule until a new group called Muslims come from the West. Act 2. The First Rise of China After the fall of the Zhou dynasty, which we did not talk about at all because I know nothing about them, so don't worry, let's just move on. There was a period of chaos in China known as the Warring States period. It was a period when different states ward. So yep, this is why they pay me the big bucks. Anyway, the most important thing to come out of this period is a variety of ideas about how to stop the chaos. Three main philosophies emerged all with different opinions about how to respond to political chaos. And I'm going to go through each of them because one, they are all incredibly important to Chinese culture forever. And two, it seems like more than a few people out there might be looking for different strategies for coping with political chaos. I'm just saying. Disclaimer, I am not an expert in eastern philosophy, so I'm sorry in advance if I get something wrong. It's really confusing to me and I think a lot of people from the West were just used to much more cut and dry religions. Good and evil. Heaven and hell, that sort of thing. I'm not going to get into all intricacies of their beliefs, but just give you the gist as it relates to politics and world history. The first philosophy is is Taoism. Their advice just stay out of politics completely. These are your friends who skip past the news because it's quote too much, but then spend three hours taking buzzfeed quizzes about which Disney Prince was the hottest, which you don't need a quiz to tell you it's Aladdin. Taoists believe in humility and religious piety. They want you to just accept that there are things about the world that you can't change and focus instead on your own betterment. The Tao means the way, and it is essentially the meaning of life that can only be understood by just living your life according to the way. If you're confused and welcome to the club, in grad school, I had a Chinese history professor who tried to explain it to me. He said, "The Tao is the way. If you have to ask what it is, then you do not know." To which I responded right, I don't know what the Tao is, so I'm asking you. And then he replied, "You can't know it if you have to ask." It's like the who's on first of Chinese philosophy. But for our purposes, Taoism doesn't have a big impact on rulers and empires because by definition, they want you to stay out of it. So leaders in China never have too big of an issue with Taoists because they don't pose a real threat to their power. Confusions, on the other hand, have a very different approach. Confucius lived during the Warring States period and he believed that the only way to prevent the chaos he saw around him was to install leaders who had been thoroughly educated in ethics and morality. Confucius envisioned a massive bureaucracy. And at this point, bureaucracy does not have the negative connotation that we have today. Like, it's not your experience at the DMV. It's actually a really effective way to set up your empire. But Confucius envisioned a massive bureaucracy made up of scholars that would run the government. To enter the government even at the lowest level, you would have to pass a rigorous exam on Confucian values. These Confucian values were things like filial piety, which means to honor your father. Basically, Confucius believed that everyone has a place in society and that peace would come if everyone just knew their place and stayed there. You could find out your place by understanding the five basic relationships. So they're one ruler to ruled, then father to son, husband to wife, older brother to younger brother, and friend to friend. The second person in each of these pairs is supposed to subordinate themselves to the former. So if everyone submits themselves to the ruler, then things will be OK. Remember, this is assuming that the ruler is a Confucian scholar and acts ethically. This system is highly restrictive, especially for the people who are supposed to subordinate themselves to their superiors, like women, for example. But it does work to bring order to a chaotic China eventually. But Confucianism won't actually get adopted as the governing philosophy until almost 700 years after Confucius's death. We'll get there today. Finally, there were other philosophers who thought the Daoists and Confucians were too soft. They believed that the only way to establish order was through an autocracy where the ruler had complete power over the people. Essentially, where Confucians believe that people are inherently good and just and just need to be taught, these philosophers believe people were bad and would always make terrible decisions if they are left alone. And this is legalism. Strict laws and punishments are the only thing that will keep people in line. To be clear, Confucians also believed in laws, but ultimately, they believe the best motivation for people to act good was to educate them and use essentially peer pressure through the five basic relationships. The basic question here is which motivates you to do the right thing, respect or fear. Confucians believe that a ruler who's respected will maintain order, while legalists believe that fear is the ultimate motivator for humans. Needless to say, legalists are not nearly as popular, but they get stuff done. [MUSIC PLAYING] This is where a guy named Shikwondi enters the story. He is easily the most important person in Chinese history until maybe Mao Zedong, but only time will tell. And his legacy is similarly muddled. Shikwondi emerged victorious from the Warring States period and he established the Qing dynasty. It spelled Q-i-n and is pronounced Qing. I mean, it's where China gets its name. And Shikwondi becomes the first emperor of China before then they just been ruled by kings. He sets up systems that are going to unite China for the next 2,000 years and yet his dynasty only lasts 15 years. 15 years. Keep that in mind as we talk about all the things he was able to get done. Dictatorships are bad for a lot of reasons, but you can't argue that they're inefficient. The main thing Shikwondi does is use legalist ideas to forcefully unite China. He standardizes everything, the written language, currency, the legal system, weights and measurements. He proclaims that all roads across China have to be the same width to match his standard length for cart axles so that trade could be more efficient since you wouldn't have to keep switching carts or going off the road. This guy was type A to the max and I kind of love it. He also begins the all-important infrastructure project of the Great Wall. This structure will mostly keep out nomadic invaders from the North for 1,000 years until the Mongols, who basically do everything that no one else was able to do up until that point, but we'll get to them later. So why does the Qing Dynasty not last? Well, 300,000 peasants and convicts were forced to go to the North to build the Wall and a lot of them died. Sometimes when they died, their bodies would be put into the Wall to save a few bricks. So there's that. He also fought threatened by Confucian scholars who opposed his rule. And he tried to purge other traditional ideas by burning books and killing scholars. From the beginning of his rule, Shi Huangdi was obsessed with death, specifically avoiding it at all costs. He sent some Taoist alchemists with 1,000 people out to travel China looking for the elixir of life. They never returned and legend says that they found Japan and it said settled there and colonized it. Shi Huangdi tried ingesting a lot of different substances that he hoped would give him eternal life, including Jade and molten gold. A lot of these substances were nealous, say toxic and it's probably the reason he died. Ah, irony. Shi Huangdi was buried in a massive underground tomb filled with thousands of terracotta soldiers, chariots, and horses. It's believed that his tomb also had rivers and mercury. Another substance believed to be the elixir of life. But even though these terrible things happened, you have to keep in mind the way that history was written. Shi Huangdi was so busy setting up China, they didn't get the chance to write a lot of his own version of events. And he was overthrown before he could get to it. So his successors, the Han Dynasty, which was governed by Confucian scholars, got to tell us about the Chi Dynasty. And they were slightly miffed about the whole burying scholars alive episode. And so they were less than nice when they wrote about Shi Huangdi's legacy. Keep in mind too, that every dynasty that comes in has to claim that the dynasty before it had lost its mandate of heaven. Remember this from the first episode. And so in order to justify this, we normally get really skewed versions of history where the new dynasty really talks down about the old dynasty to make it seem like their rule is so much better and more justified. But good or bad, Shi Huangdi was important. And China owes a lot to what he did in unifying the country. Whereas India is going to have long stretches of essentially anarchy between empires, China is stable and relatively unified even during periods of diagnostic change. And I think a lot of that is because of Shi Huangdi. Besides the Qing, the other dynasty that has contributed the most to China's identity is its successor, the Han Dynasty. After overthrown the Qing, they instituted Confucianism as its governing philosophy. It's important to note that they kept most of what Shi Huangdi did, including a lot of his strict laws. But they basically put Confucianism on top of these legalist institutions to provide a nicer justification for their rule. It looked better. So people were supposed to do the right thing because of ethics. But just in case they don't, there were still pretty strict punishments. This continues sort of up until today in China. The Han Dynasty is considered a golden age in Chinese history. Notice that the classical era is littered with golden ages, the Greeks, Romans, Persians, Gupta, and now the Han. While the Qing only lasted 15 years, the Han lasts for 400. They created an imperial university, the Teach Confucianism, by the year 2 CE, which I just think it's hilarious to think about there being a year 2, but anyway. There were 30,000 students there at this university studying Confucius' writings. And this provided a steady pool of educated applicants to work in the government's administration, which provided stability even during times of chaos at the top. And there was chaos at the top. For example, after the death of the first Han Emperor, his wife, Empress Lu Ji, tried to take control by murdering a few of his sons by other women. She also murdered and mutilated the Emperor's preferred mistress, who pay attention here, also happened to be her mother. What? What? So she dumped her mom's body into a toilet and left it there to show off to visitors. Whoa. Eventually, she was killed, but these types of interfamily power struggles happened constantly during the dynasty. But Confucianism provided a philosophical thread that kept China united. The Emperor's court was typically administered by a scholarly class of men who served close to the leader in order to keep them from becoming a threat to the Dynastic Succession, though they were unix. So it was a pretty big price to pay for influence. One of the Emperor's unix is credited with inventing paper around 100 CE. It's like that sign-fold episode where George stops having sex and all of a sudden suddenly gets really smart. Who knew 90 sitcoms were so steeped in classical Chinese history? It was during the Han dynasty that the Silk Road gets firmly established. Originally, it was established to begin trading with Afghanistan, which was controlled by one of the descendants of Alexander the Great's generals. Eventually, it stretches all the way to Rome, and it establishes China and India as destinations for luxury goods like silk, paper, and spices. The Han dynasty existed at the same time as the Roman Empire. For example, the Confucian University got established around the same time Augustus became Emperor. But the Han dynasty fell 200 years before Rome. But it's no coincidence that their fall coincides with the end of the Pax Romana and the beginning of their decline. So if all of these empires were so great, then let's take a look at what had to happen to cause them to fall. (soft music) (upbeat music) Act three, all good things must come to an end. Fortunately for us, but bad for them, most of the classical empires decline for very similar reasons. This makes it relatively easy to study if we're willing to oversimplify a bit and by a bit I mean a lot. And I am always in favor of oversimplification to make history slightly more palatable. We can generalize the reasons for their decline into three main categories. First, they overextended their boundaries. Essentially the classical empires were too big for too long. At it's height, the size of the Roman Empire was about two million square miles with 120 million people in its borders. And yeah, that's about half the size of the US today, but that's an enormous amount of land in people to control with the technology they were working with at the time. Remember, the Romans had set the precedent of paying their soldiers in land. This started a dangerous cycle where they would conquer land to pay their soldiers, but then they would need more soldiers to defend the new land and so on and so forth. Also, they started outsourcing their army to other non-Roman groups who don't care about allegiance to Rome at all, bad idea. Yadda, yadda, yadda, they fall. There were also a lot of internal disputes that caused problems. Most of these empires ruled a diverse population that became more diverse every day that they grew. It's hard to keep people united under your rule if they don't identify with you and your culture. And in a lot of these empires, they were a little restrictive on who could become a citizen. And the capital cities and these empires were really far from most people that lived in the empire. So over time, the leaders became more concerned with power struggles in the capital and became less and less connected to the people they ruled. I mean, 30 to 40 different Roman emperors were assassinated, for example. Over time, the people in the empire, many of which were not considered citizens and didn't get all the same rights, grew tired of a bunch of rich politicians arguing over petty issues instead of governing. I'm sure you'll know how that feels. Finally, outside groups started showing up at the borders everywhere. You see, there was this group of highly skilled warrior nomads in northern Eurasia called the Huns. Under the leadership of people like Attila, they started spreading out of the Eurasian step and into everyone else's business. They started invading the Gupta Empire in India and the Han Dynasty in China. Everybody, let's get down to business, to defeat the Huns. And they started pushing other groups in Eastern Europe into the Roman Empire. These people generally referred to as Germanic people entered the Roman Empire increasing numbers. Some were essentially refugees that had just been pushed out of their own land, but others were invading groups who wanted to take advantage of the chaos in the cities. Finally, remember that because of things like the Silk Road, these classical empires were interconnected. So when one starts to experience problems, there's a domino effect that creates issues everywhere. When the Han Dynasty falls, the Silk Road sort of falls apart. It doesn't stop existing, but it's way more of a wild west than it was during the classical era. It's going to be re-unified as a Silk Road 2.0. Next era, thanks to the Mongols. All of these factors, plus problems like environmental disasters and lead pipes, they led to the decline of the classical empires. And I keep saying fall, but really, it's important that we understand that they declined. It might seem trivial, but very few civilizations actually fall suddenly. Most have a period of decline the last decades or even centuries. And the people living in that period of decline don't know their declining. It's not like the Romans walked outside one day and the call was seen was suddenly in ruins. It was gradual, and so it wasn't always taken seriously. It's at this point in my class that I get some worried looks for my students who seem to think that I'm implying that we might one day fall. And I comfort them by telling them that, yeah, we 100% will one day fall. And it's arrogant to think that we would be the only civilization ever to avoid that fate. Wait, is that not comforting? Sorry. But historians take the long view and are often burdened by this super depressing truth that everyone else avoids. My mom shared a cartoon with me once that said, people who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it. And historians are doomed to watch it happen. It was funny until it wasn't. In order to avoid leaving all on that note, let's talk briefly about why some of these regions were better able to say unified even in the power vacuum that opens up when these empires fall. China and India, for example, maintain way more cultural unity, even in periods of chaos than Europe does. We'll get to it next time, but Western Europe loses its mind when Rome falls. But China and India have some stability and are able to pick back up with other empires and dynasties later. So why didn't Europe stay Europe like China stayed China? Why does it fall apart in the various kingdoms that will never be reunited? Ethel, if you aren't familiar with Ethel, I suggest you go back and listen, episode one. Ethel has a theory that I like. She proposes that China and India had religions or philosophies that had been well established for centuries, like 700 plus years. And these helped keep the people together even when the leadership fell. But Christianity had only arrived on the scene a few hundred years before Rome fell and it didn't even become the official religion of Western Europe until around 320 CE, just 150 years before the final sacking of Rome. It's a cool theory that makes sense to me, but who knows? So by the end of the classical era, the Mediterranean region has an enormous power vacuum after the fall of Rome and there isn't a lot of longstanding cultural unity that helps them stay together and weather the storm. Meanwhile, Indian China are well accustomed to periods of chaos, whether it be localized rule or warring states and their belief systems of Hinduism and Confucianism will make it easier to remain united even when new powers step in. And a new power is going to rise in the east in a trading city called Mecca. But first, we'll move into the post-Coscal era in the West, often called the Medieval Era in European history. We'll see it all, moats, chariot racing riots, torture devices, and a little piece of paper called the Magna Carta. To be continued. (upbeat music) For notes, pictures of some of the things I mentioned, links to sources and other fun stuff, check out the podcast appendix page at www.antisertialstudies.org. Join me next time on antisocial studies as we explore the post-Coscal era in the West, or that time, your up lost its mind. And don't forget, if you like what I'm doing, please subscribe to my podcast, so you will know in the next episode there are. And if you really like what I'm doing, then go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast and give me a review. Thank you so much, and I'll be honest. (upbeat music)