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World History 1

<OpenstaxParagraph>
	<OpenstaxTerm>India</OpenstaxTerm>, usually referred to as South Asia, shares the Asian subcontinent, culture, and history with several countries in the modern period, including Pakistan and Bangladesh. Before the Middle Ages, two powerful religious and philosophical traditions emerged there, <OpenstaxTerm>Hinduism</OpenstaxTerm> and Buddhism, the latter spreading by traveling merchants via the Silk Roads, both overland and overseas.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	In the fourth century BCE, <OpenstaxTerm>Alexander the Great</OpenstaxTerm>, his army, and his people came to what is today Afghanistan and the region of the Hindu Kush. Although they did not remain there, for the next three centuries this Hellenistic Seleucid kingdom continued to trade with India and spread Greek ideas. The arrival of Alexander’s army in the region was a crucial step in the process of bringing the Afro-Eurasian world closer together. Long-distance travel in this period was still arduous and undertaken primarily by merchants, but important cultural shifts were beginning. Although Alexander’s death shortly after his Indian campaigns meant that neither he nor his successors came to rule over this part of the world, disparate and previously separate cultures and peoples began sharing material goods, technologies, and ideas in ways that only continued as the centuries passed. This change was accelerated by the rise of the <OpenstaxTerm>Mauryan Empire</OpenstaxTerm>, the first major kingdom to dominate the Asian subcontinent. The Mauryan Empire was founded by Chandragupta Maurya in 322 BCE and lasted until around 185 BCE. During that time, the region saw great intellectual developments, such as the implementation of place value in numbers and the addition of zero to the numbering system, while long-distance trade continued to expand and widen the spread of these new ideas and concepts.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	While India experienced a time of unity and great success during the Mauryan age, the subcontinent again broke into separate kingdoms following invasions by the <OpenstaxTerm>White Huns</OpenstaxTerm>, which fatally weakened the empire. One of the more stable regimes to emerge in this period was the northern kingdom of <OpenstaxTerm>Thanesar</OpenstaxTerm>, under its Buddhist ruler <OpenstaxTerm>Harsha</OpenstaxTerm> Vardhana, whose reign lasted from 606 to 647 CE. We know a great deal about Harsha thanks to contemporary accounts by the Indian poet <OpenstaxTerm>Bana</OpenstaxTerm> and the Chinese Buddhist monk <OpenstaxTerm>Xuan Zang</OpenstaxTerm>. According to both, Buddhism had penetrated the region surrounding Thanesar to a considerable degree, despite the Guptas’ earlier favoring of Hinduism. It was also clear, though, that Buddhism had declined as a result of Gupta neglect because its monasteries throughout India were in a state of disrepair. Still, Xuan Zang found Harsha’s kingdom well run, wealthy, and justly administered. As far as the monk was concerned, Thanesar was a model state. It did not outlive its king by many years, however. Soon after Harsha’s death, the Arab advance that began in the early part of his reign had become a wave that, in the early eighth century, swept across northern India.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	In the early seventh century, the new religion of Islam had begun to expand, encompassing <OpenstaxTerm>Arabia</OpenstaxTerm> and soon spreading even farther. By 659, Muslim forces were advancing eastward and clashed with the rulers of <OpenstaxTerm>Sindh</OpenstaxTerm> in modern-day Pakistan; by the early eighth century, armies of the <OpenstaxTerm>Umayyad</OpenstaxTerm> Islamic state had conquered the region. Under increasing pressure from foreign invaders, India splintered into rival principalities ruled by independent rajas, or princes. These kingdoms, which extended from the Indus River valley in northwestern India to the Ganges River in the northeast, flourished for a time. However, long centuries of fending off invasions by Islamized Turkic warlords from central Asia had taken their toll.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	The career of <OpenstaxTerm>Mahmud</OpenstaxTerm> of Ghazna is a good example of these developments. The son of a Turkic mamluk, or military slave, who ruled from 998 to 1030, Mahmud was intent on developing his region as an important Islamic state and launched dozens of campaigns against the princes of northern India from his base in Afghanistan. The onslaught was quite successful, for by the twelfth century, the Muslim <OpenstaxTerm>Ghaznavid</OpenstaxTerm> dynasty ruled an area that stretched from the Aral Sea in the north to Lahore in the east and encompassed the vital Silk Roads conduit of Khurasan in the southwest (<a href="#fig-00001">Figure 12.3</a>). The Muslim advance did not end with the establishment of the Ghaznavid state, however. Wars raged across northern India, and by the end of the twelfth century, the remaining independent Indian princes had become fatally weakened. Vulnerable to conquest, the kingdoms of the rajas collapsed.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxFigure id="fig-00001" src="https://openstax.org/apps/archive/20240226.174525/resources/24260605efe3f15ed38b801ee2f3fe187b113f6e" alt="A map is shown. Green areas with some white and brown bumpy regions are shown in an upside down “U” shape with blue in the lower middle. In the middle, a large area is highlighted in gold and labelled “Ghaznavid Empire.” Within this area, these cities are labelled with black dots, from west to east: Teheran, Ispahan, Nishapur, Merv, Herat, Zaranj, Balkh, Ghazni, Kabut, and Lahore. These cities are labelled with a white and black dot: Somnath, Mathura, and Kannauj. The city of Shiraz is labelled outside this highlighted area in the west, and Urgench, Bukhara, and Samarcanda are labelled in the north. All three are labelled with a black and white dot." mediaType="image/jpg" width="1100" height="842" />
<OpenstaxFigureText width="1100">
	<strong>Figure 12.3</strong> At its height, the Ghaznavid Empire encompassed a vast swath of central Asia and included parts of modern Iran, Afghanistan, and the historical region of Turkestan. With several vital trade centers such as Samarkand and Merv, the state for a time played a key role in maintaining Silk Roads connections between the East and West. (credit: “Map of the Ghaznavid Empire” by Unknown, created in DEMIS World Map Server/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
</OpenstaxFigureText>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	In the twelfth century, a new line of Turkic invaders arose in present-day Afghanistan, led by <OpenstaxTerm>Muhammad of Ghur</OpenstaxTerm> (Ghur was an especially important town in the region). A Persian ruler subject to the Ghaznavids, Muhammad declared his independence from Ghazna and conquered most of the lands of his former lords. In 1192, his forces defeated an army of some 100,000 <OpenstaxTerm>Rajputs</OpenstaxTerm>, considered Hindu India’s most ferocious warriors, in one of the most violent engagements of his increasingly bloody career. The crowning achievement of Muhammad’s campaigns was establishing a Muslim state at Delhi, deep in the heart of northern India. It endured as the <OpenstaxTerm>Delhi Sultanate</OpenstaxTerm> for more than three centuries (1206–1526), during which time it was the center of Islamic India (<a href="#fig-00002">Figure 12.4</a>).
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxFigure id="fig-00002" src="https://openstax.org/apps/archive/20240226.174525/resources/1149ec286f5085ba0efcb0fb26e1f118c677c8d8" alt="A map is shown. Land is highlighted beige and water blue. In the southwest, the Arabian Sea is labelled, and in the southeast the Bay of Bengal is labelled. The top half of the map is land and an upside down triangle shaped mass sticks out in the lower half. Most of this land is highlighted orange except for a “U” shaped section at the southern tip and a circle section in the east. These cities are labelled within the orange area, from north to south: Lahore, Delhi, Ahmadabad, Bombay, Daulatabad, Goa, Madras, and Tranquebar. Along the southwestern coast, Calicut and Cochin are labelled outside of the orange area." mediaType="image/jpg" width="901" height="822" />
<OpenstaxFigureText width="901">
	<strong>Figure 12.4</strong> The orange shading shows the Delhi Sultanate in 1330, at its greatest extent. Its size allowed it to control much of the Indian Ocean trade on the western side of the subcontinent. However, the absence of larger cities in the center and south-center of the subcontinent meant that Indigenous peoples there were less likely to come into contact with Islam and its practitioners, so this region was not under the control of an Islamic state. (attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY 4.0 license)
</OpenstaxFigureText>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	Thus, through a series of invasions over the course of some five hundred years, Arab and then Turkic invaders made their way into northern India, bringing <OpenstaxTerm>Islam</OpenstaxTerm> and stimulating political integration in the process. Because the minority Muslim rulers did not enforce cultural homogeneity, the invasions also strengthened the cultural diversity that was already a hallmark of Indian social order. For example, the Islamic rulers of the sultanate gave Hindu subjects the status of <OpenstaxEm>dhimmis</OpenstaxEm>, which protected their rights as non-Muslims, although they still had to pay the special tax, the <OpenstaxEm>jizya</OpenstaxEm>, placed on non-believers. The sultans of Delhi often employed Hindu laborers on construction projects such as the building of mosques, which led Muslims to integrate certain forms of Hindu symbolism and motifs such as trees and plant life into the structures. In the fourteenth century, Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq expanded and even encouraged Hindu religious freedom, himself participating in Holi, the annual celebration of spring, while he allowed Hindu pilgrimages to the Ganges River, Hinduism’s holiest site.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	Before the arrival of Islam in South Asia, <OpenstaxTerm>Hinduism</OpenstaxTerm> was the dominant religion in the subcontinent. The result of a synthesis of beliefs that occurred after the <OpenstaxTerm>Vedic</OpenstaxTerm> period of Ancient <OpenstaxTerm>India</OpenstaxTerm> (c. 1500–500 BCE) and a response to Buddhism’s commercial and urban influence, Hinduism developed a philosophy and belief system more widely accessible to the rural and agrarian peoples of India. An elaborate universe of Hindu deities was also established that included divinities from other religions, widening Hinduism’s accessibility and appeal. Perhaps most importantly, Hinduism stressed personal devotion to a particular deity to obtain a truly individualized religious experience.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	The Muslim <OpenstaxTerm>Turks</OpenstaxTerm> who arrived in India in the twelfth century recognized the Hindus as a protected people, allowing them to practice their own religious traditions and govern individual territories so long as they paid taxes and tribute. Buddhists, however, were not given the same measures of religious freedom, although it is not clear why. They were forced to flee or be executed, and many went to areas of Southeast Asia, Nepal, or Tibet, where <OpenstaxTerm>Buddhism</OpenstaxTerm> remains a major religion today. Over time, in the northern areas of the Indian subcontinent, which include modern Pakistan and Bangladesh, many Hindus converted to Islam, which then became the majority religion of the region. In the <OpenstaxTerm>Vijanagar Empire</OpenstaxTerm> in southern India, on the other hand, far fewer conversions took place, perhaps due to its distance from the centers of Islam.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	In 1221, the province of Khurasan, which had invaded the Punjab in the tenth century, was itself invaded by the <OpenstaxTerm>Mongols</OpenstaxTerm> from China, led by <OpenstaxTerm>Chinggis Khan</OpenstaxTerm> (often referred to as “Genghis Khan” in the West). The Mongols then turned their attention to the Delhi Sultanate, which managed to successfully weather an attempted Mongol invasion in 1222. Over the next several decades, northern India experienced a series of invasions accompanying renewed Mongol expansion. Although most were repelled, countless Muslims were displaced and resettled on sultanate lands deeper in the subcontinent’s interior.
</OpenstaxParagraph>

12.1.1 South Asia in the Early Middle Ages

1 Understanding the Past

1.1 Developing a Global Perspective

1.1.1 World History as Preparation for Life after College

1.1.2 World History and Global Citizenship

1.1.3 Features of This Textbook

1.2 Primary Sources

1.2.1 Learning to Evaluate Documents and Images

1.2.2 Documentary Sources: Competing Narratives

1.2.3 Textual Sources: The Importance of Language

1.2.4 Hidden in History

1.3 Causation and Interpretation in History

1.3.1 Levels of Causation

1.3.2 Interpretation in History

2 Early Humans

2.1 Early Human Evolution and Migration

2.1.1 Human Evolution

2.1.2 Why Did Humans Move and Where Did They Go?

2.1.3 Early Human Technologies

2.2 People in the Paleolithic Age

2.2.1 Ice, Ice, and More Ice

2.2.2 Life in the Paleolithic Age

2.2.3 Diverse Paleolithic Peoples

2.3 The Neolithic Revolution

2.3.1 The Development of Agriculture

2.3.2 How Farming Changed the Human Experience

2.3.3 Neolithic Peoples

3 Early Civilizations and Urban Societies

3.1 Early Civilizations

3.1.1 Attributes of Early Civilizations

3.1.2 The First Urban Societies

3.2 Ancient Mesopotamia

3.2.1 The Rise and Eclipse of Sumer

3.2.2 The Rise of the World’s First Empire

3.2.3 Later Empires in Mesopotamia

3.2.4 Society and Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia

3.3 Ancient Egypt

3.3.1 The Origins of Ancient Egypt

3.3.2 The Age of Pyramid Building

3.3.3 A Second Age of Egyptian Greatness

3.4 The Indus Valley Civilization

3.4.1 The Origins of the Indus Valley Civilization

3.4.2 Trade, Writing, and Religion

3.4.3 The Era of Decline

4 The Near East

4.1 From Old Babylon to the Medes

4.1.1 Power Politics in the Near East

4.1.2 Foreign Affairs and Trade

4.1.3 Daily Life and the Family in the Near East

4.2 Egypt’s New Kingdom

4.2.1 The Hyksos in Egypt

4.2.2 The Pharaohs of the New Kingdom

4.2.3 Egypt’s Foreign Policy

4.3 The Persian Empire

4.3.1 The Rise of Persia

4.3.2 Darius I and the Reorganization of the Empire

4.3.3 Persian Culture and Daily Life

4.4 The Hebrews

4.4.1 The History of the Hebrews

4.4.2 The Culture of the Hebrews

5 Asia in Ancient Times

5.1 Ancient China

5.1.1 Prehistoric China

5.1.2 Early Dynastic China

5.1.3 The Zhou Dynasty

5.1.4 The Warring States Era and Qin Unification

5.2 The Steppes

5.2.1 The Nomadic Culture of the Steppes

5.2.2 Tribes, Confederations, and Settled Neighbors

5.3 Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia

5.3.1 Ancient Korea

5.3.2 Ancient Japan

5.4 Vedic India to the Fall of the Maurya Empire

5.4.1 Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro

5.4.2 The Aryans and Brahmanism

5.4.3 Buddhism

5.4.4 The Mauryan Empire

5.4.5 The Gupta Dynasty

6 Mediterranean Peoples

6.1 Early Mediterranean Peoples

6.1.1 The Late Bronze Age World

6.1.2 Phoenicians, Greeks, and Etruscans

6.2 Ancient Greece

6.2.1 Archaic Greece

6.2.2 Sparta and Athens

6.2.3 Classical Greece

6.3 The Hellenistic Era

6.3.1 The Kingdom of Macedon

6.3.2 Hellenistic Culture

6.4 The Roman Republic

6.4.1 The Foundation and Function of the Roman Republic

6.4.2 The Expansion of the Roman Republic

6.5 The Age of Augustus

6.5.1 The First Triumvirate

6.5.2 From Republic to Principate

7 Experiencing the Roman Empire

7.1 The Daily Life of a Roman Family

7.1.1 The Structure of Roman Families

7.1.2 A Day in the Life of a Roman Family

7.1.3 What Family Meant in Rome