That's the title of a valuable Wikipedia article. I have no idea who wrote it, but I'm very glad to have access to this comprehensive article, since it touches on so many topics that concern my ongoing research.
Here are some highlights:
Before British colonisation, the Persian language was the lingua franca of the Indian subcontinent and a widely used official language in the northern India. The language was brought into South Asia by various Turkics and Afghans and was preserved and patronized by local Indian dynasties from the 11th century, such as Ghaznavids, Sayyid dynasty, Tughlaq dynasty, Khilji dynasty, Mughal dynasty, Gujarat sultanate, and Bengal sultanate. Initially it was used by Muslim dynasties of India but later started being used by non-Muslim empires too. For example, the Sikh Empire, Persian held official status in the court and the administration within these empires. It largely replaced Sanskrit as the language of politics, literature, education, and social status in the subcontinent.
This will be a long post because it brings together much newly accumulated historical, archeological, and linguistic research that has the potential to change our conception of the course of development of medieval Eurasian civilization.
We begin with a pathbreaking article by Neil Price:
Vikings on the Silk Roads:
The Norse ravaged much of Europe for centuries. They were also cosmopolitan explorers who followed trade winds into the Far East
Neil Price, Aeon (5/5/25)
This article has a significant amount of valuable information that did not make it into the recent blockbuster British Museum exhibition "Silk Roads" (9/26/24-2/23/25) and its accompanying catalog of the same title (British Museum, 2024), edited by Sue Brunning, Luk Yu-ping, Elisabeth R. O'Connell, and Tim Williams at the end of last year and beginning of this year. There was also a two-day international conference on "Contacts and exchanges across Afro-Eurasia, AD 500–1000" (12/5/24-12/6/24), at which I delivered the concluding remarks.
Price's article begins:
In the middle of the 9th century, in an office somewhere in the Jibāl region of what is now western Iran, a man is dictating to a scribe. It is the 840s of the Common Era, though the people in this eastern province of the great Caliphate of the ’Abbāsids – an Islamic superpower with its capital in Baghdad – live by the Hijri calendar. The man’s name is Abu ’l-Qāsim ʿUbayd Allāh b ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Khurradādhbih, and he is the director of posts and police for this region.
For the past week, I have been preparing a major post on Middle Iranian and associated peoples who transited and traded across Eurasia during the Middle Ages, so it was fortuitous that I received the following photograph from Hiroshi Kumamoto:
If we take stock of the sinographic cosmopolis at the end of first quarter of the 21st century, it is evident that it is increasingly moribund. Vietnam has jettisoned chữ Hán for the Latin alphabet; North Korea has switched exclusively to hangul; South Korea now uses very few hanja; the Japanese script currently consists of draconically limited kanji, many of which are simplified, often in ways that are different from the simplified characters adopted by the PRC, plus two types of syllabaries and roman letters; the PRC itself now uses radically simplified and limited characters and the Latin alphabet, not to mention that all of the hundreds of millions of students in China learn English, which is a primary index of success for rising in the world of education, and entering sinographs into computers and other digital devices is overwhelmingly accomplished through the alphabet (with resultant amnesia eroding the characters they do learn); while the ephemeral Sinoform scripts of Inner Asia (Tangut, Jurchen, Khitan) disappeared around a millennium ago; Sinitic Dungan speakers write their language in Cyrillic…. For those who are advocates of the sinographic script, naturally all of this would be cause for alarm.
In the first part of this inquiry, I stressed the connection between Mesopotamian and Indus Valley (IV) civilizations. My aim was to provide support for a scriptal and lingual link between the undeciphered IV writing system and the well-known languages and writing systems of Mesopotamia (MP), which tellingly is translated as liǎng hé liúyù 兩河流域 ("valley / drainage basin of two rivers") in contemporary Sinitic. The point is to detach IV from IE, which is a red herring and a detraction from productive efforts to decipher the IV script. If we concentrate on the civilization, languages, and writing systems of MP, it should be easier to crack the IV code.
Jean Nota Bene, the biggest French YouTuber (millions of followers) on historical subjects, recently focused on the Kushans. He follows many of the same themes that we do on Language Log and Sino-Platonic Papers (including Greek-Indian-Chinese associations), so many readers of this post will be interested in what he has to say about the Kushan Empire (ca. 30–ca. 375 AD). Although Nota Bene speaks in French, I think readers will be able to glean a lot of valuable information on this subject. Plus his presentation is richly illustrated, so watch carefully and pause the video if you want to take a closer look.
"Cultural Nuances in Subtitling the Religious Discourse Marker Wallah in Jordanian Drama into English." Al Salem, Mohd Nour et al. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12, no. 1 (March 6, 2025). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04515-6.
The merging of peoples, cultures, and languages at the heart of Eurasia
The Iron Gates (Darband), a 3-kilometer (1.9 mi) mountain pass that separated the Indo-Greek kingdoms from Central Asian nomads. The Graeco-Bactrian ruler Euthydemus (230–200 BC) built a great wall there to protect the kingdom. c. 130 BC a nomadic people, the Yuezhi, invaded Bactria swarmed the kingdom, and killed its last ruler.
The Iron Gates (Darband), a 3-kilometer (1.9 mi) mountain pass that separated the Indo-Greek kingdoms from Central Asian nomads. The Graeco-Bactrian ruler Euthydemus (230–200 BC) built a great wall there to protect the kingdom. c. 130 BC a nomadic people, the Yuezhi, invaded… pic.twitter.com/KZkVlVLory
Above is the cover of John DeFrancis's magnum opus, Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1989). It has a stunning illustration consisting of the phonetic representation of the first six words of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address transcribed as follows: acoustic wave graph of the voice of William S.-Y. Wang, IPA, roman letters, Cyrillic, devanagari, hangul, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Arabic, katakana, Yi (Lolo, Nuosu, etc.), cuneiform, and sinographs (a fuller version of the cover illustration may be found on the frontispiece [facing the title page] and there is a generous explanation on pp. 248-251).
ABSTRACT: This paper comparatively examines the propaganda of the first emperors of China and Rome, Qin Shi Huangdi and Augustus. Focusing on the interplay between divine support and claims of world conquest and utilising the Qin stelae and the Res Gestae Divi Augusti as case studies, this paper will argue that both early imperial Chinese and Roman propaganda shared extremely similar rationales and methods. Divine support and military victories were intimately linked and mutually dependent. As such, the emperors' claims to unprecedented levels of divine support also impelled them to claim successful world conquest, lest the very ideological foundations of their regimes be called into question.
Dr. Hu Shih (1891-1962) was arguably the greatest Chinese scholar of the 20th century, for whom I have the utmost respect. He and I thought alike on a number of important subjects: language, literature, and script reform, philosophy (we both were attracted to the utilitarian-pragmatist-logician and defensive strategist Mo Zi [c. 470 -c.391 BC]), recognition of the great influence of Indian civilization upon Chinese culture, dedication to public service and education, devotion to democracy, and so forth. Overall, the only other 20th-century thinker and writer who could compete / compare with Hu Shih was Lu Xun (1881-1936), but the latter came from the left, whereas Hu Shih came from the right. I admired them both.
Even when I was a child, I was never a theist, and I stopped going to church when I went to college and my mother wasn't around to urge me to do so. Likewise, I suspected that Hu Shih, being a Confucian minded Chinese intellectual, was not a theist either. So it was quite a surprise when the following notice from the Hu Shih Memorial Hall in Taipei came to my attention:
This is a phrase that has been sweeping through China during recent months. In Chinese it is "lìshǐ de lājī shíjiān 历史的垃圾时间". The expression "lājī shíjiān 垃圾时间" started out in sports to characterize a situation where one side has such a commanding lead that it would be impossible for the other team to catch up. It's a foregone conclusion who is going to win, so the leading team can do what is called "play out the clock", putting in second- and third-string players to give them experience. Furthermore, it would be considered unsportsmanlike to pile up the score against the losing team.
The expression "lājī shíjiān 垃圾时间" was only applied to historical analysis when essayist Hu Wenhui coined the fuller phrase "lìshǐ de lājī shíjiān 历史的垃圾时间" in a 2023 WeChat post.
