Episode 84: Trans-Saharan Trade

Synopsis

We talked about trade moving across Asia and into Europe, but what about trade going North–South? Like the Silk Road, there was a lot of Trans-Saharan trade going back a long time. Goods like salt, ivory, gold, beads, and metal goods–as well as enslaved people–crossed hostile conditions to travel from as far south as Ghana and Mali to northern Africa and the Middle East, and from there into Europe. Join Em and Jesse as they discuss these lesser-known but incredibly interesting routes.

Notes

1/ The Ever Given: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ever_Given (yeah, we recorded this a while ago).

2/ Ducks: The Friendly Floatees Spill! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_Floatees_spill 

3/ John Oliver talks about trucks and waiting! (Start at the 5 minute mark.)

4/ Sacha Baron Cohen turned out to be a terrible person. Surprising? Not really.

5/ Nintendo was originally founded in 1889. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo 

6/ Cannabis discovered in Chinese tombs

7/ Chinese coins in England

8/ Shoshonean Prayerstone Hypothesis 

9/ History of the De Beers Corp: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~lcabral/teaching/debeers3.pdf

10/ History of diamond advertising: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-you-ever-tried-to-sell-a-diamond/304575/

11/ Somehow over the past two years since we recorded this, the salt/salary thing turned into a throwaway line in Em’s new novel Troth. Never say I don’t learn nothin’ from this.

Old Silk Road, Take Me Home

Synopsis

The Silk Road spanned four thousand years and lasted for centuries–it’s hard to think of anything comparable in scale. From the second century BCE until the mid-15th century, jade, silk, tea, horses, the plague, and more flowed across the Eurasian continent. Join Em and Jesse as they talk about it–and also about Route 66, the origin of the word “tea,” Mongolian horses, and other questionably relevant things.

Notes

1/ Route 66 celebrates its centennial in 2026! https://www.route66-centennial.com/ The google doodle was April 30, 2022: https://doodles.google/doodle/celebrating-route-66/ It recognized the day in 1926 that the designation “U.S. 66” was proposed for the route.

2/ Tom Robbins did write a book called Another Roadside Attraction, but the family of clowns was in Villa Incognito. I refuse to link to those books on Wikipedia. You cannot read a summary of a Tom Robbins novel; they must be experienced.

3/ The Green Book: https://www.loc.gov/item/2016298176/

It was inspired by The Jewish Vacation Guide, a book published in 1917 that did a similar thing—list places where road-tripping Jews would be welcome.

The LOC site suggests that after the Civil Rights act of 1964 passed, the kinds of discrimination the book helped people avoid stopped happening and so the guide stopped being published. But I’ve talked to Jews who went on motorcycle road trips across the country and stopped at various establishments in the south in the late 70s and felt they were, in modern parlance, extremely sus, vibes are off, etc. So, like, sundown towns maybe went away but the people’s attitudes did not change as quickly.

4/ It was Turkmenistan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9QYu8LtH2E

The mention of Azerbaijan on Last Week Tonight.

5/ Bongbong Marcos was elected in 2022. We taped this one a while ago.

6/ Podcast episode on textiles: Episode 33 (on women artisans and textiles), Episode 54 note 15 (on the Bayeux Tapestry), and Episode 62 on tapestries.

7/ Mongolian horses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_horse

They live outdoors in temps that get down to -40 degrees. There are more horses than people in Mongolia right now.

In trying to source the cheese-making story, I have learned that horse’s milk cannot be made into cheese, because the lactose level is too high! So it’s probably not cheese that was made that way, but fermented mare’s milk—airag—which needs to be churned while it’s fermenting.

8/ Famously, people call it “chai” if it arrived in their country by land (for example, India, most of peninsular SE Asia, Russia, Japan) and “tea” if it arrived by boat (e.g., England and all of their colonies). Both of these words come ultimately from the Chinese “tu”, which became “cha” in Mandarin but “ta” and “te” in Min, a group of Chinese languages spoken in Fujian province and Taiwan (among other areas—there are over 70 million speakers! And you’ve never heard of it!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_tea has a nice table with different words in different languages if you’re interested in the linguistics here.

9/ The thing Em says about a Mayan god of zero appears to be incorrect. However, linguistically, in at least one Mayan dialect, yesterday and tomorrow are always expressed as “day minus one” and “day plus one” respectively—today is always zero. (https://baas.aas.org/pub/2021n1i336p03/release/2) The Mayans were a long-lived and pluralistic society and in retrospect it’s not right to say, “The Mayans thought,” because when did they think this? Which group? Today they are still over six million people speaking twenty-eight languages! Their earliest villages were established before 2000 BCE and their last city fell in 1697 CE.

9/ Rabban Bar Sauma (c1220–1294) was a Nestorian (named for Nestorius). We discussed miaphysitism and dyophysitism in Episode 48 (see note 14).