What Was Happening in China, Africa and the Americas While Rome Ruled

While Rome dominated the Mediterranean, the Han dynasty held the central capitals of China and the overland routes running west from them, a city of monumental pyramids was rising in the Basin of Mexico, a kingdom on the Red Sea was minting its own power between the Roman and Persian worlds, geoglyphs were being cut into the Peruvian coastal plain, and Buddhist monasteries were being built into hillsides in the north-west of the Indian subcontinent. None of these were reacting to Rome. They were the other things that were happening.

Setting the window

This article slices horizontally rather than vertically. Instead of following one state from beginning to end, it takes roughly the first five centuries CE and asks what was going on across the map at the same time.

That is a different exercise from the usual one, and it produces a different picture. Rome is a reasonable anchor because most readers already have its outline, and because the arguments about its trajectory — surveyed in why Rome fell — are the familiar reference points. But it is an anchor, not the subject.

China: two capitals and the roads west

For much of this window the Han dynasty governed from Chang'an and Luoyang. UNESCO's World Heritage inscription for the Silk Roads: the Routes Network of Chang'an-Tianshan Corridor describes a 5,000 km section running from Chang'an and Luoyang, the central capitals of China under the Han and Tang dynasties, to the Zhetysu region of Central Asia. The inscription states that the network took shape between the second century BC and the first century AD and remained in use until the sixteenth century, linking multiple civilisations and carrying trade, religious belief, scientific knowledge, technological innovation, cultural practice and art.

Its thirty-three listed components give a sense of what such a network physically consisted of: capital cities and palace complexes of various empires and khanates, trading settlements, Buddhist cave temples, ancient paths, posthouses, passes, beacon towers, sections of the Great Wall, fortifications, tombs and religious buildings.

The Han did not last the whole window. China divided into competing states after it, and the political map of the third to sixth centuries is as complicated as the contemporaneous Mediterranean one. Our introduction to the Silk Road covers who actually moved goods along these routes and why the modern name is younger than the thing it names.

Mesoamerica: Teotihuacan

About 50 km north-east of present-day Mexico City, UNESCO describes the city of Teotihuacan as built between the first and seventh centuries AD, characterised by the vast size of its monuments — in particular the Temple of Quetzalcoatl and the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon — laid out on geometric and symbolic principles. It calls the city one of the most powerful cultural centres in Mesoamerica, one that extended its cultural and artistic influence throughout the region and beyond.

The chronology is worth sitting with. A planned monumental city was under construction in the Basin of Mexico across the same centuries in which Roman power peaked and then reorganised, with no contact between the two and no awareness on either side. Pre-Columbian studies is a substantial research field in its own right — Dumbarton Oaks has run a dedicated programme in it alongside its Byzantine one for decades — and treating it as a parallel subject rather than an appendix is the point of an exercise like this.