When Asia Was the World: Ibn Sina and the Intan Shipwreck

I talked last week about the ease of travel that Islamic cultural hegemony brought to the Asian world before Europe dealt itself into the game. The next two chapters in Stewart Gordon's When Asia Was the World illustrate what things actually traveled along the regulated, if not entirely pacified, paths under the Caliphate. Each chapter deals with one of the two most enduring things in history, ideas and commerce.

Now, a lot of people when they think of history think of the rise and fall of empires, the triumph of armies, the erection of great wonders, or the biographies of conquerors on horseback. But all of that fades with time. What endures is the progress of technology, the dangerous evolution of new ideas, and the sustenance of daily barter. And these things depend on conquered highways to move from town to town, region to region, culture to culture. Who has conquered these highways will always change with time--Umayyads yield to Abbasids, Khans yield to Tamerlanes, who yield in turn to Turks to Crusaders to Hapsburgs to redcoats. The sun sets on all empires. But whoever holds the umbrella, the busy traffic of goods and gimmicks, of truck and tricks of science, carries on. And to the extent that the traffic in education, science, engineering, and commerce, a civilization advances.

Chapter three tells us about a man known then as Ibn Sina, the son of an Afghan scholar cum court official. His name and groundbreaking advances in sciences was transmitted to the western world as Avicenna. He lived in an age when the unity of Islam was splitting into regional powers--Persia in the east, Spain in the Maghreb, Damascus and Baghdad and Cairo and Istanbul holding regional power in indirect competition. Ibn Sina himself held onto ideas that the ruling powers in Persia considered dangerous and spent his life on the move, traveling from one minor kingdom to the next, seeking a court sponsorship to carry on his research in exchange for his counsel in war, his engineering advice for improving civic life and health, and the prestige of hosting a brilliant, if dangerous mind.

The critical availability of paper in this age made learning more transferable than in ages past. Ibn Sina wrote numerous books that became an important bridge between classical Europe and the medieval world. He was a Neoplatonist--a dualistic worldview that led men to question God's plans and intentions and challenged the strongly material and more Aristotelian approach of mainstream Islam. Building on Galen's flawed theory of the four humors, Ibn Sina wrote books describing his experiments in treating medical patients. Although the theory itself was seriously misdirected from scientific truth, his unwavering commitment to recording his trials and errors in medicine led to improved medical care and more detailed examinations of medicines, anatomy, and hygiene. He was a polymath, as most learned men were in those days, the fields of science having yet to calcify into the distinct fields we think of. He wrote books on philosophy, politics, metaphysics, pharmacology, geology, and a range of other topics. Whatever stuck his ranging intellect, he dove in and the scope of his inquiry led generations of his readers--thanks to the spread of paper technology--to expand on this thinking.

His exchange of ideas with leading Jewish, Chinese, and Hindu scholars led to a flowering of human knowledge on scale with the golden days of Athens. He and his contemporaries laid the foundation for the European Renaissance. This was the real import of the Asian community in the years we call medieval--not that an intellect like Ibn Sina occurred, but that he had so wide of range of prior leaning to draw on and that so many others would benefit from his thoughts in future centuries.



What sustained this world was greatly what sustains today's "integrated world" in our current post-Cold War world of globalization. Trade, even a thousand years ago was the donkey that pulled the cart of human intellect and science. Professor Gordon is able to focus this fact into one recent shipwreck undergoing aquatic archaeology today: the Intan shipwreck found 45 miles off the south coast of Borneo in 2004. Buried in the sands on the floor of the Javan Sea for most of the past 10 centuries, the shifting currents allowed the wrecked Chinese merchant vessel to reemerge and reveal its forgotten artifacts.

Aboard in transit were mirrors, ironwares, and ceramics from China, glass beads from Indochina, Buddhist statuettes of bronze and terra cotta from Bengal, spices from around the Indian Ocean rim, cotton from the Malabar Coast of western India, and middling quality glass wares from the Fertile Crescent area--probably slated for recycling. Tin, which is common in the western half of the Old World, was rare and greatly prized in the Orient. And thus tin ingots, probably slated for alloys, was possibly the second greatest prize aboard the all wood vessel that sank in Javan waters those ten centuries past. All together, they tell the story of a hemisphere connected more by trade than by diplomacy and conquest.

It's instructive to us today to realize that where trade of roughly mutual benefit prevailed, peace held and learning blossomed. By implication, where trade in later centuries become less even handed and governments more intrusive into the business of business, the peace could not hold and nations resorted to arms.

Of course it's fanciful to think of trade being a truly global experience for most sailors and merchants of the day. Traders moved not from one extreme of the known map to another as their cargoes did. Rather, each leg of the journey for this far traveling cargo would have been handled by a different ship and crew, with each subsequent merchant pulling a slight profit off the top. Transportation was the greatest cost added to swatch of silk moving from China to India to Persia to Egypt. Trade alone made few men wealthy--the risks, as revealed by the fact that it's a shipwreck that informs us of the past, usually offset most of the occasional profits.

But still the trade happened, through successes and failures. Hope, as much as imperial rules, held a community of medieval Asia together. What we've learned since has rested more on peace and commerce than war, including the resulting technologies that have made each subsequent descent into war ever less civilized.