Abstract
The papers in this Special Issue of the Medieval History Journal were first presented in a workshop entitled ‘China, India, and Iran: Scientific Exchange and Cultural Contact Through the First Millennium CE’, held on 8–9 October 2021 at the Needham Research Institute and the Ancient India and Iran Trust in Cambridge. It was hosted by the two institutes, together with the collaboration of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. The idea of an interdisciplinary workshop came to me while I was a research fellow at the Needham Research Institute, as the inaugural recipient of the Ho Peng Yoke Fellowship, and Bye-Fellow of Robinson College (2019–2020). I then had the opportunity to meet a great many scholars whose works were connected to a project on historical trans-Eurasian scientific exchange in which I was engaged (see Overlapping Cosmologies in Asia, Brill, 2022). The two-day workshop, postponed for a year due to the global pandemic, took place thanks to the support of all the speakers, and three very generous sponsors, Professor Mei Jianjun of the Needham Research Institute, Professor Nicholas Sims-Williams of the Ancient India and Iran Trust and Professor Imre Galambos of the University of Cambridge. The varied topics presented in the workshop, as in this volume, from natural science to linguistics and book-making, are connected by our common interest in attempting to understand the highly nuanced ways in which scientific and cultural ideas from the three key ancient cultures, China, India and Iran or Persia, interacted with each other, and the hybridity of the myriad results thereof. The eight papers included here are some of the fruits of this endeavour. As typical of post-Needhamian scholarship in the history of science, the authors of these papers were not concerned so much with the questions surrounding the origin of an invention or an idea, or a grand theory to explain everything. Rather the attempt was to cast new light on old and new sources, and to reveal the pattern of emergence and the particular and often convoluted pathways of transmission, with emphases on primary sources in our research, mostly but not exclusively philological and textual.
The first contribution by Samuel N. C. Lieu, entitled ‘From Qin to Cathay: Names for China and the Chinese on the Silk Road’, was the keynote lecture of the workshop. It provides one of the most comprehensive accounts to date of all the different names given to China by her foreign neighbours and explains why the Chinese names that Chinese people have given to themselves are not reflected in their foreign counterparts, including those in Chinese sources connected to the Buddhists and the ‘Nestorian’ Christians. The answer, expectedly not a straightforward one, tells a complex story of knowledge transmission, where the process of transmission itself left an indelible mark in the resultant knowledge generated from the names of China, as for the understanding of China as well.
Vincenzo Vergiani’s paper, ‘The Introduction of Writing into Achaemenid Gandhāra and the Origin of Pāṇini’s Grammar’, examines the historical interaction of ancient Persia and India, describing the impact of the technology of writing on the linguistic tradition of India, where oral culture and mnemonic techniques played a vital role. Contrary to the mainstream scholarly view of the primacy of orality in the Indian intellectual tradition, Vergiani presents an alternative view in which writing enables a cognitive leap in the algebraic formulation of Pāṇini’s rule-based grammar and linguistic meta-language, which ultimately inspired the modern-day discipline of historical linguistics.
The third paper, ‘Persian Astronomy in China’ by Bill Mak, is a survey of the largely overlooked scientific contact in the field of astral science between Persia and China. During the first millennium, while Persia may have been seen largely as a mediator of Hellenistic culture and scientific knowledge, the roles of Persians as both transmitters and generators of knowledge were in fact highly varied. Not only did the astronomical knowledge of the Persians in China have a distinct flavour, it was also viewed by the later Chinese, rather faintly, as the antecedent of the Sino-Islamic Huihui school of astronomy.
Flavia Xi Fang takes us through a transcultural journey of mesmerising aroma across Eurasia in her paper entitled ‘Scent, Art, and Astronomy: New Light on Tang Incense Spheres and Their Global Connections’. The paper is an extension of the research she did on her PhD thesis, ‘Navigating the Smellscape of Medieval China’, submitted to and defended at the University of Cambridge in 2023. By focusing on the technology and the cultural meaning of the curiously designed incense sphere, the earliest extant exemplars of which are found in China, the paper presents a hitherto unimagined landscape of long-distance exchange along the Silk Roads, including the possibility that they ‘may have been imported or made under strong cultural influence from Central Asia, India, Iran or beyond’.
Imre Galambos’ paper, entitled ‘The Chinese Pothi: A Missing Link in the History of the Chinese Book’, examines the transcultural history of writing technology from a new angle, focusing on a small subset of manuscripts from the Dunhuang Library Cave, now in the Stein and Pelliot collections. Through a careful comparison between Indian and Tibetan pothi manuscripts and the later Chinese book forms, and the historical descriptions thereof, the pothi form of the Chinese book manuscripts is shown to represent a link between the palm-leaf manuscript traditions of South and Southeast Asia and the concertina scriptures ubiquitous in manuscript cultures throughout East Asia. The example illustrates how a foreign, Indian concept may have a long and unexpected trajectory of evolution in China.
The article by François de Blois, “From Choresmia to Cathay: A New Look at al-Bayrūnī’s Chronology”, begins with a flourish in Semitic philology and textual history (complete with a stemma codicum) concerning al-Bayrūnī’s renowned work on historical chronology and calendars written in 1000 CE entitled Chronology of Ancient Nations. It ends with an unexpected discovery connecting the names of the months in one family of manuscripts to the twelve terms of the Sino-Turkic animal cycle in the language of the Kitan people, who ruled as the Liao dynasty in Northern China between 916 and 1125.
The topic of book and book production continues in Daniel J. Sheridan’s paper, entitled ‘“Bookish” Borrowings and Novelty in a Chinese Christian Manuscript from Dunhuang’. His study, based on his doctoral research on Sogdian Christians and Christian networks along the Silk Roads, defended at the University of Cambridge also in 2023, took us in the other direction to explore the Chinese connection with the codices of Syriac Christians. The focus of the investigation, Pelliot chinois 3847, a Christian text in the Chinese scroll form, is a result of this long-distance interaction.
Last but not least, in Sally Church’s paper entitled ‘Interplays and Interactions on the Maritime and Overland Silk Roads in the First Millennium
A heartfelt thanks goes to Sally Church for proposing this Special Issue to the Medieval History Journal and for her hard work as co-editor. It is our hope that such international, interdisciplinary collaboration with both senior and younger scholars may continue in the future, casting more light on the hitherto unknown relations and interactions among the three ancient cultures in the pre-modern world.
I would like to express my hearty thanks to the Medieval History Journal and to the various authors and peer reviewers who dedicated their precious time and effort to its completion. I would especially like to thank the Needham Research Institute and the Ancient India and Iran Trust for their moral support in this endeavour.