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I’ve suggested that religions die. But perhaps they leave ghosts – and you can see across the Middle East many ghosts, many survivals of older religions in the newly successful religions. So, as you look at Islam, for example, you see many survivals from Christianity and Judaism – the Qur’an is littered with stories which make no sense except in terms of what the Christians and Jews of that time would have understood. Also, in terms of the buildings of Islam, the institutions of Islam and the mystical practices of Islam, you can see a great many of these ghostly survivals. Then as Islam spreads it carries on drawing in new kinds of pattern from older religions and evokes new ghosts.

Eventually that spreading Islam would conquer most of the world we’ve been looking at in this section; indeed it would conquer all the places from which our objects have come, except Dorset. Next I will be examining how those victorious Islamic rulers administered their conquests.

PART TEN

The Silk Road and Beyond

AD 400–800

The Silk Road from China to the Mediterranean was at its peak between AD 500 and 800, the time of the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ in western Europe. This trade route connected a revived Tang Dynasty China with the newly formed Islamic caliphate, which erupted from Arabia and conquered the Middle East and North Africa with astonishing rapidity. It was not only people and goods that spread along the Silk Road but also ideas. Along it, Buddhism spread from India into China and then beyond, into the newly formed kingdom of Korea. South Asian products even made their way to remote Britain, as we can see from the gems found in the Sutton Hoo burial. At the same time, but entirely separately, the first organized states in South America were flourishing.

Gold coin issued by Abd al-Malik showing an image of the caliph himself (top)

46

Gold Coins of Abd al-Malik

Gold coins, minted in Damascus, Syria

MINTED AD 696–697

These two dinar coins sum up one of the greatest political and religious upheavals ever – the permanent transformation of the Middle East in the years following the death of the Prophet Muhammad. For Muslims, the clock of history was reset when Muhammad and his followers moved from Mecca to Medina. That event, the Hijra, which took place in the year 622 by Christian reckoning, marked for Islam the beginning of year 1 in a new calendar. For his followers, the Prophet’s teachings had so transformed society that time had begun again. The next few objects will show something of what the world looked like at this pivotal moment. They were all made in the years around Muhammad’s death in the Hijra year 11, or AD 632, and they come from Syria, China, England, Peru and Korea. Everywhere they give insight into the interaction of power and faith.

In the fifty years after the death of the Prophet, Arabian armies shattered the political status quo across the Middle East, conquering Egypt and Syria, Iraq and Iran. The power of Islam had spread as far in a few decades as Christianity and Buddhism had in as many centuries. In Damascus in the mid 690s the inhabitants of the city must have had a strong sense that their world was being totally transformed. Still in appearance a Christian Roman metropolis, Damascus, conquered by Muslim armies in 635, had become the capital of a new Islamic empire. The head of this burgeoning empire, the caliph, was remote in his palace, and the Islamic armies were segregated in their barracks, but the people in the bazaars and streets of Damascus were about to have their new reality brought home to them in something they handled every day – money.

In the early 690s Damascus merchants might not have understood that their world had changed permanently. Despite decades of Islamic rule they were still using the coins of their former rulers, the Christian Byzantine emperors, and those coins were full of Christian symbolism. It was quite reasonable to think