At 4:36 PM -0600 3/27/02, David Starner wrote:
>Why isn't there exterior evidence? IIRC, there was some traffic between >the Roman empire and parts east; given the detail of Chinese history, >can't some Chinese emperor be matched to a Roman emperor and years be >counted off from there? It really seems like the people who would have >noticed the missing years if they really existed would be the people >trying to look at non-European history. > I'm not sure there was close enough contact to make that sort of correlation. There was trade between India and China and the Roman Empire, but probably a lot of it was of the form Chinese merchant trades with Indian merchant trades with Persian merchant trades with Greek merchant trades with Roman merchant. I'm not sure how many people actually made the journey personally. As states, they were probably only dimly aware of each other. The notable exceptions until modern times were Alexander and Genghis Khan who each conquered large swaths of intermediate territory, and thus simplified trade routes; but neither of them quite made the final connection or a lasting one. (and of course Genghis Khan wasn't born until the 1100s) I did ask a historian friend who specializes in the Middle East about this recently. He told me that the Islamic world really didn't take much notice of Europe until after the period in question so it's not really possible to match up the Islamic calendar to events in Europe during or before the Dark Ages. If the hypothesis proved to be true, Islamic history probably wouldn't be affected very much at all. -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) | | http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/bible2/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
