5 World Empires 500 C.E. to 1400 C.E.
Look at the Silk Road Resource Page for more resources!
Look at the Indian Ocean Resource Page for more resources!
Day by Day
Day One: overview and create your back story
Day Two: Your Bio and Avatar
Day Three: Sahara Desert
Day Four: Sahara Road
Day Five: Silk Road
Day Six: Indian Ocean
Day Seven: Workshop your journal
Avatar programs
Directions
Summary
How are we to understand the thousand years (roughly 500-1500) between the end of the second-wave era and the beginning of modern world history? Historians, frankly, have had some difficulty defining a distinct identity for this millennium, a problem reflected in the vague terms used to describe it: a postclassical era, a medieval or “middle” period between the ancient and the modern, or…an age of third-wave civilizations. At best, these terms indicate where this period falls in the larger frame of world history, but none of them are very descriptive.
In some areas, for example, wholly new but smaller civilizations arose where none had existed before. Along the East African coast, Swahili civilization emerged in a string of thirty or more city-states, very much engaged in the commercial life of the Indian Ocean basin. The kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay, stimulated and sustained by long-distance trade across the Sahara, represented a new West African civilization. Throughout Asia the influence of China.
Essential Questions
How are trade and conflict interrelated?
In what ways are societies and cultures changed by migration and trade?
Enduring Understandings
Trade and technology impacted the development of world empires.
Ideology and culture are shaped through syncretism and assimilation.
There are multiple causes and consequences of migration (political, ideological, economic, environment).
Empires combined traditional sources of power and legitimacy with innovations better suited to the current circumstances (i.e. patriarchy, religion, and land-owning elites, force).
Out of Eden
Silk Road
Africa
Henry Louis Gates Jr.