table of contents

Unit 5 - Topic 2: Overview.....................................................................................................................................1

Unit 5 - Topic 2: Goal, GLEs, & Description..........................................................................................................2

• Essential Content - GLEs

• Ancillary Content - GLEs

Homework: What Did you Learn in Unit 5 - Topic 1...........................................................................................3

Student Strategies.................................................................................................................................................4

• Caterpillar Writing

• Thinking Like a Historian

• R.A.C.E. Strategy for Reading

• C.E.R. Strategy for Reading and Stating Claims (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning)

Lesson Activity: Vocabulary Words - Homework..............................................................................................5

Lesson Activity: Building Context - Setting the Stage......................................................................................6

Lesson Activity: Building Context - The Great Silk Road..................................................................................7

• Excerpts from The Travels of Marco Polo............................................7A

• Excerpt from Sulieman..........................................................................7B

• Excerpt from Letter to the West...........................................................7C

Lesson Activity: Developing a Claim/Formative Assessment.........................................................................8

Lesson Activity: Building Context - Legacy of the Silk Road............................................................................9

Lesson Activity: Summative Assessment..........................................................................................................10

Lesson Activity: Build Context - Silk Road Mini-Q.............................................................................................11

• The Silk Road: Recording the Journeuy............................................................11A

• Document A: The Silk Roads in the Han-Roman Times..................................11B

• Document B: Dunhuang Caves..........................................................................11C

• Document C: The Taklimakan Desert...............................................................11D

• Document D: Kushan Empire.............................................................................11E

• Document E: Chart..............................................................................................11F

Lesson Activity: Formative Assessment..............................................................................................................12

Unit 5 Description: Students explore the role of trade in the advancement of civilization by examining the development of civilizations in Asia and Africa. Students investigate the role of trade in the advancement of societies and how trade is responsible for the exchange of more than just goods.

Topic 2: Goal

Students will be able to analyze and discuss the impact of Chinese and Western societies.

Topics (GLEs) for the unit & pacing:

Unit 5: Approximately 7 weeks

Topic 2: 6 class periods

Connections to the Unit Claim:

Students investigate the significance of the Silk Road in building connections between Europe and Asia.

Key Connections:

• Resources and land use contributed to the development and expansion of trade between civilizations and world religions.

• Economic motivations influenced territorial conquests and led to the success of kingdoms.

• Territorial expansion and the growth of trade and taxation influenced migration patterns and the spread of cultures, ideas, and religion.

Claim:

• Is trade necessary for advancing civilizations?

Sub-claim:

• What is the impact of trade on Chinese and Western societies?

6.2.6 Analyze the origin and spread of major world religions as they developed throughout history.

• Explain factors that influenced the spread of religion. (trade)

6.3.4 Determine world migration patterns and population trends by interpreting maps, charts, and graphs

• Analyze the spread of the Black Death/Bubonic Plague through Africa, Europe, and Asia using maps, and explain relationships among the spread of the plague, population density, and trading centers and routes.

6.4.2 Explain how world migration patterns and cultural diffusion influenced human settlement.

• Explain how interactions along the Silk Road influenced the exchange of ideas and technology among Asians and Europeans

6.4.3 Explain the connection between physical geography and its influence on the development of civilization

• Explain how geography affected trade in Chinese Dynasties (the Silk Road).

6.6.2 Analyze the progression from barter exchange to monetary exchange

• Analyze the benefits of monetary trading on the Silk Road, and the reasons bartering was replaced by currency.

• Analyze the progression from barter to monetary exchange in the Chinese dynasties including the benefits of monetary exchange as opposed to bartering

6.6.3 Describe the economic motivation for expanding trade and territorial conquests in world civilizations using economic concepts

• Use economic terms to explain why ancient Chinese dynasties expanded trade (terms include: goods, services, producers, consumers, supply, demand, scarcity, shortage, surplus, markets, import, and export).

• Explain the motivation for trade using the Silk Road (demand for Chinese silk due to scarcity in other civilizations, opened access to new markets elsewhere.)

6.6.4 Explain how the development of trade and taxation influenced economic growth in the ancient world

• Analyze the influence of the Silk Road on Chinese dynasties, and discuss who traveled on the Silk Road and for what purpose.

• Discuss how trading n the Silk Road was tied to the development of social classes in ancient China.

6.1.1 - Produce clear and coherent writing for a range of tasks, purposes, and audiences by completing the following tasks:

• Options to address 6.1.1 in Unit 4:

  • Use technology to research the impacts of trade in ancient China

  • Compare and contrast the impacts of trade on world religions

  • Produce written claims on the necessity of trade in advancing civilizations

6.1.3 Analyze information in primary and secondary sources to address document-based questions.

• Analyze writings and artifacts to answer questions about the impact of the Silk Toad on cultural exchange.

Ancillary Content not addressed in the textbook at this time. Teachers should include Ancillary Content with the Topic.

What does the name "Silk Road" imply about the trade network? Pay attention to the implication of the individual words ("Silk" and "Road"), rather than just the meaning of the name itself. Is it an actual road? How do you know?

Note: Marco Polo, a Venetian merchant, achieved fame from his travelogue, The Travels of Marco Polo (c. 1300), wherein he described many of the cultural and economic activities of Asian societies. Though the authenticity of his experiences in China has come into question, his book nonetheless introduced Europe to Eastern cultures. In the following excerpts, Polo provides descriptions of Silk Road trading.

Note: Suleiman, an Arab merchant, describes his travels through India and China. The excerpts below are his description of the Chinese use of silk.

Young and old Chinese all wear silk clothes in both winter and summer, but silk of the best quality is reserved for the kings... During the winter, the men wear two, three, four, five pairs of pants, and even more, according to their means. This practice has the goal of protecting the lower body from the high humidity of the land, which they fear. During the summer, they wear a single shirt of silk or some similar material.

We use the term "Silk Road" to refer generally to the exchanges between China and places farther to the west, specifically Iran, India, and on rare occasions, Europe. Most vigorous before the year 1000, these exchanges were often linked to Buddhism.

Refugees, artists, craftsmen, missionaries, robbers, and envoys traveled along these routes in Central Asia. The most influential people moving along the Silk Road were refugees. Waves of immigrants brought technologies from their respective homelands, practicing those skills or introducing motifs in their new homes. Frequent migrations of people fleeing war or political conflicts meant that some technologies moved east, others west. As techniques for making glass entered China from the Islamic world, the technology for manufacturing paper was transported westward. Paper, the most convenient and affordable material for preserving writing, encouraged great cultural change, including the printing revolution in Western Europe. Of course, the Chinese developed woodblock printing much earlier than Gutenberg, starting around 700 AD.

People who spoke different languages often encountered one another on the Silk Road. Some had learned multiple languages since childhood. Others had to learn foreign languages as adults, a more arduous process than it is today given how few study aids were available.

The most important legacy of the Silk Road is the atmosphere of tolerance fostered by rulers. Over the centuries these rulers welcomed refugees from foreign lands, granting them permission to practice their own faiths. Buddhism entered China, and so too did the Christianity of the East. Archeological sites and the preserved artifacts offer a glimpse into this once tolerant world.

Source: Photo of the Dunhuang caves courtesy of the British Library, London, England.

Note: For travelers heading west, the oasis town of Dunhuang ("dun-wong") was a place to rest and resupply before braving the western Gobi and the Taklimakan deserts. Soon after the fall of the Han Dynasty, Buddhist monks began to dig caves just ten miles outside of Dunhuang. In many of the caves, they built Buddhist shrines. Over the centuries, these caves also became storage vaults for many items brought to Dunhuang by Silk Road travelers.

Source: Description of the Dunhuang caves in Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron, 2007.

...[The cave] walls were carpeted with hundreds of miniature Buddhas... In several shrines, the ceiling teemed with Hindu angels and lotus flowers.

...[Rolls of manuscripts] revealed a multicultural world, which had barely been suspected... inventories, wills, legal deeds, private letters. Chinese ballads and poems came to light..., even a funeral address for a dead donkey... And besides, the mass of Chinese prayers are documents written in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Uighur, Sogdian, Khotanese, Turki in a mélange of scripts: a letter in Judeo-Persian, a Parthian fragment in the Manichean script, a Turkic tantric tract in the Uighur alphabet.

Source: An excerpt describing the Taklimakan Desert in Encyclopedia, a natural history of Asia written in the early 1300s by Chinese historian Ma Twan-lin.

Note: Today, as then, the temperature in the Taklimakan Desert reaches over 100 degrees Fahrenheit and rainfall is minimal.

…you have to cross a plain of sand, extending for more than 100 leagues [about 300 miles]. You see nothing in any direction but the sky and the sands, without the slightest trace of road; and travelers find nothing to guide them but the bones of men and beasts and the droppings of camels. During the passage of this wilderness you hear sounds, sometimes of singing, sometimes of wailing; and it has often happened that travelers going aside to see what these sounds might be have strayed from their course and been entirely lost; for they were voices of spirits and goblins.

Source: The Hedin Foundation, National Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm, Sweden.

Source: A description of the Kushan Empire city of Marakanda in Great Tang Records on the Western Regions, a book about the Silk Road written by Xuanzang ("shweng-zang"), a Buddhist pilgrim, in 646 CE. Illustration artist unknown.

Note: After crossing the Gobi and Taklimakan deserts, travelers on the Silk Road's northern route had to traverse the rugged Pamir Mountains in Central Asia before arriving at this bustling city. Today, Marakanda is called Samarkand, a city in Uzbekistan.

The precious merchandise of many foreign countries is stored here. The soil is rich and productive and yields abundant harvests. The forest trees afford a thick vegetation and flowers and fruit are plentiful... Horses are bred there. The inhabitants' skill in the arts and trades exceeds that of other countries. The climate is agreeable and temperate and the people brave and energetic.

Source: Chart compiled from various sources.

Note: After leaving Marakanda, a traveler heading west on the Silk Road traveled through modern-day Iran and Iraq, eventually arriving in Antioch. Antioch was a major city at the eastern edge of the Roman Empire, not far from the Mediterranean Sea. The Chinese viewed this city as Rome itself. Caravans approached Antioch via a 30-foot-wide paved roadway that led to the huge gates of the city. At Antioch, a trader might record transactions made over the past year along the Silk Road.