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
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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.
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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.
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Directions for Homework: Before we start this new topic, take a minute to write about what you have learned so far. Use complete sentences in your writing. Try to fill these pages with the new knowledge you have gained. Celebrating YOU, Because YOU ARE SOMEBODY!!! Don't forget it.
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barter
caravan
cultural diffusion
export
import
maritime
plague
silk
Silk Road
tariffs
trade
Directions: Open your NOTEBOOK and complete the vocabulary for a HOMEWORK assignment. You will not be tested on all words, but you need to know them for content.
Watch the above videos to learn about money and bartering. Know the difference.
Setting the Stage
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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?
Watch the videos below to learn about the Silk Road. You will see what the Silk Road was used for, how ideas were shared, religion, culture, goods, and more. It will explain how some civilizations began to thrive and grow because of the Silk Road.
The Silk Road was a vast trade network connecting Europe, North Africa, and Asia. It earned its name from Chinese silk which was a highly valued good that was transported along these routes.
In your NOTEBOOK you will complete the Journal Journey slide on the Silk Road video as well as the map analysis slide.
The Great Silk Road
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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.
The people of Tabriz [Iran] live by trade and industry; for cloth of gold and silk is woven here in great quantity and of great value. The city is favorably situated that is a market for merchandise from India and Baghdad, from Mosul and Hormuz, and from many other places; and many Latin merchants come here to buy merchandise imported from foreign lands. It is also a market for precious stones, which are found here in great abundance. It is a city where good profits are made by traveling merchants...
Merchants come here by ship from India, bringing all sorts of spices and precious stones and pearls and cloths of silk and of gold and elephants' tusks and many other wares. In this city, they sell them to others, who distribute them to various customers through the length and breadth of the world. It is a great center of commerce, with many cities and towns to subordinate to it, and the capital of the kingdom.
When the traveler rides through this province [Tenduc, Northeast China] for seven days towards the east in the direction of Cathay, he finds many cities and towns inhabited by Mahometans [followers of Muhammad], idolaters, and Nestorian Christians. They live by commerce and industry, weaving the cloths of gold called nasich and nakh and silk of various types. Just as we have woolen cloths of many different types, so have they of cloth of gold and silk. They are subject to the great Khan...
Ho-kien-fu [in Cathay province, China] is a great and splendid city, lying towards the south. The people are idolaters and burn their dead. They are subject to the Great Khan and use paper money. They live by trade and industry, for they have silk in plenty. They produce cloths of gold and silk and sandal in great abundance. This city has many cities and towns subject to its dominion. Through the midst of the city flows a great river, by which quantities or merchandise are transported to Khan-balik; for they make it flow thither through many different channels and artificial waterways.
Click the button below to take a journey on the Silk Road from China to Europe.
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.
I, Friar John of Monte Corvino, of the Order of Friars Minor [The Franciscans], departed from Tauris, a city of the Persians, in the year of the Lord 1291, and proceeded to India. And I remained in the country of India, wherein stands the church of St. Thomas the Apostle, for thirteen months, and in that region baptized in different places about one hundred persons…. I proceeded on my further journey and made my way to Cathay [China], the realm of the emperor of the Tatars who is called the Grand Khan. To him, I presented the letter of our lord the pope and invited him to adopt the Catholic faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, but he had grown too old in idolatry. However he bestows many kindnesses upon the Christians, and these two years past I am abiding with him.
The Nestorians, a certain body who profess to bear the Christian name, but who deviate sadly from the Christian religion, have grown so powerful in those parts that they will not allow a Christian of another ritual to have ever so small a chapel, or to publish any doctrine different from their own….
I have built a church in the city of Khanbaliq [modern Beijing], in which the king has his chief residence. This I completed six years ago, and I have built a bell tower to it and put three bells in it. I have baptized there, as well as I can estimate, up to this time some 6,000 persons; and if those charges against me of which I have spoken had not been made, I should have baptized more than 30,000. And I am often still engaged in baptizing.
Also, I have gradually bought one hundred and fifty boys, the children of pagan parents, and of ages varying from seven to eleven, who had never learned any religion. These boys I have baptized, and I have taught them Greek and Latin after our manner. Dated at the city of Khanbaliq in the kingdom of Cathay, in the year of the Lord 1305, and on the 8th day of January.
Directions:
In your NOTEBOOK you will complete the primary source analysis charts for the three documents above.
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Review the map above.
Directions: Using the map and the information from the readings, develop a claim that answers the question:
Who traveled the Silk Road and describe the purpose of their travel?
This will be completed in your NOTEBOOK.
Legacy of the Silk Road
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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.
Travelers along Silk Road
Chinese Woodblock Printing
Spread of Buddhism Along Silk Road
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.
Directions: After reading the passage, complete the reading guide in your NOTEBOOK.
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Directions: You will write an informative paragraph that answers the following prompt: "What impact did the Silk Road have on Chinese and Western societies?"
Remember to include specific claims and relevant evidence from contemporary and historical sources while acknowledging competing views.
Silk Road Mini-Q
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When you sit down to a bowl of spaghetti at home or a math problem in school, you probably aren't thinking about history. Yet it is a fact that noodles from China and a number system from Persia and India first made their way into the European world along ancient trade routes called the Silk Road.
The Silk Road was actually a series of roads and routes that together made up a huge trade network that stretched from China to Rome with many branching offshoots to the north and the south. The Silk Road began as far back as 4,000 years ago and got its name from the luxurious, brightly colored cloth that was China's biggest export. The Silk Road owes an important part of its success to the domestication of the camel - an animal that could carry heavy loads over long distances and required little water while doing so. Camels were the fuel-efficient minivans of the ancient world.
As is true with international trade today, politics made business on the Silk Road difficult, and often dangerous. Caravans had to travel through many kingdoms and city-states that fought each other. When conflict broke out, trade would be interrupted. Between about 200 BCE and 250 CE, the growth of four empires helped ease this problem and kept the Silk Road humming. The empires were the Han, the Kushan, the Parthian, and the Roman. From 202 BCE to 220 CE, the Han dynasty ruled over China. The Han were especially eager to trade silk for magnificent horses from Ferghana in Central Asia. To protect this trade, the Han cracked down on bandits who preyed on Silk Road travelers.
Starting in 50 CE, another Asian empire took shape and began profiting from the Silk Road. This was the Kushan Empire, which stretched from western China into northern India. The Kushans established themselves as a kind of toll booth that collected taxes on goods moving back and forth between China and points west.
Beyond Kush was the powerful empire of Parthia, which covered much of modern-day Iran and Iraq. The Parthians became skilled middlemen, buying up goods flowing into their country and reselling them at a higher price to traders who carried them further along the Silk Road.
Meanwhile, the Roman Empire had come to dominate the west, eventually controlling much of the land that rimmed the Mediterranean Sea. As the empire got richer, Romans demanded more and more luxury goods, especially that wonderful Chinese fabric, silk.
In time these four empires collapsed, but the Silk Road continued on without them. Then, around 1400 CE, exploration and new sea routes brought an end to much of the overland trade.
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.
Directions: In your NOTEBOOK you will analyze the documents by completing the reading guides and/or analysis sheets. As you analyze each document think about the question: How is trade responsible for cultural exchange?
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Review the information learned in this topic.
Directions: In your NOTEBOOK you will complete your Characteristics of Civilizations organizer.