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For this location I'm going to talk about Baghdad and how it was significant at the time. Baghdad helped the Arab Empire become an international meeting spot. It was a huge city that was a center for trade and a roaring fire for innovation. "The centre of Arabic intellectual life was long fixed in Iraq, the ancient home of culture... Baghdad became a Ctesiphon, the capitol not simply of a State but of a world civilization"(Saunders). It was a very diversified place as they had Arabs, Jews, Syrians, Persians, Turks, Egyptians, Berbers, and Spaniards. This allowed them to have innovations from lots of different cultures which is what made their culture so great. It was not just them but part of everyone else.

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Now I'm going to talk about the astonishingly rich location of Timbuktu. The king at the time was Mansa Musa who was possibly the richest man of all time. He got all of this money(gold) through trade. There were many trade routes around Timbuktu connecting the civilization to salt and gold, but on top of that, Mansa Musa had his own personal trade route to Mecca, in Arabia. Mecca was where Mansa Musa would get his spices which allowed him to get so rich. These spices were so great for trade as everyone needed them for food, medicine, etc. This put so much value in them allowing Mansa Musa to trade them for a large amount of gold.

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For this location, I'm going to talk about Ghana. Ghana was one of the wealthiest societies at the time. Their king was, "the wealthiest king on the face of the earth because of his treasures and stocks of gold extracted in olden times"(Hawqal). They got all of this gold from trading salt with Islam and then re-trading the salt away. This made not only their king rich, but also the people of their society.

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Mesopotamia and The Agricultural Revolution

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Mesopotamia and The Agricultural Revolution

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For this location of Mesopotamia our first civilization, I am going to talk about the agricultural revolution and the good as well as the bad that came from it. The agricultural revolution was the transition from hunting and gathering, to farming. This was pretty good for civilization as it made huge cities and people could store food. They knew what they could do in the future and didn't have to fight for food every day. This all seems great, but the problem is that it caused huge cases of human inequality and probably was what cause the racism and sexism that is present in our society today. You see if we go all the way back to hunter-gatherer societies, women would play the same roles as men. Women would gather plant food while men would hunt animal meat. This was fine and they all got the same food. Then the agricultural revolution came around and there became to types of farming. Horticulture which was farming mainly plants, and agriculture which was farming mainly animals. When the agricultural revolution came, animals suddenly became more valuable. You could bread them and they had things like sheep wool or leather. Because the main role for men was hunting animals, the majority of agricultural farmers were men and because the main role for women was gathering plant food, the majority of horticulture farmers was women. This meant men would have more food from farming and make more money with material like leather and wool being very valuable.

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For this location, I am going to tell a story about a tribe of people called the Nacirema. The Nacirema where a weird tribe. They did lots of weird things that you would not a tribe to do. For example the Nacirema, "have an almost pathological horror of and fascination with the mouth, the condition of which is believed to have a supernatural influence on all social relationships"(Miner). Another grotesque thing the Nacirema do is they have a rite where they start by, "scraping and lacerating the surface of the face with a sharp instrument"(Miner). This happens on a weekly to monthly basis. Now these things might seem terrifying or grotesque, but they are just cases of othering. If you look at the name Nacirema, you can flip it backwards and see that it says American. These things they do are just things we do in America, but described in a very weird way. For example, the first one is that we like our mouths and our teeth and they have a big role in our relationships, as you might kiss your partner. The lacerating your face is just shaving. People use sharp razors to cut the hair off their face. This is how westernization happens. Someone makes up a story of what a group of people are doing and they say it in a way where it sounds terrible and it makes other people not like them.

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Throughout most of history, people looked at Christopher Columbus as a hero. Someone who discovered America. That he peacefully helped the native Americans, but in these past few decades, more and more people are challenging that assumption. This assumption of Columbus being some great hero strongly contributes to eurocentrism. It shows people only think he did good things because our previous history books taught them that, but what if I told you it was all false. In a letter from Columbus to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, Columbus writes, "on my arrival, I had taken some individuals by force"(Columbus). Now that doesn't really sound like he "discovered" the land peacefully. But, this only shows that he was not peaceful. It doesn't show that he didn't discover America, which brings me to my next piece of evidence. In the book "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong" by James W. Loewen, there is a chart that shows different civilization who discovered America before Columbus. It not only shows where they are from and when it happened, but it also shows the quality of evidence based on what the evidence was. A couple of examples are the Siberians in 70,000-12,000 BC. They moved from Siberia to Alaska and the evidence was there were survivors from this trip living in America. One other example is Indonesians going to South America from 6,000-1,500 BC. Evidence is they had the same blowguns, paper making, and other technologies. All of this just proves Columbus wasn't the first to discover America, and he sure as hell did not "discover" it peacefully.

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The Ming Dynasty was the 3rd of the most relevant Chinese Dynasties. The Ming Dynasty, like the others had lots of things, but was famous for one thing. They were famous for their sailing expeditions. Their main navigator Zheng He had one of the biggest sailing expeditions of history and he did it a little less than 90 years before Columbus. He started right here and went down through Malaysia and the Philippines, to Indonesia. Then e made his way through southern India and Iran. Next he went all the way down the east coast of Africa to places like Somalia and Kenya. This journey was not only important because of how big it was, but also because of what it did for China and how it contributed to southernization. It brought in tons of spices from places like India and Iran as well as mathematics from those places. It brought in lots of gold from the east coast of Africa and was also great for International Trade because of this.

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The Yuan Dynasty or the Mongols, were the first Dynasty to take the capitol of Beijing. The Yuan Dynasty was famous for lots of things. One main one that had a contribution to southernization is the invention of porcelain. They had beautiful vases, plates, bowls, and other things. When people refer say, "This is my China set", they are talking about Chinese porcelain, made at the time of the Yuan Dynasty.

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Kaifeng is where the capitol of the Song dynasty(China's first relevant dynasty) was first located back when it was called Bianjing in 960. This place is a key location for talking about the term southernization. The definition of southernization by Lynda Shaffer is, "a multipart process that began in Southern Asia and spread from there to various other places around the globe". This process involves Mathermatics, production of marketing subtropical and tropical spices, pioneering of new trade routes, the cultivation, processing, and marketing of southern crops(like sugar and cotton), and the development of technologies related to math, spices, trade routes, etc. In Bianjing, they had many great inventions that helped lead to southernization. One of these inventions was woodblock printing. Woodblock printing existed before the song dynasty in the year 700, but there was one small flaw with it. You could not move the presses. In the excerpt from "The Story of China", it says, "Movable type was invented by the Chinese during the Song Dynasty"(Wood). This shows the development of China under the Song Dynasty and its contribution to southernization.