1. Middle East and South Asia: How separate are they?

2. They are regions of Asia … Caucasus Iraq West Cent Asia Iran Tarim Basin Altai Moutains Gobi Desert Mongolia- Amur North China Hindu Kush Indus Basin Ganga Basin Burma to Vietnam

4. … and more broadly, of Afro-Eurasia (the world region that Marshall Hodgson considers the vast historic homeland of what he calls “Islamicate cultures”).

5. Early urban civilization sites at Harappa (Indus Valley, now in Pakistan) were connected by trade and migration to Mesopotamia and Mediterranean Basin

7. Indo-European languages spread with ancient migrations across western and southern Asia

8. Many routes of mobility well documented and influential across Afro-Eurasia by 1500 were alive and well 2000 years earlier …

9. Routes interconnected regions of Afro-Eurasia by land and sea. They carried all the elements of culture in various directions. Ancient silk road and Marco Polo’s routesilk road

10. <==Spread of Buddhism: 300BCE-300AD Spread of Black Plague, circa 1300

11. Alexander the Great followed trade routes to India, fought and lost battles in the Hindu Kush, and died in retreat in Iran

12. He lost to Mauryan armies dispatched from the eastern imperial heartland of the Ganga River basin.

13. India’s first empire marched west in the 4 th century BC … as Alexander marched west … The Mauryan Empire rose on the eastern Ganga edge of routes extending across Iran to the Mediterranean … marked by competitors for territorial control over routes of mobility.

14. The stupa at Sanchi is one of the oldest of the surviving monuments from the Buddhist period.

15. … but the homeland of Buddhism was always on the move … in various directions

16. Empire in South Asia was always a moveable feast, moving along routes of trade and cultural exchange …

17. … and compelled substantially by nomadic warrior- herder-merchants who migrated to conquer settled sites of intensive agricultural development – dependent on river water supplies – along routes of trade and cultural mobility in one vast differentiated region of Afro-Eurasia … always connected to the Middle East.