NOTES ON THE SILK ROAD EXHIBIT

By Tabitha Korol August 2014

“Traveling the Silk Road,” at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, appears to be a small section of a larger, global exhibition, “1001 Inventions,” which, accompanied by an award-winning film, professes to be a revelation of a thousand years of scientific and cultural achievements by the Muslim world, with a nod to some contributing faiths and cultures. However, these faiths and cultures were victims of Muslim jihadists who, following in Mohammed’s footsteps, invaded the “infidel” world for more than 1400 years, enslaving, slaughtering, and plundering. Their greatest achievement was their ability to expropriate every creative, innovative, groundbreaking device of Islam’s victims and, defying all logic, fraudulently claim each as their own.

The Silk Road exhibit is a betrayal of its name and deception to the tourists, individuals, schoolteachers and students. Some of the visitors are of those cultures whose contributions were formidable, but were given scant recognition or complete disregard, thereby denying them the knowledge and sense of pride to be had upon learning that their heritage contributed to the growth of civilization along the early trade routes. This Islamic presentation allowed about 20 percent to China.

Islam’s growth in both religious adherents and these “achievements” emanated from their invasions into foreign lands, enforcing their will under penalty of death, and booty acquired from the invaded and enslaved cultures (the worst, the black African trade, was excluded). Slavery, including sexual slavery, is justified in the Qur’an and practiced in many countries, to this day.

Islam is socialism, and socialism is antithetical to creativity. Islam is based on envious hatred of what is noble, the aspirations and outstanding creative individuality in all fields of human endeavor. Muslims are enraged that a small Israel could smash the rocket launchers and their terror tunnels of Gaza, for example. They resent and hate human excellence, yet they take ownership of the ingenuity of others out of envy and deceit to entice.

The museum exhibit is just such an example of Muslims’ adopting achievements of others for their own acclaim, because they have produced nothing of value in 1400 years of existence. The majority of the Islamic world is illiterate, violent combatants who commit atrocities beyond the Western imagination – although we are beginning to learn of what these people are truly capable.

DEFINING THE SILK ROAD

The Routes Network ofChang’on-Cianshan Corridor, Eurasia

A vertical screen hangs at the entrance:

WHAT WASN’T SAID:

1. That this was an Islamic exhibit.

2. that Islam provides a martyr’s way to Paradise, which includes destruction, slavery, suicide and genocide, and looting.

3. That Islamic countries lead the world in illiteracy.

FACTS:

1. The most prominent reward promised Islamic Martyrs are the 72 Dark-Eyed Virgins in Paradise. A Palestinian religious leader explained, “…the purpose of authentic Islam is to fill Muslims with desire for Paradise” – the anticipation and love of death. He [Muhammad] said (in a Hadith, Islamic tradition): “[There is] a palace of pearls in Paradise and in it seventy courts of ruby… And in each court [there are] seventy houses of green emerald stone. In every house, seventy beds. On every bed, seventy mattresses of every color and on every mattress a woman.” (Hadith)

2. Sahih al-Bukhari HadithHadith 1.35 Narrated by Abu Huraira The Prophet said, “The person who participates in (Holy battles) in Allah’s cause and nothing compels him to do so except belief in Allah and His Apostles, will be recompensed by Allah either with a reward, or booty (if he survives) or will be admitted to Paradise (if he is killed in the battle as a martyr).” http://www.inthenameofallah.org/Shaheed%20OR%20Martyr.html

EXHIBIT SIGN:

HISTORIC BACKGROUND:

Ancient Chinese guarded the silk production secret for centuries. Ottoman Turks and Persians fought over it; English and French competed to restrict its markets, but every culture was touched by silk. It was found aboard medieval Viking ships sailing out of Constantinople, as kerchiefs from India and as silk bandanas brought by pirates and worn by American cowboys. Damask silk of Damascus, Syria, was actually from China. Martha Washington wore a dress of Virginia silk to George’s inauguration, and Native Americans learned silk embroidery to decorate traditional apparel.

WHAT WASN’T SAID:

1. That the Persian and Babylonian Jews pioneered the intercontinental trade and the Silk Road.

2. It is likely that “Arab traders” is an all-encompassing term to include all the people, religions and cultures that existed in the Middle East, that the Muslims captured and made their own. In fact, the Arab ethnic groups included Lebanese, Syrians, Emiratis, Qataris, Saudis, Bahrainis, Kuwaitis, Iraqis, Omanis, Jordanians, Yemenis, Sudanese, and Egyptians. These were not all Arab, in fact; neither were they of the same original religion; the exhibit is misleading.

FACTS:

1. Intercontinental trade was pioneered by Persian Jews who forged the “Silk Route” to the heart of China in the fifth century BCE. Augustus, first Roman emperor, is said to have commissioned “the first travel guide” from Isidore of Charax (a Greco-Roman geographer of the 1^st century BC and 1^st century AD). Centuries later, while the Europeans were still deep in the Dark Ages, Persian Radhanite scholar/travelers (medieval Jewish merchants who traded between the Christian and Islamic worlds, 500-1000 AD) pioneered land and sea trade routes to the Far East. “These merchants speak Arabic, Persian, Roman, Frankish, Spanish, and Slavonic,” wrote Ibn Khurdadhih in the ninth century CE, “They travel from East to West and from West to East by land as well as by sea.” They also spoke Hebrew and Aramaic.

2. The Silk Route was pioneered by Babylonian Jews in the fifth century BCE. The Kaifeng, China synagogue complex was erected in 1163 to serve a community of three thousand worshipers, and to accommodate Jewish trader-travelers who came across Asia with their caravans.

Cinnamon, Cassia (the bark from which cinnamon is made), jade, camphor, and many other Chinese products were greatly in demand in the West. The earliest reference in any literature to the oriental products, cinnamon and cassia, occurs in Exodus 30:23: Moses is instructed to take “principal spices, of pure myrrh five hundred shekels, and of sweet cinnamon (kinamon besem) half so much.” In 30:24 he is likewise instructed to take “of cassia (kiddah) five hundred shekels.”]

1. Herodotus (485-425 BCE) stated that Kinnamomon (Greek) came from Canaan (3.111); the word in Exodus for cassia, kiddah, appears in Greek as Kitto. Another Biblical word, kes’iah (Psalms 45.9), became the Greek ² The transcription of Aramaic words into the Greek language identifies the merchants who first brought these spices in the 5th c. BCE from the Orient to the Mediterranean.

2. Linen fabrics (Byssus) were as marketable in China as silk fabrics were in the west. One of the earliest centers of industrial weaving of fine linen fabrics was the city of Beth She’an. The Bible informs us that Beth She’an (“Scythopolis” by the Greeks), was a Canaanite town that fell to the forces of David. By the 3rd c. BCE, the Jews of Beth She’an achieved world fame as producers of fine fabrics. The Jerusalem Talmud refers to “the fine linen vestments which come from Beth She’an.”

3. Beth She’an is described as a city that supplies textiles to the world in the Latin Descriptus Orbis, 4^th The superiority of the textiles and clothes made by Jews in Beth She’an was affirmed by Roman Emperor Diocletian, in 296 CE. The edict listed Judaic glassware (by Jews of Judah) and vitri Alessandrini (by Jews of Alexandria). Hadrian also asserted that Jews were the glassmakers of Alexandria.

4. Rabbi Chiyya bar Abba, a famous sage is named in the Bible, was involved with trading goods of glassware, flax, and linen along the Silk Route into China.

5. The tradition of travel and trade expanded into a world-girdling network of Jewish trade under the Rhadanites. Ibn Khurdadhibih, an Arab chronicler of the ninth century, wrote that “these merchants speak Arabic, Persian, Roman, Frankish, Spanish and Slavonic. They travel from East to West, and from West to East by land as well as by sea.” They also spoke Hebrew and Aramaic. The routes radiated out from the Jewish centers of population in the agricultural and industrial heart of Babylonia to Europe, North Africa, India, and China.

EXHIBIT SIGN:

WHAT WASN’T SAID:

1. That Sogdians were mainly Zoroastrian (a religion that exists today), yet linked to suggest they are Muslim craftsmen.

2. That Jews who worked at creating merchandise in Samarkand and produced much of the “beautiful objects” described in the exhibit sign, remain unidentified; the Aramaic alphabet may be a means of identification.

FACTS:

1. Sogdians were an ancient civilization of an Iranian people whose religion was Zoroastrianism. Although many converted to Islam, they may number up to 2.6 million today. Not politically aligned, Sogdiana’s various territories centered around Samarkand. They wrote in a variety of scripts derived from the Aramaic alphabet.

2. Most merchants tended to trade goods in a central oasis, and Sogdians established a trading network across the 1500 miles from Sogdiana to China, until they became the all-encompassing name for all merchants to trade with China’s Han Dynasty, into the 10^th Their language became a lingua franca of trade; they taught their children to read at age 5. Sogdians worked as farmers, carpetweavers, glassmakers, and woodcarvers.

EXHIBIT SIGN:

WHAT WASN’T SAID:

1. That the Sogdian designation for merchants of Samarkand remains The exhibits’ focus is promoting Islam.

2. That skill may have been needed to handle animals and people, named in a questionable order, unless the people are women and children who had been abducted into slavery.

FACTS:

1. The Silk Road exhibit is a tribute to the Islamic culture, with all negative characteristics whitewashed, removed, and replaced with positive traits usurped from the cultures conquered. Islam was and continues to be a culture of acquisition, subjugation, and genocide, responsible for the killing of 270 million people over 1400 years, to this day.

2. The countries involved in the Silk Route include China, Persian Empire, Greece (particularly maritime trade routes), and mainland Europeans. By religion, they were Jews, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, Romans, Grecians, Hindus, Pharoahans, Christian sects and Muslims.

3. Dating back about three millennia, the Jewish community in Iran is the oldest in Asia. Freed from slavery by Persia’s Emperor Cyrus in 539 BCE, they became an integral part of the Persian Empire. They travelled widely in Persian-dominated Afghanistan, the Caucasus and Caspian through Central Asia, and traded with displaced Turgik tribes, and Khazars (glassworks factories, c. 7^th and 8^th centuries). Persian Jews were merchants in Uzbekistan, Central Asian Silk Road in Bukhara and Samarkand, where major trading posts were established.

EXHIBIT SIGN:

WHAT WASN’T SAID:

1. Some inns provided sex workers to the Silk Road merchants; one Sogdian-language contract shows at least one Chinese bought a Sogdian girl in 639 AD. Earlier 7^th century documents point to massive volume in the sex-slave trade, with some recorded marriages. One record shows a Sogdian merchant sold an 11-year-old girl for 40 bolts of silk.

2. That there was a flourishing slave trade. As a youth, Mohammed accompanied his uncle on the caravan expeditions, dealing in human slavery and trading the items looted from the conquered peoples.

3.The many cultures of travelers and slavers remain unidentified, although their grotesqueries are known and continue unabated.

EXHIBIT SIGN:

WHAT WASN’T SAID:

1. That glass making originated with the Jewish people, a secret maintained for the next 3,000 years.

2. That it had been considered an Egyptian discovery until an archaeological expedition unearthed the truth, and acknowledged in 1983.

FACTS:

1. The art of glassmaking was born in Akkadia, the Biblical locale in Mesopotamia, home of Terach, father of Abraham, ~2400 B.C.E. It was a Semitic, and then Jewish, art for the next three millennia. Unique among the arts, glassmaking was invented only once in all of human history and its spread was parallel and coincident with the dispersal of the Jews.

2. Manufactured glass was discovered by Dr. R. H. Hall on an archaeological expedition near the ancient city of Eridu, close to Abraham’s purported birthplace of Ur, in the winter of 1918-19. “Only one object of great interest has been found,” reported the astounded Hall, “… In the rubbish beneath the pavement was found a lump of opaque blue vitreous paste which I recognized as true glass… the most ancient piece of glass known.” The object’s date was fixed at between 2047-2038 B.C.E. Later, Akkadian glass, more than two centuries older, was found from buildings and cemeteries of the ancient city of Ur itself.

3. Museums and texts on glassmaking history had always cited Egypt as the birthplace. However, glassmaking depends on thick forests for fuel, requiring several tons of wood to produce just one kilogram of glass, and Egypt had no forests. Further, glass is liquefied silicate stone (quartz), and only a reverberatory furnace (absent from ancient Egypt technology) could achieve and maintain the necessary temperatures of 1200 degrees Celsius. Further, glassware couldn’t suddenly appear in 1500 BCE in 18^th Dynasty tombs without a trace of hundreds of years of necessary development. Finally, there is no word for “glass” in Egyptian language (scribes used the Akkadian term) and there was no cobalt, the coloring for the glass, available in Egypt.

4. In 1983, Donald B. Harden, author of the catalogue of the British Museum’s collection of Greek and Roman Glass, finally removed all doubt, admitting, “During my two years at Ann Arbor and the next winter season on the excavating staff in Egypt, I naturally became too Egypto-oriented.”

5. Once manufactured, glass is easily melted and reformed into glassware. Delicate glassware was not transportable, but beads or amulets were. A Canaanite merchant vessel was found off the Turkish coast at the turn of the 14^th century, with tons of cargo of glass ingots and eye-beads (beads overlaid with concentric rings of colored glass).   Glass was produced in Israel and Judah, and transported by Canaanites, whom Greeks called Phoenicians – “purple,” from the purple-stained hands and clothes of those who made purple dye.

6. Egyptians and Greeks made advances in glassmaking; Romans brought glass into everyday life by making it transparent at a lower temperature. They manufactured in bulk and transported throughout the Roman Empire via their vast trading infrastructure. The Roman love of glass evolved into the glass window, providing protection from the elements while delivering light. They developed the mirror at a lower cost, increasing effectiveness and longevity.

7. Roman innovation developed into glassblowing to produce delicate creative shapes, and into clear drinking vessels, for color, transparency and wine clarity.

EXHIBIT SIGN:

FACTS:

1.  The first evidence of this significant historical milestone was recovered from the 5th century BCE grave at Lo-yang. Glass beads to wear in the next world were among the artifacts buried with the deceased. The Chinese had no knowledge of glassmaking at that time.

2.  The beads were typical of eye beads made in Israel – overlaid with concentric rings of colored glass – and distributed around the Mediterranean by Canaanite seafarers (Phoenicians)

3.  Late BCE eye-beads found in Europe and the near East paralleled those found in China. The technique and composition of eye beads traded across Eurasia validates their common Near-Eastern origin.

4.  Persian Jews were merchants in Uzbekistan, the Central Asian Silk Road in Bukhara and Samarkand (areas mentioned in exhibit, improperly credited), where major trading posts were established. Evidence of thriving Jewish settlements was found along the Eastern Silk Road, into Kaifeng, China (which included synagogues and Hebrew documents). For the next thousand years, Jewish glassware and linens were the principal goods exchanged for the silk and spices of China and India.

5.  Arabs traded with a variety of merchants and are known for taking proprietorship of the items produced by the peoples they conquered: Africans, Greeks, Jews; Jews traded with Persians, Georgians, Uzbeks, Chinese; Chinese traded with Indonesians, Thais, Sri Lankans. Bloodlines merged; cultural practices and foods were integrated, all blending to form the Great Silk Road.

EXHIBIT SIGNS:

FACTS:

1. Pottery originated during the Neolithic Ceramic objects like the Gravettian culture Venus of Dolní Věstonice figurine discovered in the Czech Republic date back to 29,000–25,000 BC, and pottery vessels discovered in Jiangxi, China date back to 20,000 BP (before present). Early Neolithic pottery has also been found in Jomon Japan (10,500 BC), the Russian Far East (14,000 BC), Sub-Saharan Africa and South America.

2. Pottery was in use in ancient India, including areas now forming Pakistan and northwest India, during the Mehrgarh Period II (5,500-4,800 BC) and Merhgarh Period III (4,800-3,500 BC), known as the ceramic Neolithic and chalcolithic. Pottery, including items known as the ed-Dur vessels, originated in regions of the Saraswati River / Indus River and were found in a number of sites in the Indus Civilization.

3. Early Islamic pottery followed the forms of the regions which the Muslims conquered. Eventually, however, there was cross-fertilization between the regions. One major emphasis in ceramic development in the Muslim world was the use of tile and decorative tilework.

WHAT WASN’T SAID:

1. That Muslims were neither the first nor the only merchants to travel the seas.

2. That the Mediterranean Jews were responsible for opening up these trade routes.

FACTS:

1. Mediterranean Jews were entrepreneurs who controlled much of the trade in the region and developed the economies of those nations, which included Alexandria’s shipping; Syria’s markets; Beirut’s silk-production industry and textile dyeing; and the glass factories, with bead shapes and colorations that are traced to Near Eastern Jewish glass designs.

2. Persian/Jewish traders pioneered the route from the Near East to Kaifeng, then capital of Imperial China, 1700 years before Marco Polo set out on his journey from Venice to China.

3. Interestingly, a saying attributed to Marco Polo is: “The militant Muslim is the person who beheads the infidel, while the moderate Muslim holds the feet of the victim.”

Along another Silk Road

1.The Chinese systems (Buddhism and Confucianism) fused with Korea and Japan, creating a Golden Age, which included the construction of pagodas and temples.

2. Products of the Silk Road were found at a Buddhist Temple site in Korea: bronze iron scissors, glass Buddha beads, terra cotta figures, jade ornaments, bronze buckles, images and bells, pottery, metalworking. The Middle Kingdom (Korea) became proficient at making iron blades and tools, 500 – 400 BCE.

3. Japanese had imports from Silla of perfume, medicine, cosmetics, fabric-dyeing materials, metallic goods, musical instruments, carpets, measuring tool; silk came to Japan in 306 CE. Buddhism became Japan’s state religion in 372 CE.

4. Korea’s Koryu Dynasty (935-1392) had the world’s first metal-printing technology before Gutenberg; the world’s oldest printed book, the Jikji; the world’s oldest surviving complete transcription of the Buddhist cantons; the world-famous Celadon pottery; and development of Buddhism throughout the peninsula.