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This paper was presented at the workshop “Goods, Languages, and Cultures along the Silk Road” at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, October 18 and 19, 2019. While many contributions to the workshop focused on recent developments in China’s current “New Silk Road” politics, on forms of communication, and on contemporary exchange of goods and ideas across so-called Silk Road countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia and with China, this short essay focuses on the history of the so-called Silk Road as an important transport connection. Although what is now called the “Silk Road” was not a pure East-West binary in antiquity but rather developed into a network that also led to the South and North, the focus here will be on describing the East-West connection.
I will start with a few brief remarks on the origins of the connection referred to as the Silk Road and will then introduce the different great empires that shaped this connection between antiquity and the Middle Ages through military campaigns and by using it as a trading route and network. But the Silk Road was by no means only of economic and military importance. Its significance for the exchange and dissemination of religions should also be mentioned. This paper does not detail the importance of the numerous individual religions in the area of the Silk Road but discusses the phenomenon of the spread of religions and the loss of some of their own distinguishing characteristics in this spread, a phenomenon that could be described as a “unity of opposites” (coincidentia oppositorum). Finally, the essay asks who, in the face of the regular replacement of powers, held sovereignty over the transport connection: the subject (in the form of the empires) or the object (in the form of the road).
Who were the main protagonists of and along the Silk Road in the course of history? Who were the people who became the great powers of the ancient Silk Road, building up the material route, governing parts of it, and organizing trade and relationships from the far East to the extreme West of the Eurasian continent?
The merchant language of the Georgian Jews deserves scholarly attention for several reasons. The political and social developments of the last fifty years have caused the extinction of this very interesting form of communication, as most Georgian Jews have emigrated to Israel. In a natural interaction, the type of language described in this article can be found very rarely, if at all. Records of this communication have been preserved in various contexts and received different levels of scholarly attention. Our interest concerns the linguistic aspects as well as the classification.
In the following paper we argue that the specific merchant language of Georgian Jews belongs to the pragmatic phenomenon of “very indirect language.” The use of mostly Hebrew lexemes in Georgian conversation leads to an unfounded assumption that the speakers are equally competent in Hebrew and Georgian. It is reported that a high level of linguistic competence in Hebrew does not guarantee understanding of the Jewish merchant language. In the Georgian context, the decisive factors are membership in the professional interest group of merchants and residential membership in the Jewish community. These factors seem to be equivalent, because Jewish members of other professional groups (and those from outside the particular urban residential area) have difficulties in following the language that are similar to those of the Georgian majority. We describe the pragmatic structure of interactions conducted with the help of the merchant language and take into account the purpose of the language’s use or the intention of the speakers. Relevant linguistic examples are analysed and their sociocultural contexts explained.
European scholars, colonial administrators, missionaries, bibliophiles and others were the main collectors of Malay books in the nineteenth century, both in manuscript or printed form. Among these persons were many well-known names in the field of Malay literature and culture like Raffles, Marsden, Crawfurd, Klinkert, van der Tuuk, von Dewall, Roorda, Favre, Maxwell, Overbeck, Wilkinson and Skeat, to name only a few. Their collections were often handed over to public libraries where they form an important part of the relevant Oriental or Southeast Asian manuscript collections.
Therefore the knowledge of the intellectual culture of the Malay Peninsula and the Malay World in general depended very much on these manuscripts and printed books collected often by chance or in a rather unsystematic way. The collections reflect in a strong sense the interests of its administrative or philologist collectors: court histories, genealogies of aristocratic lineages, law collections (adat-istiadat as well as undangundang) or prose belles-lettres build a vast bulk of these collections, while Islamic religious texts and poetry forms popular in the 19th century (especially syair) are fairly underrepresented. Malay manuscripts and books located in religious institutions like mosques or pondok/pesantren schools have not been searched for; until today there are more or less no systematic studies of these collections. As in some statistics religious texts build about 20% of all existing Malay manuscripts, their neglect by Europeans scholars leads to a distorted view of the literary culture in the Malay language.