Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening depending on when you are reading this blog. Today I am looking at a documentary on the Silk Road. This is the second episode in How the Silk Road Made the World series. This episode is called Light from Darkness. The run time for this documentary is 52:14.
This episode kicks off with the English defeating the French at the Battle of Crecy. The English are using a new invention that was imported from China on the Silk Road: gunpowder. Two thousand kilometers from Crecy in Caffa, another battle is looming. The Mongols are sieging the City of Caffa a Silk Road trading post. The city had held out for two years. Suddenly the Mongol army collapsed as a result of a mysterious disease. The Mongols tossed the corpses over the city walls and the residents died as a result of this disease. Soon this disease started spreading throughout Europe: The Black Death. In under a decade, one-third of Europe’s population was decimated. Today, scientists believe that the Black Death was spread through disease-ridden fleas that traveled on the backs of rodents. Not only did the Silk Road promote an exchange of trade and technology but disease. However, there is a sudden transition as to the crops that were transported. It made the documentary feel disjointed going from disease to food corps. Maybe the filmmakers should have changed the order of the documentary between crop and disease exchange. The archeological records document the arrival of Chinese Millett to Europe. However, it is not clear how or why this millet was transported from China to Europe. At least until discoveries in China lead to the conclusion that Millet farmers were seeking water. In addition to the transport of Millet to the West, Europe sent wheat to China. This would have changed farming dynamics in both Europe and China. Millet requires a shorter growing season in comparison to wheat, so in Europe, farmers could sneak in another crop before winter. Like Secrets of the Castle, this is another documentary that highlights that people moved more than you thought they did. There is a continued discussion on how crops moved across the Silk Road as well. This discussion centers on a Silk Road post. This post was a cosmopolitan post. The toilet paper was discovered in this post. The Chinese people would use a cloth-wrapped stick to wipe themselves. Scientists have studied the sticks and the cloth around the sticks to discover many different organisms. This leads to a discussion on the Chinese Liver Fluke and this was a demonstration of how humans could carry diseases long distances. This leads to a discovery in Germany. A mass grave with four hundred people was discovered. Why were these people buried in one place? There was one clue discovered: the people were buried in the Sixth Century. The Plague of Justinian was ravaging the known world. About half the people died. There were so many corpses nobody knew how or where to bury them. Eventually, the bodies were thrown into watch towers and sealed off. The plague arrived in Constantinople from Egypt on ships. A scientist examines the bones from the grave, looking for more clues about the Justinian Plague. Perhaps the bones can tell what the disease was. So where did this disease come from? There is a return to the discussion on the Black Death and how it came to Europe from Central Asia. It swept through Europe. Nobody would have known what to do to combat this disease. Physicians were confused as to treat it. Did people fleeing from the Black Death cause it to spread even faster? To learn more about the Silk Road continue to watch this documentary. The discussion on crop and food movement does not seem to fit in with this documentary because it focused on the spread of disease and bacteria. If there was more evidence about crop movement, that discussion would have been better served by a separate episode, leaving the focus on disease. The recreations were done well and the participants spoke well on the subject. I would put this on my potential list to show to a history classroom and would be using this documentary for research purposes.
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The purpose of this blog is to share information on what can be used in a classroom, private school, or home school setting as well as serve as a portfolio of my personal and professional work. The reviews are my opinions and should be treated as such. I just want to provide a tool for teachers to select documentaries for their classrooms. |