The various Eurasian civilizations had relations with
each other even
in ancient times. Shang chariots imply some kind of contact with the
Near East; the alphabet spread outward from the Near East to the shores
of the Atlantic and the Pacific; a Roman medallion of the second
century A.D. found its way to what is now Vietnam; paper made its way
from China through the Islamic world to Europe.
Examples of this kind can easily be multiplied, and
they became more
frequent as time passed. But this was cross- cultural seepage; it was
not a flood capable of sweeping away the profound differences that
separated the civilizations of Eurasia and gave them their distinct
identities.
An altogether more drastic way of changing cultural
landscapes is
conquest. What, then, were the prospects for the cultural unification
of Eurasia by the sword? The obvious thing to look for here would be a
single Eurasian civilization with the will and the way to conquer the
others. But the military history of the classic Eurasian civilizations
did not point in this direction. There was no lack of states of
imperial dimensions built up through conquest, but for the most part
they retained a firmly regional character. The major exception was the
career of Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C., which led to
the imposition of a Greek elite culture on much of the Near East. But
his conquests did not go much farther. His invasion of India did not
amount to more than an incursion, though Greeks later ruled some
territory in the northwest. China was beyond his horizon and neither he
nor his successors ever conquered the western Mediterranean.
