Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
century B.C. This paper, made of pounded hemp fibers, is thick and
not very smooth. This crude but very strong paper apparently had
uses other than as a medium for writing. In fact, early paper in China
was so durable that it was sometimes used as clothing and even light
body armor.
The oldest paper on which writing survives dates to A.D 110 of Han
China and records the rebellion of a frontier tribe. After paper replaced
silk and bamboo as the most common material on which to write, the
bark of the mulberry tree became the most popular pounded fiber for
making paper. But even this wood-fiber paper was so tough that it
found use as clothing, curtains, and mosquito nets. The Chinese were
also the first in the world to promote and practice the use of paper
for reasons of personal hygiene. For centuries the Chinese carefully
guarded the secret of papermaking, but eventually it spread to the
Near East and still later to Europe. Today it is sometimes supposed
that when Arab armies from the Abbasid Caliphate defeated Tang
dynasty forces in the eighth century A.D. at the Talas River (near
modern Uzbekistan), Chinese prisoners who knew the prized secret
of papermaking shared it with their captors in Baghdad.
Stirrups are such commonplace devices today that it is difficult to
imagine riding horses without them. Ironically, even though the
Chinese were not a great horse-riding people, they were the first in
the world to invent stirrups, in the third century A.D. Centuries before
this, the great mounted warriors of Alexander the Great and the
Romans rode their horses without them and were jostled about on
horseback with no platform from which to stand up and stabilize their
rides. These warriors had to hang on to the horse's mane to steady
themselves, and often they had trouble mounting their horses. Perhaps
because they were not great horsemen themselves, the Chinese sought
a remedy for these difficulties and eventually devised a very simple
and effective one. Chinese stirrups, made of cast metal and thus quite
durable, hung in suspension from the saddle and constituted a platform
on which the rider could stand and steady himself. Being able to do this
greatly increased the rider's stability and enabled him to be much more
accurate with a bow and arrow. Thus the stirrup, originally developed
for peaceful purposes, quickly found military application and greatly
increased the lethality of the mounted archer. Pastoral nomads were
quick to note the utility of these simple devices and soon adopted them
for their own use. Because the stirrups were made into solid shapes,
they did not flex and thus bind the feet of the rider the way some early
rope predecessors of the stirrup had done among certain pastoral
nomadic tribes. The earliest mention of the stirrup we have in the
