Mountains, Deserts, and Oceans — Walls That Shape Nations

Why It Matters

In the last lesson you learned that rivers bring civilizations together. Today you are going to learn the opposite lesson: some parts of the earth keep civilizations apart. Huge mountain ranges, endless deserts, and wide oceans act as walls. People on one side of a wall develop one way. People on the other side develop another way. Over centuries, those small starting differences grow into enormous gaps: different languages, different religions, different tools, different ways of thinking.

Consider this: why are Chinese civilization and Indian civilization so different from each other, even though they are neighbors? They are right next to each other on a world map. You might think that two peoples living that close would borrow from each other constantly until they became almost the same. They did not. They remained profoundly different for thousands of years. The reason is that between them stand the tallest mountains on earth — the Himalayas. You cannot walk across the Himalayas. You cannot take an army across them. You can barely take a messenger across them. For most of history, the Himalayas meant that Chinese and Indian civilizations could only trade a little, fight rarely, and influence each other at the edges. They remained separate worlds with their own logic.

Now consider the opposite: why did ancient Greek and Phoenician and Egyptian civilizations influence each other so much? Because the Mediterranean Sea, while big, is not a wall. It is a highway. Anyone with a boat could sail across it. The Greeks learned from the Egyptians, the Phoenicians taught the Greeks to write, the Romans inherited from everybody. The Mediterranean was a connecting sea, not a separating one. Small bodies of water connect. Huge bodies of water divide.

The same goes for deserts. The Sahara — that enormous stretch of sand across North Africa — kept sub-Saharan African civilizations and Mediterranean civilizations largely separated for most of history. Not totally. Brave traders crossed on camels. Some ideas filtered through. But the Sahara was a wall just as much as the Himalayas were, even though it was made of sand instead of stone. A person on foot with a horse could not cross it. An army could barely try.

If you want to understand why different parts of the world developed different cultures — why Europeans and Chinese ended up with such different languages, foods, beliefs, and ways of living — the answer is almost always: there was a wall between them. Find the wall. Name the wall. Then you understand the difference.

Pattern

The Mountain Between the Monks

Long ago, there was a young Buddhist monk named Thongjen who lived in a monastery on the southern slopes of the Himalayan mountains, in a valley in what is now Nepal. His teacher was an old monk named Phurbu, who had spent his entire life studying and copying sacred texts. Thongjen loved the monastery. He loved the smell of butter lamps in the morning and the low sound of chanting that echoed off the stone walls. But he had one burning question, and he could not stop asking it.

'Teacher,' he said one day, 'on the other side of these mountains, there are people who also follow the Buddha's teachings. They live in a place called Tibet, and beyond that, China. I have heard that they have different scriptures than ours. Different prayers. Different ways of meditating. How can that be? We all follow the same Buddha. Why are we so different from them?'

Phurbu put down his ink brush and looked at his student for a long moment. Then he walked to the doorway of the monastery and gestured for Thongjen to follow him outside. He pointed up — straight up, into the sky.

'What do you see?' he asked.

Thongjen looked. All he could see was the face of a great mountain, rising impossibly high above them, its top lost in clouds. Snow clung to its upper slopes. The wind coming off it was cold even in summer.

'The mountain,' Thongjen said.

'How long would it take you to walk to the other side?'

'Weeks,' Thongjen said. 'Maybe months. If I did not die in the snow or fall into a ravine.'

'And what would you carry with you?'

'A little food. A robe. My begging bowl. Not much.'

'Could you carry a stack of books?'

Thongjen imagined trying to climb that mountain with a heavy bundle of scriptures on his back. He shook his head.

'Could you carry a large bronze statue of the Buddha?'

'Of course not.'

'Could you carry a teacher?'

Thongjen laughed, then stopped laughing, because he realized his teacher was making a point.

'The mountain,' Phurbu said quietly, 'decides what can cross it. A single traveler with light bags, maybe. A whole temple's worth of books and statues and teachers, never. So when Buddhism came over the mountain to Tibet, it came slowly, in pieces, carried by a few brave monks who could only bring what they could walk with. Everything else they had to rebuild on the other side, using whatever was already there. Different wood. Different stone. Different languages. Different neighbors. By the time Buddhism had been in Tibet for a few hundred years, it had grown into something its own, shaped by what survived the journey.'

Thongjen was quiet for a long time, looking up at the mountain.

'The mountain did not just stand between us,' he finally said. 'It shaped what grew on each side.'

'That is what mountains do,' said Phurbu. 'And deserts, and oceans, and any wall large enough that people cannot easily cross it. They do not stop everything. They decide what gets through.'

Vocabulary

natural barrier

A large geographic feature — like a mountain range, desert, or ocean — that makes it hard for people, armies, or goods to cross. Natural barriers separate groups of people and preserve their differences.

range (mountain range)

A long chain of connected mountains. The Himalayas, the Alps, the Rockies, and the Andes are all mountain ranges.

isolation

The state of being cut off from other people or places. Natural barriers often cause isolation, which makes a civilization develop in its own unique way.

peninsula

A piece of land surrounded by water on three sides. Peninsulas are often partly isolated, which affects the cultures that develop on them. Italy, Greece, and Korea are all peninsulas.

filter

Something that lets some things through but keeps other things out. Natural barriers act as filters — a few travelers or ideas may cross, but most cannot.

Guided Teaching

Let us think about this carefully, because the idea of a 'wall' in geography is one of the most useful tools you can carry as a historian.

Start with a simple question: why is the world not all the same? Why do different groups of people speak different languages, wear different clothes, eat different food, and believe different things? After thousands of years of trade and travel, shouldn't everything have blended together into one big global culture?

The honest answer is: it has blended, but very slowly, and mostly recently. For most of history, people did not travel far. Crossing a large mountain range took weeks and killed many of those who tried. Crossing a desert required special knowledge, animals, and supplies that most people did not have. Crossing an ocean required ships that could handle open water — and for most of history, only a few civilizations had those ships. So most people lived their whole lives within a few dozen miles of where they were born. They married the people nearby. They learned the language nearby. They worshipped the gods nearby. Walls of geography kept everyone in small worlds.

Anywhere there was a wall, the people on each side became different. That is the basic pattern. If you could not easily travel between two valleys, the people in one valley would develop one dialect, one set of customs, one way of life, and the people in the next valley would develop another. Multiply this over thousands of years and millions of people, and you get the world we live in — a world of different cultures, different languages, different religions, mostly corresponding to the walls that kept them apart.

Some walls are more final than others. A small river separates two villages a little — the villages will have slightly different dialects, maybe. A mountain range separates whole nations — the nations will have completely different languages and cultures. An ocean separates continents — the continents can develop totally independent civilizations that have never heard of each other.

Consider what happened when the walls were finally broken. For most of human history, the Americas and Europe might as well have been on different planets. No regular contact. No shared diseases. No shared plants or animals. Totally separate civilizations developing on their own. Then in 1492, ships crossed the wall of the Atlantic Ocean for the first time in any large way. Within a century, the entire world changed — new foods, new diseases, new wars, new empires. When a wall comes down, the changes are enormous, because suddenly two worlds that developed separately can influence each other.

Here is a useful habit: whenever you look at a civilization or a culture, ask 'what walls are around it, and what walls are not?' A civilization with walls on every side will be isolated — it may last a long time but it will not have much outside influence. A civilization with walls on some sides and openings on others will be shaped by who it can reach through the openings. A civilization with no walls at all will be constantly mixed with its neighbors.

Egypt had walls — the desert on two sides, the sea on another — and that is why it lasted three thousand years with a consistent culture. China had walls — the Himalayas, the Gobi Desert, and the Pacific — and that is why Chinese civilization is the longest continuous civilization on earth. Greece had some walls (mountains) but also openings (the sea), which is why Greece developed as many independent city-states that fought each other but also traded aggressively with everyone else. These are not coincidences. The walls explain almost everything.

For Discussion

1. 1.What are the three main kinds of natural barriers discussed in this lesson? Can you think of a fourth kind?
2. 2.In the story, why did Buddhism become different in Tibet than it was in Nepal, even though both places had the same starting religion?
3. 3.Why do you think the people living on two sides of a big mountain range usually speak different languages?
4. 4.Why is a small stream not much of a wall, but a huge ocean is? What's the difference in how they divide people?
5. 5.What was one huge change that happened when the wall of the Atlantic Ocean was first crossed in 1492?
6. 6.Can you think of a place where a natural wall stopped an army from invading? (Hint: think about Russia in winter, or Switzerland in the Alps.)
7. 7.Are there any walls in your own life that separate you from people who are different — even if they are not made of stone or water?

Practice

Name the Walls

1. 1.Get a world map. Look at it carefully.
2. 2.Pick any two civilizations or countries from different parts of the world. Don't think about them yet — just pick based on where they are.
3. 3.Now identify what natural barriers — if any — separate them. Mountains? A desert? An ocean? An ice field? Nothing at all?
4. 4.Predict: based on the walls (or lack of walls) between them, do you think these two places would have developed very differently from each other, or similarly? Why?
5. 5.If you can, look up some actual information about both places. Were your predictions right? What did you guess, and what surprised you?
6. 6.Write one paragraph at the bottom: 'The walls between these two places are _______. Because of those walls, their cultures ended up _______.'

Memory Questions

1. 1.What are natural barriers, and what three kinds were discussed in this lesson?
2. 2.Why do mountains, deserts, and oceans divide civilizations rather than connect them?
3. 3.What does the Himalayas example tell us about why Chinese and Indian civilizations are so different?
4. 4.What happened when the wall of the Atlantic Ocean was finally crossed in 1492?
5. 5.What does 'isolation' mean, and how is it related to natural barriers?
6. 6.Give one example from this lesson of a civilization that lasted a long time partly because of its walls.