The Abode of Water: Shipwreck Evidence and the Maritime Circulation of Medicine Between Iran and China in the 9th Through 14th Centuries

Abstract

This dissertation traces the role of Persian travelers and physicians in the maritime exchange of medical goods and knowledge between Iran and China between the ninth through the fourteenth centuries, and the afterlife of that exchange in modern museums. The Maritime Silk Road was a cosmopolitan network of premodern trade arteries linking the Far East and Southeast Asia to the Middle East by sea. The long-standing cultural and economic exchange across these thoroughfares dramatically expanded the pharmaceutical ingredients and medicinal recipes available to physicians practicing across the littorals of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea and facilitated the intellectual engagement of scholars with medical theories from afar. Drawing from an archive of shipwreck artifacts that includes medical goods, herbs, trade wares, and the personal effects of seafarers interpreted alongside written accounts of sea travel, medical and philosophical texts, tomb inscriptions, and architecture in port cities, this dissertation explores how the maritime journey of Persian travelers to China influenced the epistemology and practice of Persian medicine.

The first chapter addresses the current state of Southeast Asian shipwreck archaeology and traces the trajectories of medical, scientific, and related shipwreck and navigational artifacts within Western museum collections. Chapter two introduces the historical context in which Persian merchants moved in Middle Period China and initiates a discussion of hybridity and resilience. The burning and reconstruction of the Hangzhou Phoenix mosque provides the narrative frame in which repeated outbreaks of violence in Tang and Song port cities are discussed as an analog to theories of the body and disease. Migration, hybridization, and medical collecting are examined as social and medical practices of resilience. The chapter uses archaeological evidence from port cities and the Belitung shipwreck with a narrative account of the massacre of foreign merchants in Guangzhou to situate the early maritime migration of Persian merchants to China within the changing tides of the Tang and Song periods. The third chapter analyzes the maritime trade routes as sites of spiritual and physical risk, humoral vulnerability, and initiation by examining Zoroastrian, Buddhist, and Islamic cosmologies of water and migration evident in religious rituals, medical instructions for seafarers, and the personal effects and crew supplies recovered from the Belitung, Intan, Java Sea, and Pulau Buaya wrecks. These materials are interpreted in light of reflections on the maritime life by travelers who survived the journey to China, leaving behind a ninth-century artistic depiction of a shipwreck, a narrative account, and inscriptions on the tombstones of merchants. Chapter four analyzes the medicines and medical material culture recovered from the Beliting, Java Sea, Intan, Pulau Buaya, and Quanzhou wreck sites within the framework of Persian humoral medicine. The final chapter examines the Tansūqnāma, a fourteenth-century Persian translation of Chinese medical texts, in light of the longue durée of medical exchange between China and Iran and changes to social hierarchies throughout the Mongol Empire that drastically changed the position of Persian merchants in China.