IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 212

At its height in the thirteenth century the Mongol empire stretched from Korea to the edges of Hungary, and the speed with which its rulers could send orders across that distance was one of the secrets of its power. The system that made this possible was the yam, a chain of relay stations along the main roads. Persian and Chinese writers treated it as one of the empire's greatest achievements, and European travellers described it with astonishment. Its principle was simple. A message was carried not by one rider but by a succession of them, each with a fresh horse waiting.

The network is usually attributed to Genghis Khan, who in the early thirteenth century ordered that stations be built along the principal routes of his new empire, and it was extended by his son Ögedei. The Secret History of the Mongols, the empire's own chronicle, records Ögedei listing the creation of a postal system among the achievements of his reign. Historians read such passages as evidence of how seriously the khans regarded the movement of information, which was as important to them as the movement of armies.

The stations themselves, known in Mongolian as jam, were placed at intervals of roughly a day's ride and were far more than stables. A traveller who arrived with the right authority could expect a bed, food and a change of horses; the larger stations are said to have resembled small inns, with storehouses and quarters for officials.

The most detailed description from outside the Mongol world comes from Marco Polo, who travelled through Asia in the 1270s and later dictated an account of what he had seen. Polo wrote that the stations stood about twenty-five miles apart, and that at each of them some four hundred horses were kept in readiness. That figure is implausibly large, and later writers have sometimes repeated it without question; the truth was probably a good deal more modest. His account is nevertheless valuable, because it describes a system that no European state possessed.

Two objects held the system together. The first was the paiza, a tablet of gold or silver inscribed with the khan's command, which was issued to envoys, officials and favoured merchants. No one could demand a horse, a meal or a bed at a station without showing one. The second was the bell. Riders are said to have worn a belt of bells, whose sound travelled ahead of them across the quiet steppe, so that a new mount and a hot meal were ready by the time they clattered into the yard. The changeover itself took only moments.

How fast could a message travel? Medieval accounts claimed that a courier might cover in a single day a distance that would otherwise take ten, but historians treat such figures with caution. Even so, a rider changing horses every few hours could maintain a pace that no single horse could sustain, and news and orders moved across the empire faster than anywhere else in the world at that time. The distance between stations was measured in the time a horse could gallop without being ruined, and everything else in the system followed from that calculation.

The network served many purposes at once. It carried the khan's orders to provincial governors, brought back reports and tax returns, and moved ambassadors between courts. It also made long-distance trade easier, since merchants travelling with the right documents could use the stations as they moved goods along the routes that later became known as the Silk Road. Yet the cost was borne by the populations along those routes. Villages were obliged to supply horses, fodder, food and labour, and a district that could not meet the demand faced punishment; the burden could ruin a poor area.

Under Kublai Khan, who completed the conquest of China in 1279, the system reached its greatest size. The Yuan dynasty maintained relays of horses, oxen and boats, with river and canal routes served by vessels as well as roads served by mounts, and separate arrangements for letters that had to travel only a short distance. Certain religious houses were granted exemption from the obligation to provide for travellers, an exemption they guarded carefully. Officials toured the stations to check that horses were in good condition and that records were kept.

No system of this kind could outlast the state that paid for it. The Mongol realms were struck by plague in the 1340s, and the resulting deaths deprived the stations of the people who had worked them and the villages of the surplus that had fed them. The empire itself divided into rival khanates whose rulers fought one another, and the roads lost the protection that had made them safe. By the early fifteenth century the yam had broken up, and the great routes across Asia were travelled less and less.

Something of the system survived in the language of the regions it had touched. The Russians, who lived for two centuries under Mongol rule, took the word into their own tongue and called their imperial post the yam, and Russian coachmen were still known as yamshchiks in the nineteenth century. Few medieval institutions were copied so widely, or for so long. Later travellers crossed the same steppes with far less support, and the routes that had once carried orders across a continent became slow and uncertain.

Experimental archaeology is the practice of testing ideas about the past by trying to do what past people did: building the same structures, making the same objects, or performing the same tasks with the same materials. The term itself is loose, covering everything from a five-minute experiment with a flint to a project lasting decades. It is not a new idea, but it became a recognised field in the 1960s. One of the first permanent centres opened at Lejre in Denmark in 1964, and comparable centres now exist in many countries.

The approach answers a problem that documents cannot solve. Written sources rarely describe how a roof was thatched or how much force a bow required, because such knowledge was ordinary and went without saying. Archaeologists who have tried to copy an object learn things that no drawing conveys: how long a task takes, how often tools break, how much fuel a kiln consumes. This practical, unspoken knowledge is often the most valuable result of an experiment, and it rarely appears in the final publication.

Butser Ancient Farm, established in Hampshire, England, in 1972 by the archaeologist Peter Reynolds, became the best-known British site of this kind. Reynolds built Iron Age roundhouses from timber, daub and thatch, and then lived with the consequences: roofs that leaked, hearths that smoked, floors that wore through. He also grew prehistoric crops and measured their yields, comparing different varieties of wheat and barley under conditions closer to those of the Iron Age than a modern farm. The roundhouses were not museum exhibits but working buildings, and the failures were as informative as the successes.

His experiments with grain storage were particularly influential. Prehistoric pits dug into chalk subsoil and then sealed have often been interpreted as granaries for keeping seed and food through the winter. Reynolds filled replica pits with grain and monitored them for months, finding that sealed grain kept far better than most specialists had expected, and that the carbon dioxide released by the grain itself discouraged insects and mould. The results did not prove that every pit was a store, but they showed that the interpretation was workable.

The most ambitious project of this kind is Guédelon, in Burgundy, where since 1997 a castle has been under construction using only the techniques and materials available in the thirteenth century. Stone is quarried and dressed on site, mortar is burnt from local limestone, and the ropes, carts and lifting gear are made by hand. Because building of this sort stopped centuries ago, nobody knows precisely how some of the work was done, and the masons at Guédelon must decide, try and revise. Every stage of the work is recorded, and the questions it raises are answered by practice rather than by argument.

Ships are another fruitful subject, since a vessel's shape implies claims about how it sailed. The Sea Stallion, a reconstruction of a Viking ship found in a Danish fjord and dated to around 1040, was sailed from Roskilde to Dublin in 2007 with a crew of about sixty. The voyage showed that such a ship could cross open sea, but it also produced unexpected findings about the number of rowers needed and the difficulty of handling the vessel in strong winds.

Yet a successful voyage proves less than it seems. Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947, in which a balsa raft drifted from Peru to the islands of Polynesia in 101 days, demonstrated that such a crossing was physically possible. It did not show that Polynesians had come from South America, which was Heyerdahl's argument; linguistic and genetic evidence has since pointed decisively to origins in Asia. Demonstrating that one route is possible says nothing about which route was taken.

Similar caution applies to objects. A modern flintknapper can produce a hand axe in a few minutes, and the result may look identical to one from half a million years ago. But the same shape can be reached by several different sequences of strikes, so the resemblance of the finished object does not establish how the original was made. Archaeologists therefore study the waste flakes as closely as the tool, and some have argued that the skill of the maker, rather than the shape, is the real subject.

Critics point to further weaknesses. The experimenter knows the answer in advance and may unconsciously work towards it; modern tools, adhesives and safety equipment change the task; a single attempt proves little, yet few experiments are repeated often enough to be reliable; and unsuccessful experiments, which may be the most informative, are less likely to be published. There is also the problem of the observer: a team building a roundhouse today has been trained in modern carpentry and will find solutions that Iron Age builders might never have considered.

Defenders reply that the purpose of such work is rarely to prove anything. Its value lies in narrowing the field of possibilities: an experiment can show that a method does not work, or that a task would require a hundred people rather than ten. Because it is visible and easily explained, it also draws the public into arguments about the past more effectively than a technical report, and a visitor who has watched a bronze being cast remembers how it was done long after forgetting a case of labelled objects. None of this settles the argument, but it explains why the argument keeps returning.

Ask a historian at a dinner party what would have happened if the Spanish Armada had landed, or if the German invasion of the Soviet Union had succeeded, and the answer will usually be a polite refusal to speculate. Yet the temptation is evidently hard to resist. Counterfactual history — the deliberate exploration of what did not happen — has a long and respectable pedigree. A collection published in 1931 under the title If It Had Happened Otherwise included an essay by Winston Churchill imagining a Confederate victory at Gettysburg, and the genre has flourished ever since in novels, films and best-selling popular history.

Serious historians have generally been uneasy about it. Their objections are not merely a matter of taste. Any historical event, they point out, is followed by an infinity of possible alternatives, and there is no evidence with which to choose between them: the archives record what happened, not what nearly happened. To explain the past, they argue, is to show why one thing led to another, and speculation about the routes not taken is at best decoration and at worst a distraction from that task.

The defence begins from a point that is difficult to dispute. Every causal statement in history carries a counterfactual inside it. To say that a famine caused a rebellion is to say that without the famine there would probably have been no rebellion; to say that a new weapon decided a war is to claim that the war would have gone differently without it. Causal reasoning of this kind is not an eccentric hobby but the ordinary grammar of historical explanation. The question, then, is not whether historians use counterfactuals, but whether they use them openly and carefully or smuggled in and unexamined. The historian Niall Ferguson made this argument at length in a collection of essays published in 1997 under the title Virtual History.

The most rigorous use of the technique has been quantitative. In a celebrated study published in 1964, the American economist Robert Fogel asked what the economy of the United States would have looked like in 1890 if the railways had never been built. He constructed a detailed model of a country served only by canals and roads, then compared the two. His conclusion, that railways had contributed far less to American growth than most historians assumed, was fiercely contested, and the argument went on for years. Whatever one thinks of the answer, the method was instructive: it forced historians to state precisely what they believed railways did.

What separates a serious counterfactual from a parlour game is discipline. The change must be a single, identifiable event, and everything else must be left as it was, because a second alteration makes the outcome impossible to attribute. The alternative must also be one that people at the time would have judged plausible; a world in which a medieval king commands an aeroplane is not a counterfactual but a fantasy. Finally, the consequences may be followed only as far as the surviving evidence allows, which is usually a few years and rarely a century. Beyond that point the exercise becomes uncheckable, and its conclusions reflect the writer's imagination rather than the past.

The popular form of the genre makes no such demands. Its purpose is entertainment, and it succeeds by inventing vivid worlds: a Europe ruled from Berlin, an America in which the South won its independence. Some of these works are clever and enjoyable, and a few are serious enough to make readers think about how fragile the present is. But the pleasures they offer are the pleasures of fiction. The reader is invited to admire the ingenuity of the construction, not to weigh the likelihood of the outcome, and the machinery of the plot does most of the work.

There is a subtler danger. A writer who rewrites the past usually has a lesson in mind, and the lesson tends to be the author's own politics in historical dress. If a single death is removed and everything improves, the reader is being told that one person mattered more than any structure or economy; if a single decision is reversed and everything collapses, the reader is being told that the decision was wise. Hindsight makes this worse. We know how the story ended, so the actual outcome looks inevitable and the alternatives look like accidents, though to those living through them the future was as open as our own.

The same reasoning is already used wherever responsibility is assigned. A public inquiry into a disaster asks whether the deaths would have occurred if the warning had been heeded, and the answer decides whether officials are blamed. Courts ask what a reasonable person would have done. Nobody calls these questions idle. They are asked because they have practical consequences, and because the evidence can be examined and disputed.

None of this makes counterfactual history a substitute for evidence, and the genre deserves much of the scorn it receives. But the choice between speculation and no speculation is a false one. Historians speculate whenever they say that one cause mattered more than another, and the honest response is to do it in the open, in narrow compass and under the discipline of the evidence. The test is simple: can the claim be checked? Where it can, counterfactual reasoning is one of the sharpest tools we have for judging why things happened as they did. Where it cannot, it is entertainment, and should be labelled as such.