Pre-modern cultural diffusion across civilizations took centuries to complete.

Evidence

Ideas and technology moved from civilization to civilization, but it often took centuries. Perhaps the most important cultural diffusion not the result of conquest was the spread of Buddhism to China, which occurred about six hundred years after its origin in northern India. Printing was invented in China in the eighth century A.D. and movable type in the eleventh century, but this technology only reached Europe in the fifteenth century. Paper was introduced into China in the second century A.D., came to Japan in the seventh century, and was diffused westward to Central Asia in the eighth century, North Africa in the tenth, Spain in the twelfth, and northern Europe in the thirteenth. Another Chinese invention, gunpowder, made in the ninth century, disseminated to the Arabs a few hundred years later, and reached Europe in the fourteenth century. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 134

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete diffusion timelines resonate with the tech-timeline debates in the reader’s knowledge base about transmission lags between inventions and adopters. — connects to: Cultural mediation once worked through latency and obscurity, now through speed. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 841