We spent a lot of time on the Roman Empire, and in the highlighted yellow, you see the Roman Empire at roughly its maximum extent, and on this timeline, you see the Roman Kingdom, and then the Roman Republic, and then the Roman Empire, which ends in the fifth century, although the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, continues on for roughly another 1,000 years. Now, we also have depicted here a significant Persian Empire. You have the Parthian Empire, and they were preceded by the Seleucid Empire, and they were succeeded by the Sasanian Empire, but I have the Parthians depicted here on the timeline and on the map. I also show Han China, both the Eastern and Western Han dynasties you can see on this timeline as well, and in India, I show the Maurya Dynasty on the timeline. I don't depict it here on the map, but on the map, I show the Kushan Empire, and I also show it on the timeline. Now, the reason why I wanted to pick these empires at this specific time in the world is to highlight the fact that they weren't operating in complete isolation. In fact, as we get to the second and first century BCE, especially as we get into the Common Era, we start seeing a significant amount of trade and interaction between these empires, not to say that there wasn't trade and interaction before that time, but it started to get accelerated, and to a large degree, it got accelerated because you had these contiguous empires that at least within their borders were able to provide some level of stability for someone to travel across roads or travel across borders, and so you start to see the emergence of these trading networks.