This passage from Peter Brown's "The Rise of Western Christendom" describes cultural exchanges between Asia, Europe, and the Mediterranean a few centuries later

This passage from Peter Brown's "The Rise of Western Christendom" describes cultural exchanges between Asia, Europe, and the Mediterranean a few centuries later: By the year 700 Christian communities were scattered throughout the known world, from Ireland to Central Asia. Archaeologists have discovered fragments of Christian texts which speak of basic Christian activities pursued in the same manner from the Atlantic to the edge of China. Both in County Antrim, in Northern Ireland, and in Panjikent, east of Samarkand, fragmentary copybooks from around A.D. 700 – wax on wood for Ireland, broken potsherds for Central Asia – ­contain lines copied from the Psalms of David. In both milieux, something very similar was ­happening. Schoolboys, whose native languages were Irish in Antrim and Soghdian in Panjikent, tried to make their own, by this ­laborious method, the Latin and the Syriac versions, respectively, of what had become a truly international, sacred text – the “Holy Scriptures” of the Christians.