Where were the Silk Routes? (Silk Routes Podcast Ep. #1)

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So much of world history has been oriented around something called the Silk Road, or the Silk Routes. Where were the silk route and we do we still talk about them today?

In the ancient world, during the first few centuries of the Common Era, much of Europe, Asia, and Africa was divided into countless kingdoms and larger empires that cultivated trade relations with one another. To the west were empires like the Roman Empire, which stretched from Spain and Morocco to Egypt, Greece and Syria. To the east were empires like imperial China during the Tang dynasty. In Africa, there were empires like the Empire of Ghana, which connected places like Nigeria on the West African coast to Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, and Algeria in the Roman Empire.

What connected all of these kingdoms and empires from West to East were a series of trade routes that crossed deserts, oceans, forests, mountains, grasslands, and seas. One of these trade routes was the so-called Silk Route, which was really a series of routes connecting Europe and Africa with the kingdoms of China and India by way of the Middle East and Central Asia.

These routes only came to be known as the Silk Routes in modern history in the 1800s as historians looked back to the past to understand how different cities conducted trade with one another before the advent of modern oceanic shipping technology and aviation technology. The writer who coined the term "silk road" appears to have been a writer named Ferdinand von Richthofen, a

Central Asian monks from a cave fresco (Turpan)

German traveler and geographer who used the term “silk road” in 1877 to describe the pathways of goods moving Europe and East Asia. Ferdinand von Richthofen also used the term "silk routes" because he was aware that there were many roads connecting West and East in the ancient world.

Of course there were many roads, because there were many cities and centers of commerce, many of which are still important centers of commerce today: There was Roman Constantinople, now known as Istanbul on the western coast of modern Turkey. There was also Alexandria in Egypt, Beirut in Lebanon, Aleppo in Syria, Persepolis close to modern Shiraz near Iran's southern coast, Seleucia in Iraq on the outskirts of what is not Baghdad, the Sogdian cities of Samarqand and Bukhara in what is now Uzbekistan, Kashgar on the road to Xian and Nanjing in China, and across the Sea of Japan, Nara close to Osaka and Kyoto.

It turns out that in those days, ancient peoples had managed to cultivate sophisticated transportation technologies to buy and sell a wide variety of commodities, from gold and silver, dried fruit and grain, fur and wool and precious stones like jade. In many cases merchants and their families moved to new cities across the silk routes for business opportunities and brought not only these commodities for sale but also their lifestyles, including their clothing fashions and tastes in luxury and leisure, like the taste for drinking tea. And with tea and conversation came an exchange of ideas about the world and ethics, ideas about virtue and what it meant to live a happy and fulfilling life with a sense of purpose and meaning. In other words, there was an exchange of philosophies and worldviews--people talked about conceptions like the mind and its relationship with the body and the idea of the human spirit, and what distinguished the human spirit from nature and the life of plants and animals. And it was through this exchange of ideas and even written texts that specific philosophies and spiritual traditions spread across the ancient silk routes---some people called themselves Christians, others Muslims, there Jewish people and Buddhist people and a whole array of traditions, and in some cases these traditions became popular because a particular king or queen adopted the tradition as a kind of royal philosophy, and it was through this pattern that some of the major philosophies and religions of the modern world became intertwined with peoples customs and lifestyles and cultural practices and way of life--practices like choices of cuisine, ways of helping others, ways of improving health, taking care of the elderly, and the like.

What allowed all of this exchange and movement of businesspeople and their families and the commodities they bought and sold and the ideas they shared was the transportation technology of the ancient world. Before modern airplanes and automobiles were two other technologies that are still important in modern commerce:

The first is the technology associated with riding fast-moving four-legged creatures like horse and camels--we can call this equestrian technology, and it includes the saddle and its counterpart, the stirrup: taken together, the saddle and the stirrup allowed people to work with domesticated horses and camels to transport commodities in caravans -- or in other words, large traveling groups where merchants used horses and camels both to carry commodities and also to protect those commodities from raiders, who were like pirates on land. The second technology was associated with the sea, what we might call maritime or nautical technology. This technology includes a set of navigational tools for boats, especially sails, oars including large steering oars, and eventually, the underwater rudder for complex navigation of high-walled shipping vessels. All of this technology allowed merchants to navigate rivers, enormous lakes, seas, and even oceans, and the different arrangements of these maritime technologies with experiments in boat design eventually paved the way for the Age of Exploration.

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Summary of Bonus Episode #1

(Bonus Episode on Patreon)

Q & A:

1. Why do we still talk about it today?

China

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