Silk Road

The continental Silk Road diverges into North and South routes as it extends from the commercial centers of North China, the North route passing through the Bulgar-Kypchak zone to Eastern Europe and the Crimean peninsula, and from there across the Black Sea, Marmara Sea and the Balkans to Venice; the South Route passing through Turkestan-Khorasan, through Iran into Mesopotamia and Anatolia, and then through Antioch in Southern Anatolia into the Mediterranean Sea or through the Levant into Egypt and North Africa.

Origins

The Persian Royal Road, may have been in use as early as 3500 BC. By the time of Herodotus, (c. 475 BC) it ran some 2,857 km from the city of Susa on the lower Tigris to the port of Smyrna (modern Izmir in Turkey) on the Aegean Sea. It was maintained and protected by the Achaemenid empire and had postal stations and relays at regular intervals. By having fresh horses and riders ready at each relay, royal couriers could carry messages the entire distance in 9 days, though normal travellers took about three months. This Royal Road linked into many other routes. Some of these, such as the routes to India and Central Asia, were also protected by the Achaemenids, encouraging regular contact between India, Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean. There are accounts in Esther of dispatches being sent from Susa to provinces as far out as India and Cush during the reign of Xerxes.
Lapis lazuli was being traded from its only known source in the ancient world – Badakshan, in what is now northeastern Afghanistan – as far as Mesopotamia and Egypt by the second half of the fourth millennium BC. By the third millennium the trade was extended to Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in the Indus valley.
From the second millennium, nephrite jade was being traded from mines in the region of Yarkand and Khotan to China. Significantly, these mines were not very far from the lapis lazuli and spinel ("Balas Ruby") mines in Badakhshan and, although separated by the formidable Pamir mountains, routes across them were, apparently, in use from very early times.
When Alexander the Great's successors, the Ptolemies, took control of Egypt in 323 BC, they began to actively promote trade with Mesopotamia, India, and East Africa through their ports on the Red Sea coast, as well as overland. This was assisted by the active participation of a number of intermediaries, especially the Nabataeans and other Arabs.
Soon after the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BC, regular communications and trade between India, Southeast Asia, Sri Lanka, China, the Middle East, Africa and Europe blossomed on a scale never seen before. Land and maritime routes were closely linked and novel products, technologies and ideas began to spread across the continents of Europe, Asia and Africa. Intercontinental trade and communication became regular, organised, and protected by the ‘Great Powers’ of the day. These exchanges were critical not only for the development and flowering of the great civilisations of Rome, China and India, but they laid the foundations of our modern world. While the goods may have travelled the whole way, ancient trade was probably conducted over sections of the routes and it is probable that merchants and travellers very rarely, if ever, covered the whole distance between Europe, or the Middle East, and China, by land.

Some remnants of what was probably Chinese silk have been found in Egypt and dating as early as 1000 BC. Although silk may have been traded between the two ancient countries prior to 1000 BC, silk unfortunately degrades exceedingly rapidly, and we would likely have no trace of it today. Also, though the originating source seems reliably knowledgeable, we cannot double-check for accuracy, and so we cannot say for certain whether it was actually cultivated silk (which would almost certainly have come from China) that was discovered or a type of "wild silk," which might have come from the Mediterranean region or the Middle East.

king Euthydemus (230-200 BC) The first major step in opening the Silk Road between the East and the West came with the expansion of Alexander the Great deep into Central Asia, as far as Ferghana at the borders of the modern-day Xinjiang region of China, where he founded in 329 BC a Greek settlement in the city of Alexandria Eschate "Alexandria The Furthest", Khujand (also called Khozdent or Khojent - formely Leninabad), in the state of Tajikistan. The Greeks were to remain in Central Asia for the next three centuries, first through the administration of the Seleucid Empire, and then with the establishement of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom in Bactria. They kept expanding eastward, especially during the reign of Euthydemus (230-200 BC), who extended his control to Sogdiana, reaching and going beyond the city of Alexandria Eschate. There are indications that he may have led expeditions as far as Kashgar in Chinese Turkestan, leading to the first known contacts between China and the West around 200 BC. The Greek historian Strabo writes that "they extended their empire even as far as the Seres (China) and the Phryni" (Strabo XI.XI.I).

The next step came around 130 BC, with the embassies of the Han Dynasty to Central Asia, following the reports of the ambassador Zhang Qian (who was originally sent to obtain an alliance with the Yuezhi against the Xiong-Nu, in vain). The Chinese emperor Wudi became interested in developing commercial relationship with the sophisticated urban civilizations of Ferghana, Bactria and Parthia: “The Son of Heaven on hearing all this reasoned thus: Ferghana (Dayuan) and the possessions of Bactria (Daxia) and Parthia (Anxi) are large countries, full of rare things, with a population living in fixed abodes and given to occupations somewhat identical with those of the Chinese people, but with weak armies, and placing great value on the rich produce of China” Hou Hanshu (Later Han History).
(1st-2nd century CE)

The Chinese were also strongly attracted by the tall and powerful horses in the possession of the Dayuan (named "Heavenly horses"), which were of capital importance in fighting the nomadic Xiongnu. The Chinese subsequently sent numerous embassies, around ten every year, to these countries and as far as Seleucid Syria. “Thus more embassies were dispatched to Anxi [Parthia], Yancai [who later joined the Alans], Lijian [Syria under the Seleucids], Tiaozhi [Chaldea], and Tianzhu [northwestern India]…As a rule, rather more than ten such missions went forward in the course of a year, and at the least five or six.” Hou Hanshu (Later Han History).

The "Silk Road" essentially came into being from the 1st century BC, following these efforts by China to consolidate a road to the Western world and India, both through direct settlements in the area of the Tarim Basin and diplomatic relations with the countries of the Dayuan, Parthians and Bactrians further west.

A maritime "Silk Route" opened up between Chinese-controlled Jiaozhi (centred in modern Vietnam, near Hanoi) probably by the first century CE. It extended, via ports on the coasts of India and Sri Lanka, all the way to Roman-controlled ports in Egypt and the Nabataean territories on the northeastern coast of the Red Sea. The Hou Hanshu records that the first Roman envoy arrived in China by this maritime route in 166 CE.

For an exceedingly helpful map of some ancient maritime routes between 25 and 220 CE, please see Eurasian Trade Routes at the Time of the Eastern Han Dynasty, posted at Chinese-Western contacts and chess by Peter Banaschak. Present day evidence reveals the startling discovery that Lothal, India, may be the oldest man-made harbor known (possibly as early as 6000 BC but no later than 2000 BC). The maritime route leading to Lothal on this map (located southeast of Karachi, Pakistan) then may be millennia older than this map suggests. See Lothal and Indus Valley Civilization: Economy.

Chinese silk in the Roman Empire

The Senate issued, in vain, several edicts to prohibit the wearing of silk, on economic and moral grounds: the importation of Chinese silk caused a huge outflow of gold, and silk clothes were considered to be decadent and immoral: "I can see clothes of silk, if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one's decency, can be called clothes... Wretched flocks of maids labour so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner with his wife's body" (Seneca the Younger (c. 3 BC–AD 65, Declamations Vol. I).

Central Asian exchanges

gladiator on a glass vessel, Begram, 2nd century AD.
The Kushan empire, in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent, was located at the center of these exchanges. They fostered multi-cultural interaction as indicated by their 2nd century treasure hoards filled with products from the Greco-Roman world, China and India, such as in the archeological site of Begram.

The heyday of the Silk Road corresponds to that of the Byzantine Empire in its west end, Sasanid Period to Il Khanate Period in the Nile-Oxus section and Three Kingdoms to Yuan Dynasty in the Sinitic zone in its east end.

Throughout the period, trade between East and West also developed on the sea, between Alexandria in Egypt and Guangzhou in China, fostering the expansion of Roman trading posts in India. Historians also talk of a "Porcelain Route" or "Silk Route" across the Indian Ocean.

Cultural and political effects

, Tang Dynasty.
The Silk Road gave rise to the clusters of military states of nomadic origins in North China, invited the Nestorian, Manichaean, Buddhist, and later Islamic religions into Central Asia and China, created the influential Khazar Federation and at the end of its glory, brought about the largest continental empire ever: the Mongol Empire, with its political centers strung along the Silk Road (Beijing in North China, Karakhorum in eastern Mongolia, Sarmakhand in Transoxiana, Tabriz in Northern Iran, Astrakhan in lower Volga, Bahcesaray in Crimea, Kazan in Central Russia, Erzurum in eastern Anatolia), realizing the political unification of zones previously loosely and intermittently connected by material and cultural goods.

The Roman empire, and its demand for sophisticated Asian products, crumbled in the West around the 5th century. In Central Asia, Islam expanded from the 7th century onward, bringing a stop to Chinese westward expansion at the Battle of Talas in 751 CE. Further expansion of the Islamic Turks in Central Asia from the 10th century finished disrupting trade in that part of the world, and Buddhism almost disappeared.

See also: Silk Road transmission of Buddhism

Mongol era

at the court of Kublai Khan, c.1280.

The Mongol expansion throughout the Asian continent from around 1215 to 1360 helped bring political stability and re-establish the Silk Road. With rare exceptions such as Marco Polo or Christian ambassadors such as William of Rubruck, few people travelled down the entire length of the silk road. Instead traders moved products much like a bucket brigade, with luxury goods being traded from one middleman to another, from China to the West, and resulting with extravagant prices for the trade goods.

However, the disintegration of the Mongol Empire did not see the continuation of Silk Road's political unity. Also falling victim were the cultural and economic aspects of its unity.
Turkmeni marching lords seized the western end of the Silk Road, i.e. the decaying Byzantine Empire and sowed the seeds of a Turkic culture that would later crystalize into the Ottoman Empire under the Sunni faith. Turkmen and Mongol military bands in Iran, after some years of chaos were united under the Saffavid tribe, under whom the modern Iranian nation took shape under the Shiite faith. Meanwhile Mongol princes in Central Asia were content with Sunni orthodoxy with decentralized princedoms of the Chagatay, Timurid and Uzbek houses. In the Kypchak-Tatar zone, Mongol khanates all but crumbled under the assaults of the Black Death and the rising power of Moscovite. In the east end, the Chinese Ming Dynasty overthrew the Mongol yoke and pursued a policy of economic isolationism. (The Chinese perhaps learned from previous experience that an air of imperial supremacy would better be cultivated without economic and military dependency on Central Asian forces. Hegemonic cultural dynamics had better flow one-way from the imperial center to the periphery, without barbarian elements permeating back into the "great within" of the celestial civilization.) Yet another force, the Kalmyk-Oyrats pushed out of the Baikal area in central Siberia, but failed to deliver much impact beyond Turkestan. Some Kalmyk tribes did manage to migrate into the Volga-North Caucasus region, but their impact was limited.

After the Mongol Empire, the great political powers along the Silk Road became economically and culturally separated. Accompanying the crystallization of regional states was the decline of nomad power, partly due to the devastation of the Black Death, partly due to the encroachment of sedentary civilizations equipped with gunpowder. Ironically, the effect of gun power and early modernity on Europe was the integration of territorial states and increasing mercantilism, on the Silk Road it was quite the opposite: failure to maintain the level of integration of the Mongol Empire and decline in trade, partly due to European maritime trade.

The Silk Road stopped serving as a shipping route for silk around 1400.

The great explorers: Europe reaching for Asia

When he went West in 1492, Christopher Columbus's only wish was to go to China and create another Silk Route. It was one of the great disappointments of western nations to have found a continent "in-between", before the potential of the New World slowly started to be realized. The wish to trade directly with China was also the main drive behind the expansion of the Portuguese beyond Africa after 1480, followed by the powers of Holland and Great Britain from the 17th century.

As late as the beginning of the 19th century, China was still considered the most prosperous and sophisticated of any civilization on earth. In effect, the spirit of the Silk Road and the will to foster exchange between the East and West, and the lure of the huge profits attached to it, has conditioned most of the history of the world during the last two millenia.

Cities along the Silk Road