This one shows some of the trade routes.
This UNESCO map shows the range of the 'Silk Road'.
The Silk Road(s)
Baku, Bishkek, Almaty, Bukhara, Yerevan, Tbilisi, Merv, Nukus….
Before I embarked on this Stans and Caucuses trip I had never heard of any of these cities. It turns out they are all on the Silk Road. So are Kathmandu, Bhaktapur, Damascus, Jaisalmer and Varanasi, cities I have visited on previous trips. The Wikipedia website lists 134 cities and the UNESCO website lists 55 different countries as being on the Silk Road. And that doesn’t count cities on the sea legs of the trading routes. Obviously given the number of cities, countries, distances and directions involved it’s apparent that it could not be a single road.
The image that enters most people’s heads of the Silk Road is a romantic and adventurous overland route where travelers journeyed by camel or horseback from Europe to Asia and back. This is the image largely created by Marco Polo’s journeys of 1271-1275. The reality is really very different. For a start the ‘Silk Road’ existed for thousands of years before as various communities and tribes traded with their neighbours. Gradually over time there became a network of routes connecting these tribes as they continued to trade for things they needed or wanted to sell. This would include food stuffs, crafts and drinks such as wine. By the time Marco Polo made his journey (which some historians still debate whether he did actually get to China), the network was vast and traveled in all directions over Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. This is why there was no one Silk Road but a whole network of trading partners and why I have put (s) after Road. Unlike Marco Polo, people or traders did not travel the length of it from one end to another, they usually traveled only a much shorter distance, bought and traded and returned home. Then the goods they sold might travel further as other traders took them somewhere else. For example the most famous item that traveled from east to west and was highly sought after by the Europeans was silk from China. No one trader carried it all the way, it was a series of sales and purchases as the silk made its way west. Other famous items to make that journey were gunpowder, spices, tea, precious stones, paper and slaves. In addition to actual items, religious beliefs and intellectual knowledge and sciences made the journey too as people from different areas and backgrounds interacted with and taught or learned from each other. Christianity traveled west, Buddhism traveled east and Islam traveled both ways. There is some debate about whether Europe learned more from the East than the other way around, as China was an ancient civilization before the Europeans and the Arab world knew about telescopes and the heavens before the Europeans. One thing that traveled west that was a medical disaster was the Black Death that originated in the East and killed millions including somewhere between a third and half of the European population in the Middle Ages (that is in itself another whole area of discussion). Given the vast area of the whole network of trading routes it is obvious that there were many different topographies that needed to be traversed including deserts and mountains. Traders would be traveling through the lands of different tribes or countries and would frequently have to pay a tax or levy which added to the price of the goods. Different groups would try to control the routes and offered protection from bandits at a cost, another tax. This is why as I mentioned in the last post, the Europeans eventually sought and found a sea route to the east and this ultimately led to the collapse of the Asia to Europe routes. The countries of Asia continued to and still do to this day, trade with each other, as do the European countries amongst themselves. The new ongoing history of the Silk Road is that China is working hard to build an overland route from China to the West. We were told this by several of the local guides we had, who told us about various large projects that China was funding. They offer to build good highways, bridges and rail routes through countries that cannot afford to do so themselves. In return the countries are obliged to buy Chinese products and China gets resources from those countries at a cheaper price. I saw the same thing happening in various countries in Africa. The Chinese are a force to be reckoned with and the next global superpower.
From this trip and my readings this perhaps simple overview of the Silk Road(s), helps me to understand the complicated history, peoples, and dates of Central Asia. This succinct summary by UNESCO that I found on their website outlines the importance of the cities on the Silk Road(s):
“Cities grew up along the Silk Roads as essential hubs of trade and exchange, here merchants and travellers came to stop and rest their animals and begin the process of trading their goods. From Xi’an in China to Bukhara in Uzbekistan, from Jeddah in Saudi Arabia to Venice in Italy, cities supplied the ports and markets that punctuated the trade routes and gave them momentum. After travelling for weeks on end across inhospitable deserts and dangerous oceans, cities provided an opportunity for merchants to rest, to sell and buy, and moreover, to meet with other travellers, exchanging not only material goods but also skills, customs, languages and ideas. In this way, over time, many Silk Roads cities attracted scholars, teachers, theologians and philosophers, and thus became great centres for intellectual and cultural exchange forming the building blocks of the development of civilizations throughout history.”
