Developmental Historiography of the Ancient Silk Road (original) (raw)

2021, African Journal of Culture, History, Religion and Traditions

This study seeks to explain the history of the ancient Silk Road and also explain its strategic importance as a network of trade routes connecting China and the Far East with the Middle East and Europe. Using the library's documented instrument and historical descriptive methodology, findings show that the Silk Road is historically connected with the Eastern and Western civilizations and culture. Merchants on the Silk Road transported goods and traded at bazaars along the way. They traded goods such as silk, spices, tea, ivory, cotton, wool, precious metals, and ideas. The Silk Road also enabled cultural transfers, for instance when Genghis Khan and the Mongols invaded China, they came along with their own culture, e.g., buttons on clothes were introduced in China as a cultural import from Central Asia especially under the rule of Kublai Khan during the Yuan Dynasty. The paper concludes that the Silk Road rose to prominence during the Han and Tang dynasties. The long-distance tr...

Silk Roads and cultural routes

New Silk Roads, 2020

Belt and Road is a project in both writing and reading history. To date, international scrutiny has fallen overwhelmingly on the former; how China’s grand ambitions are altering the course of events and the global power landscape of the twenty-first century. But if the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is about “reviving” the Silk Roads for the twenty-first century, we might also ask how China now reads the past, and in what ways it appropriates it for strategic ends. Such lines of inquiry help us begin to understand how Belt and Road not just writes, but comes to re-write history, and it is the latter that may hold the greatest long-term impact. From the very beginning, Beijing has framed Belt and Road as a “revival” of the Silk Roads. But what this means precisely has received little critical attention in the West. Journalists and analysts have noted the Silk Road as little more than a gesture to romantic pasts of trade and exchange, where the camel trails and caravanserai of previous centuries are replaced by transcontinental rail lines and special economic zones. Sailing ships carrying porcelain become the container ships and oil tankers of the twenty-first century. History then is merely a palette of richly evocative imagery through which the old is paralleled with the new to make strategies of connectivity meaningful for audiences around the world. Countless news channels, think tanks, government reports, and academic papers have thus introduced BRI by casually summarizing the Silk Road in a short sentence or two, and rapidly moving on to the “real” stuff.

A road as an empire: some remarks about the most important ancient periods and powers of and along the Silk Road

2021

This paper was presented at the workshop “Goods, Languages, and Cultures along the Silk Road” at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, October 18 and 19, 2019. While many contributions to the workshop focused on recent developments in China’s current “New Silk Road” politics, on forms of communication, and on contemporary exchange of goods and ideas across so-called Silk Road countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia and with China, this short essay focuses on the history of the so-called Silk Road as an important transport connection. Although what is now called the “Silk Road” was not a pure East-West binary in antiquity but rather developed into a network that also led to the South and North, the focus here will be on describing the East-West connection. I will start with a few brief remarks on the origins of the connection referred to as the Silk Road and will then introduce the different great empires that shaped this connection between antiquity and the Middle Ages through mil...

History Revisited in Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads : A New History of the World

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World is a brilliant piece of historical writing that offers the roadmap of the epic history of the crossroads of the world—the meeting place of East and West and the birthplace of civilization. It was on the Silk Roads that East and West first encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas, cultures and religions. From the rise and fall of empires to the spread of Buddhism and the advent of Christianity and Islam, right up to the great wars of the twentieth century—this book shows how the fate of the West has always been inextricably linked to the East.

Silk Road as a Space of Eurasian Cultural Communication and Transmission

Eurasian Crossroads:International Scientific Journal (online) .Vol. 1, no. 2, 2019

We communicate our archaeological findings made in several burial complexes along the ancient Silk Road along with the analysis of the recent discoveries of other teams. Our research proves the special role of the Silk Road in Eurasian economic and political mutual influence, communication and transmission since Western Han dynasty. Sogdian and Middle East influence on Chinese culture was substantial and its importance cannot be underestimated. But even more importantly, during Tang dynasty, Europeans and Northern Eurasian representatives also influenced Chinese society and culture strongly, with some of them serving at the Chinese imperial court. Our findings are even more important in the context of the New Silk Road initiative announced recently by Xi Jinping (“One Belt, One Road”). Key words: Silk Road, One Belt – One Road, Eurasian integration, culture, Chinese expansion http://thebeacon.ru/pdf/Vol.%201.%20Issue%202.%20020510005%20ENG.pdf

The Concept of the Silk Road in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, 2020

The concept of the Silk Road first attained prominence in the latter half of the 19th centu­ry as part of European attempts to impose economic and political claims upon the lands and peoples of Xinjiang (also known as East Turkestan, Chinese Central Asia, or Chinese Turkestan). These claims were given cultural substance at the turn of the century by a se­ries of expeditions undertaken by Western explorers and archaeologists, who ventured in­to the deserts of northwestern China in search of Greco-Indian art and antiquities. The study and display of such artifacts were motivated primarily by a desire to highlight the eastward migrations of Indo-European speakers into Central Asia. When these same ex­peditions began to reveal the presence of ancient Chinese ruins and antiquities as well, Chinese scholars and officials joined their Western counterparts in the field, using the material proceeds of their excavations to construct competing narratives of the westward influence of Chinese civilization. In the decades since the end of World War II, the con­cept of the Silk Road has come to dominate popular and scholarly associations with the region, monopolizing everything from the advertising of Central Asian and Middle East­ern cuisine to the names of academic monographs and international string ensembles. The elusive and malleable idea of “the Silk Road” has provided an attractive ideological platform over the past 200 years for major political, economic, and cultural actors throughout Eurasia to assert their imagined historical importance across both time and space, often with a highly romanticized gloss. In that sense, it is a purely modern intellec­tual construct, one that would have been utterly unfamiliar and likely incomprehensible to those historical agents it purports to describe.

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The Early Silk Road(s)

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. Edited by David Ludden. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. See http://asianhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-2