Reconnecting people, objects, and ideas from AD 500-1000
The Silk Road has long been seen as a conduit for exotic goods travelling both east and west. But taking a wider perspective reveals how extraordinary objects and ideas were moving much more widely, as Sue Brunning and Luk Yu-ping told Matthew Symonds.
Xuanzang was not afraid to break the rules. This Buddhist monk lived in Tang China during the 7th century AD. Although the imperial court banned foreign travel due to security concerns, this did not deter Xuanzang from slipping out of the country undercover in AD 629. His journey was destined to be a long one. Xuanzang made his way on foot through central Asia to India, where he sought documents about Buddhist teachings. Although Buddhism had been introduced to China during the early centuries AD, there were questions about the accuracy of some Chinese translations of key texts, so Xuanzang sought copies in the original Sanskrit to resolve the matter. He returned to China 16 years later with hundreds of manuscripts. Rather than being sanctioned for his transgressions, Xuanzang received a hero’s welcome and even had a monastery built for him.
The story of Xuanzang illustrates the rewards that long-distance travel could bestow during this era. At the same time, Xuanzang’s manuscripts are not alone as objects that ended up far from their place of origin. Instead, a great web of connectivity can be traced all of the way from east Asia to north-west Europe. Such east–west links are traditionally referred to as the ‘Silk Road’, and perhaps most closely associated from a Western perspective with the 13th-century adventures of Marco Polo. As Xuanzang’s exploits reveal, though, the existence of long-distance connections was allowing individuals to court risk and renown by undertaking extraordinary journeys many centuries earlier. Current research is also emphasising that these routes not only bound together east and west, but also north and south. As a major new exhibition at the British Museum showcases (see ‘Further information’ box below), we can add much to our understanding of these regions if we think not of a ‘Silk Road’, but a far more intricate network of crisscrossing ‘Silk Roads’.
Tracking trade
Modern attempts to chart ancient transport connections in central Asia began with two red and blue lines on a map. These both ran from Xi’an in China to Iran, and reflect an 1877 attempt by the geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen to set the surviving information in Greek and Chinese sources within real-world terrain. ‘The term “Silk Road” first started to be used in the 19th century’, says Luk Yu-ping, Basil Gray Curator of Chinese Paintings, Prints, and Central Asian Collections at the British Museum. ‘For a long time, it was attributed to Ferdinand von Richthofen, but more recent research suggests that the term was already in use in Europe when his work was published. So we say that the first use was around then. It really became popularised in the latter half of the 20th century. This was for various reasons, including opening up tourism, transport, and archaeological discoveries, which led to a heightened interest in artefacts from places associated with the Silk Roads. UNESCO also got involved with promoting it as a concept to bring different states and cultures together. There have been a lot of exhibitions about the Silk Road, but this one is hopefully a little different from the ones that came before.’
‘That is our aim,’ agrees Sue Brunning, Curator of European Early Medieval and Sutton Hoo Collections at the British Museum. ‘When we were working through what the public understands by the term “Silk Road” early on in the planning for the exhibition, there were a lot of references to camels, desert dunes, and obviously to silk, creating these rather romantic images. What we want to do is expand this picture and show a much richer world, with expansive cross-cultural connections linking up Asia, parts of Africa, and also Europe. So it’s not just those desert landscapes: it is all sorts of terrains, with routes by sea and river as well as land.’ Precisely when the footprint of the Silk Roads first makes its presence felt across all of these regions remains a source of debate. Some see Alexander the Great’s swathe of conquest in the 4th century BC as an appropriate start point, while Chinese accounts tend to favour an origin in the 2nd century BC, during the Han dynasty. The British Museum exhibition focuses instead on a defining period from AD 500-1000. This presents one of the peaks of Silk Roads connectivity, and coincides with an era of great powers, such as China’s Tang dynasty (618-907), the Rashidun caliphate (632-661), the Byzantine empire, and the Carolingian empire (800-887). It was an era when Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam spread widely, and some of the objects associated with them travelled even further.
‘There has long been an awareness in north-west Europe that objects could have distant origins’, Sue points out, ‘but these artefacts are often described as “exotic curiosities”. There’s been a sense that the people who received them didn’t really understand what they were or where they came from. But as you do more research and realise how interconnected this part of the world was to the wider Silk Roads, you can start to see how objects could move, and also how knowledge could travel with them. That opens the door to these people being much better informed about the origins of such artefacts and the ideas that were bound up with them.’
One fine example is a copper-alloy figurine of the Buddha seated on a double lotus flower. It was probably made in the Swat Valley, in what is now Pakistan, but ended up travelling in the opposite direction to Xuanzang and his manuscripts. Instead, the figure was found almost 5,000km from the Swat Valley, during excavations of 9th-century buildings at Helgö, Sweden. Given how far Scandinavia lay from the major centres of Buddhism during this period, it is natural to wonder what, if anything, the inhabitants of Helgö knew about the significance of this figurine. There is just a hint, though, that its spiritual nature was appreciated. When the object was found, it had leather strips wrapped around its neck and left arm. These were initially believed to be a way to fix the figurine to a surface or person, but some wooden sculptures of Norse deities found in bogs were also adorned with leather bands. Potentially, then, the Buddha was tailored to meet contemporary Scandinavian expectations of how spiritual figures should appear.
If the concept of one or two set routes connecting East and West has been eclipsed by a much more complex network, finds like the Buddha can also raise the question of how important silk really was to this trade. ‘It is obviously one of the commodities that was travelling,’ Sue says. ‘It was more significant in some areas than others, but you do find it all of the way into Europe as well, which some people may be surprised about. At the same time, it is just one of many commodities. There is a mixture of the tangible ones that people can touch and see, and the intangible elements, such as knowledge and religious beliefs. In some of the scholarship, there have been suggestions that it should really be the “Paper Road” or the “Spice Road” or various other types of road. I think this really makes the point that the nature of the things moving around is myriad.’
‘As Sue mentioned, scholarship has critiqued this idea of silk being the primary commodity’, says Luk, ‘but in some circles the importance of silk is back again. When we look particularly at China and the neighbouring regions, silk remained a highly significant and symbolic commodity. By 500-1000, there were other centres of production, and China was not the only place farming silk, but in Tang dynasty China it was a taxed item, so the government was receiving a lot of silk from local communities. The government was then using it as payment for armies and garrisons out on the frontiers. They were also using silk to buy horses – which the Tang court highly coveted – from the steppe area to the north and west. On the other hand, by this time maritime trade was very active, too. There is plenty of evidence of ships travelling, perhaps in stages, across the Indian Ocean and bringing large quantities of materials. The objects that survive in wrecks from this period are usually ceramics, so the role of silk is less clear. Perhaps, though, it has just not survived in the sea water.’
FURTHER INFORMATION
Silk Roads will run at the British Museum from 26 September 2024 until 23 February 2025.
For more details, see www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/silk-roads.
CWA is grateful to Sue Brunning, Luk Yu-ping, Matthew Hutt, and Connor Watson.
This is an extract of an article that appeared in CWA 127. Read on in the magazine (Click here to subscribe) or on our website, The Past, which offers all of the magazine’s content digitally. At The Past you will be able to read each article in full as well as the content of our other magazines, Current Archaeology, Ancient Egypt, and Military History Matters.
