I’ve long been fascinated by
ancient history, although for many years my interest in archaeology was very
much centred upon Europe, Egypt, and Central and South America. It was only
when I began working at the British Museum that I first properly encountered
the ancient history of Central Asia. This, along with my later decision to
return to university, specialising in the history of western explorers in the
region during the early twentieth century, spurred me to delve a little deeper
into the art and archaeology of this fascinating region. I have been lucky
enough to handle extremely fragile paintings on silk from Dunhuang, and ancient
ceramics, such as the enchanting models of camels from Khotan, acquired by Marc
Aurel Stein which are now part of the BM’s collection in some of the
exhibitions I’ve taken to Asia, Europe, and America, as well as seeing similar
collections in other museums, most notably in the National Museum in New Delhi.
There is no shortage of books on the history of the Silk Road and its modern
exploration, but below I review three relatively recently published books on
this subject which really struck a chord with my imagination.
THE SILK ROAD: A NEW HISTORY
By Valerie Hansen
(Oxford University Press, 2012)
The Silk Road is a concept which is
as evocative and enticing as it sounds. All the allure of the East is there, it
speaks to the imagination; it speaks of luxury and travel, of distant riches
and far away lands. An air of mystery and romance permeates its tales of
treacherous deserts of shifting sands, of oasis towns with merchants selling
silk and spices; an ancient road trodden by countless and nameless travellers -
soldiers, monks, bandits, and traders - all plying their wares, trading their
ideas, their languages and religious beliefs, a long and cosmopolitan exchange
of cultures between the East and the West, from the Celestial Empire of China
to the ancient heart of Imperial Rome. But, in reality, the phrase 'the Silk
Road' only came into common parlance relatively recently ...
As Valerie Hansen outlines in the introduction to her 'new history' of the Silk
Road, the term was first coined by Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877.
Certainly the existence of a network of interconnected trade routes had long
existed, and long been known about - one only has to think of the famous travel
account of the Renaissance traveller, Marco Polo for one example - yet Von
Richthofen was the first academic geographer to write about it using sources
taken from both ancient China as well as classical geographers, such as Ptolemy
and Marinus.
The Silk Road, Hansen explains, was in essence a "non-road" in that
it was shifting network of unmarked paths which joined the dots of trader towns
and military outposts which stretched out across the parched deserts of Central
Asia. Arguably the Silk Road also had a longer sea lane to the south, which
might even have been traversed more quickly than the overland route in its day
- but again, the idea of a lone merchant making the whole journey from Rome or
Constantinople to Chang'an or Xi'an on foot is a misconception. As Hansen
demonstrates it's far more likely that individuals would simply have plied the
routes from their own town to the next in the chain and then back again; thus
it was the commodities and goods which would have accrued the mileage, passing
from trader to trader, from hand to hand. And the idea of 'silk' too is
probably as much of a misnomer as the singular 'road' - for in reality many
types of goods besides silk would have been exchanged along these routes -
chemicals, spices, metals, leather, other kinds of fabric, glass, precious
stones and paper would all have found their way through the markets and bazaars
of the Central Asian heartlands. Remarkably enough, ammonium chloride featured
high on the cargo manifests of many traders because it was commonly used as a
flux for manufacturing metals and also in the curing process for leather, hence
it was a commodity in high demand. But it is paper which is most central to
Hansen's history, and it is paper which gives us a much clearer picture of what
life must have been like for these traders and travellers of the distant past.
The dry conditions of many of these long abandoned sites which Hansen examines
- from Samarkand in the West to Chang'an in the East - has helped to preserve a
wealth of documentary detail. Paper was a valuable commodity - such that it was
never really thrown away, even when official documents were no longer of use
they were often sold as scrap and recycled, for instance being turned into
garments for the dead or to make insoles for shoes. In some places, perhaps
most famously at Dunhuang caches of documents were carefully deposited, sealed
up in caves where they remained undiscovered for thousands of years, until
Western adventurers and archaeologists came across them in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. It is the throw away contents of many of these documents
which many modern day researchers have painstakingly pieced together which
really flesh out the bare bones of these archaeological sites, making Hansen's
account such a fascinating read.
Each chapter focuses on a different site along the route from West to East,
beginning with the oasis kingdom of Kroraina, which flourished between 200 BCE
and 400 CE. Texts in Chinese and Indian scripts from this area attest to the
sustained cultural exchange with the Gandhara region of modern day Afghanistan
and Pakistan. The following chapters look at places such as the Buddhist
kingdom of Kucha, tracing the spread of Buddhism to China after it was first
introduced into Central Asia. Similarly, looking at the history of Turfan,
Hansen follows the influence of the Sogdians and other Iranian cultures, with
the spread of Zoroastrianism and Manicheism. Islam follows on with the
Karakhanid conquest of Khotan in the eleventh century. The ebb and flow of
these cultures in terms of political control and military presence shaped these
regions in distinct ways over the course of centuries, and the book strives to
illustrate this vast complexity through a wealth of archaeological, textual and
philological detail with an insightful imagination that really brings this
ancient past vividly to life for the reader. It's an excellent and accomplished
survey of the current thought and most recent discoveries in Silk Road studies.
TRACES IN THE DESERT: JOURNEYS OF DISCOVERY IN CENTRAL ASIA
By Christoph Baumer
(I.B.Tauris, 2008)
Following in the footsteps of his
boyhood heroes, Sven Hedin (who was an acquaintance of his mother) and Marc
Aurel Stein, Christoph Baumer's intrepid memoir recounts a number of diverse
journeys made over many years to study the ancient sites of Central Asia. The
lack of knowledge regarding many of these ancient sites even today is due to
the extreme remoteness and inhospitable environments in which they are located.
Hence, in the Taklamakan desert, Baumer occasionally finds himself the first
European since Stein and Hedin to visit some of the sites which they first
documented almost 100 years before. Managing to piece together information from
their original accounts, he records how many of the sites have weathered or
changed with the intervening decades, even making a number of important
archaeological discoveries of his own, adding to and informing in greater depth
the researches begun by his heroes.
Many of the journeys Baumer makes are arduous in the extreme, yet the efforts
of travel in such remote regions are full of rewards which Baumer relishes to
the full. Discovering a room full of bronze coins, uncovering buried murals
which attest to different religions living side-by-side, or identifying the
remains of a previously unknown military watchtower, Baumer excels at
recounting the twin histories of the ancient cultures of the 'Silk Road' trade
routes as well as their subsequent academic discovery and exploration in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries. Yet the book isn't just about long dead
cultures, Baumer also finds colour in the lives of those communities living in
these regions today. He describes the people he meets along the way, examining
the extant rituals and customs, such as the pilgrimage or 'kora' around the
sacred peak of Mount Kailash, which intimately connects them back to the
cultures of their ancestors. I was somewhat perturbed though to read that
Baumer was twice confronted by armed bandits (who seemed to be in cahoots with
the local Police) on a road not too far from a place where I myself travelled
only a few years ago! ... Yet whilst these tough conditions and hostile
climates often cause extreme discomfort, as he and his travelling companions
(and their camels) struggle with thirst, mechanical failures, extremes of heat
and cold, bureaucratic paperwork and corrupt officials, or battle with
ferocious sandstorms which in a matter of hours totally redefine the topography
of the landscape around them, and, on one occasion, even suffering the
ignominious irony of almost drowning in the desert, the magnificent sight of
the Milky Way stretching across the clear desert night sky far from the light
pollution of any human habitation prompts quite a lyrical and philosophically
profound sense of personal reflection.
This book is a fascinating read for anyone interested in ancient history and
archaeology in remote locations, it sits firmly in a grand tradition of
adventurous travel narratives, like those of Hedin and Stein before him. Baumer
himself is a very engaging academic, wholly enthused by his research and the
Central Asia region, both past and present. I've heard him speak on his
archaeological fieldwork at the Royal Asiatic Society in London, and, as such,
this book certainly provides an excellent and personable introduction to the man
and his work for both specialists and lay-readers alike.
LIFE ALONG THE SILK ROAD
By
Susan Whitfield
(Second Edition: University of
California Press, 2015)
This is a beautifully evocative
book, and one somewhat of a novelty in terms of its originality. It is an
astoundingly accomplished and erudite work, firmly grounded in results of present
day scholarship, informed by the most in-depth of academic studies, but it
translates this often dry and rather fusty scientific data into the living,
breathing recreation of a fully realised world. A world which once existed, but
one which is so remote and removed from our own that it repays an imaginative
retelling – which is exactly what Susan Whitfield has expertly done in the
pages of this excellent book.
Through a series of twelve ‘tales’
she reanimates for the reader the world, or worlds, of the communities of the
Central Asian Silk Road network – enabling us to inhabit and comprehend this
long period from the point of view of certain particular individuals. A shipmaster,
a merchant, a soldier, a princess, a pilgrim, an official, a widow, and an
artist, are just some of the personas brought to life in these pages. Each tale
illuminates different facets of this complex, sophisticated, and deeply
interrelated world – its politics, its economics, its religion, its wars, its
administration, its hardships, and its joys. Yet Susan Whitfield does so in a
manner which is both skilful and deft. The fictional element is lightly
nuanced, such that it never over-shadows the historical facts it sets out to
illuminate; grounded as it is in a deeply museological understanding of the
past, the book adds life to the inanimate remnants from which this jigsaw
puzzle of a world has been recovered and pieced back together. As such, it is
well worth reading this book in tandem with Valerie Hansen’s The Silk Road: A New History.
Whitfield’s own line drawings are
used to illustrate the text which adds a wonderfully personal touch to her
tales – one can’t help imagining her immersed in copying these motifs over many
years of in-depth study, mulling over the lives of those long gone characters
who created such artworks and in turn helping to inform her own imaginative
interpretations; it is this personal element, something so rarely shared, which
undoubtedly belies all academic enquiries into, and speculations about, the
lives of those individuals who once peopled the past.
Susan Whitfield’s expertise derives
from a career devoted to the study of this region and its material culture.
Until quite recently she was in charge of the International Dunhuang Project
(IDP) at the British Library. The IDP is a fascinating and dynamic network of
academics drawn from institutions across the globe, all collaborating together
to present, interpret, and make publicly available access to hundreds of
thousands of manuscripts, paintings, and artefacts from the eastern regions of
the Silk Road. The IDP’s website and regular newsletters are essential reading
for anyone with a genuine curiosity and interest in the ancient history of
Central Asia, its academic rediscovery in the early twentieth century, and its
continuing exploration in our present day (see
here).
THE SILK ROADS: A NEW HISTORY OF THE WORLD
by Peter Frankopan
(Bloomsbury, 2015)
Eminently well written with all the narrative pizzazz typical of a
modern TV documentary series. The academic verve and elan of Peter
Frankopan's "mega biblion" is undoubtedly enthralling, it has been a
huge bestseller - one of those rare history books which somehow hits the
zeitgeist of their times and so strikes a chord that resonates with a
large audience. I've long since lost count of how many people I've seen
engrossed in reading it on the London Tube.
The book's
hot new take
is essentially a modernisation of Halford Mackinder's Central Asian
'heartland thesis', updated as such to show how the globalist efforts of
the main western imperialist powers (Britain, Russia/USSR, & USA)
from the late 18th to early 21st centuries, bedded in the sequential
context of the empires (Abbasid, Mongol, Mughal, etc.) of the preceding
centuries, have royally messed with the politics and polities of the
region of Central Asia since time immemorial - the consequences of which
are still very much alive and in play today. The subtitle therefore
clearly underlines that notion of Mackinder's that the world is
controlled by what happens at its geographical core (i.e. - the
heartlands of Central Asia, or, as Frankopan prefers to call them, "the
Silk Roads").
In many senses it is a global history. Very
admirably, the book attempts to move away from the traditional
Eurocentric views of imperialist history, but it can't entirely escape
the immense gravitational pull of that well established
historiographical tradition. It's not really a history of the
whole
world as such, in that vast chunks of the globe don't feature or simply
get the occasional, fleeting mention (e.g. - much of South America,
Australasia, Canada, etc.). And some large events are mentioned almost
peripherally (e.g. - the Opium Wars, which are covered in a couple of
sentences in a single paragraph) - but that's all part and parcel of the
inescapable nature of such 'grand narratives'. It's a big book. To
cover everything in equal detail would make it an even bigger one! -
Hence Frankopan, like any historian, has had to weigh up and decide what
to foreground and what to gloss, as well as what to leave to one side
or to leave out altogether, dependent on his overarching theme; which in
this case is the Central Asian heartland. The subtitle therefore
somewhat
over-promises on what is to be found in the pages between these two gorgeously decorated covers.
On the whole though,
The Silk Roads
does strike a credible (and creditable) balance between the scope of
its limitations and its enormous ambition. To synthesize, make sense of,
and to carry the main thread of its narrative argument across such a
vast expanse of both time and territory (both physical and academic) is
no mean feat. As a popular history, grounded in a "very current" area of
academic interest, it is certainly an engaging and accessible,
thought-provoking book. One which offers a fresh (or refreshed) angle
for many readers of both general and specialist audiences alike.
Also
on ‘Waymarks’
