The Silk Road, like the Milky Way, is not, alas, an entirely literal entity. It’s a branding exercise, a way of making coherent a whole network of ancient trade routes that stretched east and west, north and south, from Ireland to China. We think of it as a land route, like Marco Polo’s to the court of Kublai Khan; it turns out that part of the road was maritime and on rivers. It’s rather a brilliant way of expressing it, though; I don’t think the route would have had quite the same appeal if it had been billed as, say, the Decorative Ceramics Way.
But as Sue Brunning, one of the three curators of the forthcoming exhibition of the Silk Roads exhibition at the British Museum points out, it really could have been called that, or the Amber Route, or indeed after any of the goods that travelled along the network like fur or spices or slaves.
None of the traders who plied the route – or usually, bits of it – called it the Silk Road. It was a nineteenth century billing, popularised by the German geographer, Ferdinand von Richthofen as die Seidenstrasse, running from China to Iran, but in recent years, Peter Frankopan’s books about it have given the concept new life. I recently encountered rather a lovely scent by Ormonde Jayne called Silk Route, which incorporates elements of it.
The Silk Roads – note the plural - exhibition at the British Museum will explore this fascinating trade network. It feature three curators whose expertise between them stretches from Sutton Hoo to Oxiana. It’s the kind of exhibition the British Museum is made for; of the 302 exhibits, half come from its own collection, with the gaps – in Islamic Spain, say – filled in from museums abroad and London’s own V&A.
It covers lots of ground, geographically and chronologically – from 500- 1000 AD, roughly, as Sue Brunning observes, when the Vikings arrived in America.
Actually, the Vikings play an interesting role on the Silk Road, surfacing anywhere from Ireland to the Islamic world, from the Baltic along the river routes through Russia and Ukraine. It isn’t the usual historical revisionism about them being traders rather than specialists in rape and pillage. This is about how the rapine translates into trade. They paid for their wonderful silver hoards using the currency of slaves whom they captured in the normal Viking way and traded in the Islamic world for silver coins, dirhams, which they mostly melted down and repurposed back home. There was, however, one that got away: a ninth century Irish nobleman, Findan, who was captured by the Vikings not once, but twice, and finally escaped by jumping ship during a stopover in Orkney.
But the Islamic kingdoms did, of course, obtain slaves militarily; when Samarkand was besieged in 712 in the Islamic conquest of the city states of Sogdiana, at the heart of the trade routes, the terms of surrender included the provision of 2,000 slaves.
So, the exhibition encompasses not just the empires of this half millennium but the religions of those regions too: Buddhism, Islam, Christianity. During this period we see the expansion of Islam through military conquest which was accompanied by the transmission of Islamic texts along the trade routes.
It would be pushing it to suggest that the people on the route were aware of its extent, of the fact that they were elements of a vast network that crossed continents. Yet one of the most startling exhibits is an eighth century coin modelled directly on an Islamic dinar with “King Offa” on the inscription, Offa being king of Mercia, so presumably he was aware of the eastern world from which the coin came.
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All these connections are shown through artefacts. One is an ivory pyxis, cylindrical like a tusk, depicting the raising of Lazarus, dated to around 810AD from Aachen. It coincides with the exchange of embassies between the emperor Charlemagne and the Abbasid caliph, Harun al-Rashid. Among the gifts from Harun was an actual elephant called Abu al ‘Abbas, who must have been one of the sights of Aachen. It may be that when Abu finally handed in his pail, his tusk was used to make the pyxis.
There are so many fascinating stories. One of the minor heroes of free trade was an English monk called Willibald who got round customs at Tyre by putting his cache of aromatic balsam (used in chrism at baptisms) into a hollow gourd, covering it with hollow reeds and pouring mineral oil on top; the petroleum smell passed the customs officials’ sniff test, and Willibald escaped the death penalty for smuggling.
All this seems remote but Sue Brunning thinks that the exhibition has real resonances with the interconnectedness of our world, and raises questions of how far back that goes. “There was a movement of knowledge, of art, of people and ideas”, she said.
“People were more connected, earlier than we expected in lots of different ways.” But the early connections were about trading amber, silks, spices and elephants between Byzantium and Samarkand – doesn’t ours seem dreary by comparison.
