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.
