is a receptacle made to hold my tea”—is dependent not only on the object’s qualities and context but on our qualities and context. This is a dialogue. The initial narrative might be one of many provoked by the object for one individual, let alone across individuals with different experiences, knowledge, beliefs, and cultural backgrounds. A drinking receptacle might be recognized as such across individuals, although some might see it as a cup for drinking wine, others as a cup for water. Outside its initial context—outside the space and time in which it was created—the object might no longer invoke the narrative intended by its creator. Such is often the case with objects created for religious or ritual purposes. Historians and archaeologists seek to understand more about the context in order to try to recreate the narrative of the object, its biography or history: How, why, when, and by whom was it made? Where, how, and by whom was it used, and for what purposes? Did it travel? Was it adapted, changed, broken, repaired? Without direct access to the original context, we have to accept that at times we might get the answers to these questions spectacularly wrong.2
Telling history through objects rather than people or events is not a new approach, but over the past two decades it has become more central in teaching and in popularizing world history.3 Particularly successful has been the history of commodities.4 This approach has increasingly been adopted by academic institutions, especially for modern history.5 Seeking alternative sources for history is not, however, restricted to commodities, and new textbooks in this area range across the mundane, the ornamental, the useful, and the built.6
This book focuses on made rather than raw materials but takes a broad view of objects or things—including commodities; “natural” and animate things such as people, horses, and camels; and complex created things, such as jewelry, glass, paintings, and buildings. I do not exclude texts. Instead of arguing that texts are distinct from other things—that texts are “not neutral epistles . . . like other products of human creativity” but are “active in the production, negotiation and transformation of social relationships”7—I view the nontextual objects of human creativity also to be active in the production, negotiation, and transformation of these relationships. This book therefore takes the approach of historical archaeology, described by John Moreland as recognizing “that people in the past conducted their social practice, and construed their identities, through the Object, the Voice and the Word in specific historical circumstances.”8
For some historiographers, the seduction of a key object is similar that of a “great man,” whereas others look at the humble but plentiful potsherds to understand the past. This book attempts to take a middle line, concentrating most chapters around a single object but considering its context by looking at related objects—including people. The objects selected have complex stories to be told, and this book aims to give this “thick description,” a close-grained analysis of each object in its times and places.9
Movement of objects—including people—is essential to the concept of the Silk Road, and most of the objects chosen here have journeyed along the Silk Road. But the vast majority of such objects—everyday or luxury, traded or not—have long disappeared: food, wine, and medicines were consumed; slaves, elephants, and horses died; textiles, wood, and ivory decayed; glass and pottery were broken.10 Only in rare cases did objects survive by design or accident, as in hoards of metal or glass, or in burials when objects were sufficiently valued to be interred with corpses, as in the case of three of the objects discussed here (chapters 1, 2, and 5). Texts are often the only evidence for the existence of other objects, but both the archaeology and the texts are extremely fragmentary.
Objects are not neutral and inert in this story: they change and also effect change. This is where a material culture approach is especially relevant to the Silk Road. In the interaction of the objects with the cultures they encountered—those that made them, carried them, received them, used them, sold them, discarded them—we can gain new perspectives on those cultures at those times. This book seeks to take account of more recent discussions of “things” to include their interactions with humans (themselves “things”), the usual approach to material culture, but also the interdependence of things and humans—their entanglement.11
This is a book set in a period and places characterized by such entanglement. Most of the objects selected here have more than one cultural context and find themselves entangled with things—including people—of different cultures and times. I do not restrict discussion to the object in its original setting but in many cases bring the story to the present, looking at a range of very different relationships—the entanglement of the object and the conservator, the curator, the scholar, the collector, the looter, and others.
Several of the objects I discuss are luxury or monumental objects—the earrings, ewer, silk, Qur’an, and stupa. The pair of earrings (chapter 1), were discovered in a tomb in the territories of the Xiongnu Empire and show characteristics and materials from a variety of cultures subsumed under the imperial labels of “Xiongnu” and “Chinese.”12 The presentation of their story often tends to veer to the dichotomous—steppe and settled, nomad and agriculturalist, barbarian and civilized—and I very much hope to avoid that here, as I believe it to be crude and unhelpful.13 The discussion is intended to challenge the use of binary labels or any such hard distinctions. These include those sometimes made between trade and tribute and between government and private trade. One intention of this book is to show that the issues are more complex than sometimes presented, to sow uncertainty and to give references for further reading.
The environment is an essential part of the stories of all the things discussed in this book. It provided materials, conditions, and impetus for the development of technologies, the exploitation and manufacture of items, and the movement of peoples.14 The changing environment, for example, is a catalyst in the story of the earrings: some scholars have argued that the Xiongnu peoples originated in the Altai but were forced out by changes in climate in the fourth century BC, thus moving south into Central Asia and the borders of China, where we encounter them in chapter 1.15 In turn, it is argued, this movement forced the existing population, the Yuezhi, to move west, where they established the Hephthalite Empire, possibly the makers of the Bactrian ewer discussed in chapter 5.
Another similarly complex issue raised in this first chapter is the question of where, by whom, and for whom things were made. Technologies, materials, fashions, and craftsmen all traveled—I would argue this is an important characteristic of the Silk Road—and we have at best tentative hypotheses about where these earrings were made. We have to accept that these might be challenged by future finds. In other words, in many cases, when dealing with the material culture of the Silk Road, we are on shaky ground.
The earrings survived, as they were buried in a tomb, and this is the case with another two objects discussed here: the Hellenistic glass bowl (chapter 2) and the Bactrian ewer (chapter 5). These were found in elite tombs, and it is possible that such objects were considered to be “foreign” or “exotic” and that their inclusion in the tombs was intended to heighten the status and cosmopolitanism of the owner. This would assume, in turn, that cosmopolitanism was considered positively in the owners’ societies.
The chapter on the Bactrian ewer raises the important and often overlooked role of the transmission of intangible cultural heritage on the Silk Road. Like the material object itself, which has antecedents in Roman and then Sasanian vessels but which has developed its own characteristics, the story depicted on the vessel, most probably part of the Trojan War cycle, has developed its own characteristics. Not least among these is the depiction of Paris holding two fruits, little resembling apples. Of course, we have no evidence
