ewers or the Trojan War epic, and the craftsmen who made this object and the original owner might well have seen it as an entirely local production representing a local story. However, as it moved eastwards into China, it would certainly have been viewed as foreign—as coming from the “west” even if that west was Central Asia and not the borders of Europe.
Glass and glass technology, discussed in chapter 2 on the Hellenistic glass bowl, present an interesting comparison and contrast to sericulture on the Silk Road (see chapter 8). The raw materials for glass were readily available throughout much of Eurasia. The techniques were also present, at least the firing of raw materials to transform them and the use of flux to reduce the firing temperatures. The technology was invented or diffused across Eurasia from at least the first millennium BC. But whereas silk started in the East, for glass the technology was refined in West Asia on the fringes of Europe— and spread east into Sasanian Persia and to China and Korea. The South Asia tradition might have developed independently but was certainly informed by objects arriving from West Asia. And, also unlike silk technology and its products, which were mastered and valued in all the major cultures across the Silk Road, glass technology had a stuttering progress in China. Perhaps this is because other materials—jade and increasingly fine ceramics—filled the aesthetic need for a translucent but hard material that glass filled in other cultures where ceramic technology was far less developed. But glass was clearly valued by some, as shown by the existence of items in elite tombs, the importance of glass in Buddhism, and the adoption of and experimentation with the technology at different times in China.
Silk is an ongoing and central part of this story, and in chapter 8 I have chosen a piece to discuss that comes from fairly late, from the eighth to tenth centuries, so that I can explore the spread of silk technologies—moriculture, sericulture, weaving—from their origins in China. While silk was not always the major trade item over the whole period or even the major item across some of the networks, it certainly remained significant. The raw and finished materials continued to be valued and traded throughout the period. We also see the development of new weaves as the materials and technologies spread outside China.
Silk—and glass—were both part of the story of Buddhism, playing an important role in the practice of the faith. Buddhism is explored further in the discussion of the main stupa at Amluk Dara Stupa in chapter 4. As an architectural object, this stupa has not moved along the Silk Road, but it reflects the movement of Buddhism and the changing landscape—environmental, cultural, religious, political—of a place, in this case the Swat valley. It also brings into discussion the complex logistics involved in the transmission of architectural forms.
The wooden plaque, discussed in chapter 6, also belongs to the story of Buddhism, but I chose it because of the other narratives it tells, especially about the importance of the horse and the role of smaller and often forgotten Silk Road cultures: in this case, that of the Khotanese. It also exemplifies how far we have to travel yet as scholars to understand the Silk Road: it depicts iconography that is commonly found throughout Khotan but that we are still struggling to interpret.
The three textual objects in this book are selected because in each the text has a different context. Chapter 3 looks at a hoard of coins from the Kushan Empire. Coins fall on the cusp of text and object, and it is therefore perhaps not surprising that numismatics is a discipline that straddles both history and archaeology. In many cultures coins confirm other sources about the chronology and names of rulers and sometimes complete gaps. For the Kushan Empire, coins are the main source for reconstructing this chronology. Their inscriptions enable historians to reconstruct a time line of rulers, even though there has been considerable dispute about where to place the start of this time line.16 Few other extant written records have been found that are produced by the Kushans themselves, and the names of rulers in the annals of neighboring empires, such as the Chinese Later Han dynasty, are difficult to reconstruct. Therefore archaeology plays a much greater role in our understanding of Kushan history than in many other literate cultures. The cache of coins considered here have a further story to tell, as they were discovered, not in Kushan or a neighboring country that was a trading partner, but thousands of miles away in a Christian monastery in what is now Ethiopia. The reason for their journey is not certain, although we can hypothesize, but the fact of their making it is indicative of long-distance routes across sea and land at this time.
The second text considered here (chapter 9) is from a culture (China) where evidence from text and evidence from archaeology are both plentiful and have sometimes supported each other—notably, for example, in the case of the Shang rulers. In China, there are numerous texts, including detailed political histories. And Chinese history has given primacy to the word over the archaeological and other evidence, though as Charles Holcombe has pointed out, “Three subjects that mainstream traditional Chinese historians seldom addressed were trade, Buddhism and foreigners.”17 The transmitted texts are very much the voice of the literate and official elite. But the textual fragment here comes from an archaeological context, not subject to the same selection, and thus gives voice to another part of the culture. It is a fragment of a printed almanac, a popular but proscribed text at the time. This chapter considers the role of texts in largely illiterate or semiliterate societies, arguing that they also “spoke” to these groups.
The third text is a sacred object, a folio from the “Blue Qurʾan” (chapter 7) that was produced by the elite. This copy of the Islamic text was written in Arabic using gold and silver on indigo-colored parchment. Its provenance and inspiration are both uncertain and have been subject to much debate. Possible links to similar texts being produced thousands of miles away in Buddhist East Asia have been suggested.
Although I have tried to cover a wide range of topics, some have inevitably been neglected. I would like to have discussed music, medicine, and foodstuffs, and I have not included a specifically military item. My decision to include a slave, though, was very deliberate. Slaves are found across the Silk Road, regardless of period or culture, and they undoubtedly formed a major part of Silk Road trade. Despite this, they often appear only in passing in histories of the Silk Road.
I have worked with Silk Road things for over three decades, but I remain surprised that, when I come to ask more about the objects, I encounter a lack of understanding of—or interest in—their materiality. In some cases this is because what they are made of or how they are made is not certain: we have lost techniques mastered by past craftsmen and struggle to replicate methods and, sometimes, materials. But often it seems to be a matter of a lack of interest, either to find out or to question assumptions made without any evidence.
This leads to numerous cases in which the material descriptions of the object are at best imprecise and at worst inaccurate. An example of the former is the designation in many catalogs of Western medieval manuscripts of the medium as “vellum.” This tells us only that the parchment is finely made and does not specify the animal skin from which it is made (see chapter 7). The same can be said for the use of the terms hemp and mulberry to describe the paper of East Asian medieval manuscripts. These are also imprecise terms, usually denoting quality of paper rather than its main fiber, and as such are often misunderstood. While centuries of work have been done on identifying texts, much less effort has been spent on identifying the parchment or paper.18
A striking case of inaccuracy is found in descriptions of most glass excavated in China, dating from around Han-period contexts and deemed to be foreign. Such glass has usually been labeled “Roman”—even though some pieces are certainly Hellenistic and some were probably locally produced.19
In an exhibition I curated in 2009, I assumed that the description given in the institutional records of the glass bowl discussed in chapter 5 as “Roman” was correct. But when I started to study glass in more detail my misjudgment became clear, and, as at so many other times in my scholarly career, I had to question what I thought I had learned. This book is a part of this process:
