The 'Myth' of the Silk Road

[Nathan Ross]

So if you can get to India by land... then you can get to China by land, which means there was a "Silk Road".

The regular land route to India seems to be well supported (although I would suggest that we wouldn't need a constant flow of hundreds of elephants - after the early transfers, most elephants used by the Hellenistic and Parthian/Persian states were probably 'home grown'!)

Do we have firm evidence for a land route between China and India? How early might this have been established?

But even if there was one, that still doesn't make a 'silk road' - we only know of a small handful of people who ever made the full journey from west to east, and the central hub of the route seems to have been firmly controlled by middlemen, principally the Indian states.

Perhaps we could better imagine the 'silk routes' (plural) as a sort of networks of webs: a 'Roman' web stretching from Egypt via the Red Sea to India, a 'Persian' web stretching from Mesopotamia down into northern India, east to Afghanistan and north into the steppe, an 'Indian' web stretching from the Red Sea to the Malay Peninsula and north into central Asia, and a 'Chinese' web running west into central Asia and south by sea to the Gulf of Siam.

These webs intersect at various nodal points, but there's no one strand that stretches all the way from west to east. That would require a land route through central Asia that entirely bypassed the Indian middlemen - and we still don't seem to have any evidence for that.

Meanwhile, looking around for further material, I came across this dense mass of quotations and ideas:

https://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/te...dices.html

There's some very interesting stuff in there, if you can be bothered to pick though it - mostly secondary sources, and I'm unsure of the accuracy or provenance of the Chinese translations.

There is a suggestion of an early land route from the Gulf of Siam to the Bay of Bengal (which introduces the idea of the Malay peoples as additional middlemen!).

Also a curious note (towards the end) of 'Christian carvings' from Xuozhou supposedly dating from AD86 - although the identification of these carvings as 'Christian' might perhaps be a little tendentious...