The 'Myth' of the Silk Road

[Nathan Ross]

I like to think of these missions as ancient "mercantile feasability studies"... you can just imagine his merchant mind ticking over and crunching the numbers.

Ah, but isn't that part of the problem? It's very easy to imagine these things, or to think that they probably happened, even must have happened... but we still don't have any evidence that they did happen, and in the shortage of such evidence we should be wary about assumptions. All 'factoids' aren't false all of the time, of course, but the way that many historians at the moment write about the 'silk road in antiquity' you'd think there would be more substance to it.

Its a fine subject for historical novelists maybe - we could imagine rival Roman and Parthian agents clashing in the wilds of central Asia, like a sort of 'great game' of the ancient world! - but historians should be a bit more rigorous.

The Northern Hsiung-nu still posed a problem for the Han until decisively defeated by Ban Chao in about 89AD. The information about the Tarim cities bartering for silk came from a Nicola Di Cosmo paper "Ancient City-States of the Tarim Basin".

Thanks!

I just disagree with Ball writing that there was not a recognised land route to India and China.

I think even Ball would admit there was an overland route to India - he does get a bit two-fisted in his scepticism, and a bit over-credulous in other things. But the idea of a land route to China during our period still seems unlikely.

We only know of a handful of men, over a period of hundreds of years, who even attempted to make the journey - and even they didn't seem to have a very clear idea of where they were going. Some Romano-Greco-Syrian 'agents' covered half the distance east, and a Chinese mission got two-thirds of the way west. Then we have the semi-mythological Aristaeus, supposedly wandering somewhere north and east of the Caspian meeting griffins and one-eyed folk...

This isn't to say that steppe cultures had no influence on the west - they certainly did, especially in later centuries with the Alanic and Hunnic arrivals - but the idea of these peoples as a regular conduit for goods or ideas from far to the east into the Roman world before that time seems pretty untenable.