A silken bond between east and west - the Silk Road

THE Silk Road originated in the early centuries of the Christian era as a channel of trade in silk and other goods between China and India in the east and the Roman world in the west. It has a permanent place in world history as an important means of contact between peoples and cultures and a conduit for the two-way transmission of ideas, science and technology, languages and literature.

Such contact was not always easy to maintain in the face of political pressures and other hindrances, but when one stretch of the route closed down another would take its place. Several routes, both overland and maritime, were actually followed by travellers between east and west, and the expression "Silk Road" is a symbolic one evoking an enduring spirit of communication between peoples. It is in order to rediscover that eternal spirit that the protect for the "Integral Study of the Silk Roads" has been undertaken (see the Unesco Courier, November 1988).

The Silk Roads project is a many-sided undertaking. Some scholars will be retracing the various itineraries which connected China and the West and studying the geography of the countries through which they passed. Others will be focusing on the mechanics of road building and transport technology and the ways in which they were influenced by climatic conditions and the physical barriers which had to be overcome. Still others will study the technologies used by different peoples for the exploitation of material resources, and analyse the social systems, languages and literatures of these peoples, as well as their folklore, their myths and other aspects of their culture.

Population movements, the great migrations that shaped the history of entire regions, will also be studied. But the individual travellers who made their way along the Silk Roads will not be forgotten-the artists, musicians and craftsmen who were prepared to risk their lives in pursuit of knowledge from other cultures and societies, to which in turn they contributed their own skills.

Love of adventure, a hunger for knowledge about others, these were but two of many motives which fuelled the process of exchange between different societies and helped to break down the barriers which isolated people in different regions and to establish the bonds of co-existence that make human progress possible. Th's was the legacy of the Silk Road and the spirit which brought it into being.

Orient and Occident. the first contacts

The foundations of the east-west contacts, which were later channelled along the Silk Roads, were laid in the last few centuries of the pre-Christian era with the formation of a number of Asian states whose peoples exploited the resources they found locally and competed for trade. This quest for profit led to a flourishing exchange of goods and the movement of men from re on to region.

91 Gradually, the peaceful conditions necessary for trade came into being. The diverse peoples involved in this process are vividly portrayed by the Greek historian Herodotus, who describes how their societies were organized, their ways of life and their close relationship with the Achaemenid empire in Persia.

One example of this commercial and cultural exchange is that of the Aramaean merchants who travelled through Central Asia where their alphabetic script, Aramaic, influenced the evolution of other alphabets such as Sogdian and Kharoshti. Among the other peoples described by Herodotus are the Scythians, the "Indians", and the Persian speaking people who moved eastward, where their language had a strong influence on the ancient languages of the region.

The meeting of the peoples of east and west, the exchange of ideas and technologies, and the two-way transmission of languages and literature was made possible for the first time by the Achaemenid empire between the sixth and fourth centuries BC. People were attracted from many points of the compass to the capital of the empire, Persepolis, along roads built by the emperor Darius. At the same time, in the outlying central Asian provinces, cities such as Balkh, Samarkand and Taxila, which later became important staging posts on the Silk Roads, were connected by overland routes and developed as meeting points between east and west. During this period the spirit of dialogue between the peoples of east and west was the primary form of the enrichment of human civilization.

The conquests of Alexander the Great

Contacts between east and west were facilitated in the late fourth century BC by the conquests of Alexander the Great, who overthrew the Achaemenid empire and campaigned eastwards as far as India. A Macedonian who became steeped in Greek culture after his conquest of Greece, and then an oriental monarch, captivated by the idealism of the East, Alexander was himself the embodiment of cultural intermingling.

During his time the culture of the Greek world was transmitted into Asia in an unprecedented flow of men and ideas, technologies, artistic trends and architectural formulae, as well as drama, poetry, music, religions and above all language and literature. However, the traffic was not only one-way. Alexander and the scholars who accompanied him met Asian philosophers, whose ideas they took back to Greece along with tributes of gold, cattle and artefacts which enriched the classical world of the West. Alexander founded several new cities in Asia, and his men intermarried there, introducing Hellenism but at the same time becoming thoroughly Asianized and integrated into the local population.

Shortly after Alexander invaded the sub-continent, Chandragupta Maurya seized the throne of the Indian kingdom of Magadha, thus taking the first step in the creation of the mighty Mauryan empire, which inherited both the Greek and the Achaemenid legacy. The empire reached its zenith during the reign of his grandson Asoka (274-237 BC). Asoka, who inaugurated an era of Buddhist missionary activity that was to have a farreaching impact on central Asia and the Far East, received many Greek envoys and in return sent his own ambassadors to the Hellenistic world.2

After its founder's death, Alexander's great empire disintegrated into smaller units including such peoples as the Bactrian Greeks, the Sogdians, the Parthians, and later the Sassanians and the Scythians. This fragmentation did not prevent the movement of people and goods; on the contrary, commercial activity was intensified as a result of advances in geographical knowledge, which also encouraged the movements of learned Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Manicheans and other missionaries. The ruins of monasteries and other religious centres provide a clue to the routes they took. Cultural influences spread along the river valleys of Mesopotamia, Central Asia and India. Archaeological excavations at Taxila on the Indus and Al-Khanum on the Oxus have shown how art and architecture of that time drew on a wide variety of traditions.

The growth of sea-borne trade

Another significant development, thought to have taken place around 100 BC, was the discovery of the monsoon, which enabled ocean-going vessels to cross the Indian Ocean from west to east in spring and then to return in winter when the winds reversed, laden with products of the East. For the first time the Indian Ocean had become a lake for ships travelong between the Roman world, Indian ports, and the coast of China.

The work of geographers such as Pliny the Elder in the first century AD and Ptolemy a century later testifies to increasing knowledge of the world. The anonymous author of the first-century Periplus Mart's Erytbraei gives a detailed description of the countries around the Indian Ocean, their peoples, trade, imports and exports, climate and currency.

New sea routes were developed, extending the range of the coastal shipping that in ancient times had linked Egypt, via the land of Dilmun (possibly Bahrein) with the distant eastern countries of Magan and Meluhha, which may have been located in the Indus valley. Sea traffic along these new routes would reinforce, and when necessary replace, the overland Silk Roads.

China-'s opening to the West

Meanwhile, tribal conflicts on the western borders of China had caused the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC) to build the Great Wall of China as a defensive measure. Chinese sources describe how these tribes subsequently moved down the Oxus valley and penetrated south of the Kun-lun, Karakorum and Hindu Kush mountains.

The rulers of the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) which followed kept a strict watch over these tribal movements on their western borders, but they also opened up for the first time the route to central Asia and maintained close contact with the mighty Kushan empire which stretched from the Casplan Sea in the north through the Oxus, Indus and Ganges valleys to the Arabian Sea in the south. The Kushan empire was so vast that it also had close contacts with the Roman empire. This period of close collaboration between East and West helped to create the propitious conditions for the opening of the Silk Road.

Traces of intense cultural activity still mark the routes that joined East and West centuries ago. Ruins of ancient cities, such as Kapisa (near modern Charikar) in the heart of Afghanistan, tell a story of complex exchanges with other countries. Rock carvings portray people wearing the costumes of different tribes and rock inscriptions speak of different peoples and languages. In the great ancient capital of Changan (modern Xian), Buddhist monks from japan and Korea met learned scholars from Sri Lanka, India and Central Asia. Sculptures of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas stand in spectacular natural surroundings, most notably at Bamiyan in Afghanistan, where there are two colossal Buddha figures carved from the living rock and hundreds of man-made caves, many of which bear traces of fine fresco painting which links them with contemporary caves in Xin-jiang (Sinkiang).

While the Han Dynasty ruled in China, the Huns spread from the western borderland of China and Mongolia into the heart of Asia and Europe and down to India. A loose confederation of peoples, the Huns built a vast empire in central Asia stretching from China to Persia and from the Oxus to the Arabian Sea. Many Chinese and western travellers have left a vivid picture of the Huns' horsemanship, polo-playing, weapons and dress. The Huns were followed by Turkic tribes who established states in Central Asia which obstructed passage along the old-established Silk Roads, although the T'ang Dynasty which began to rule China in 618 AD still managed to send goods and people to the West.

The expansion of Islam

The rise of Islam in Arabia in the seventh century triggered a profound social and religious revolution among the Arabs, who expanded into Asia, Africa and Europe. Their expansion also opened up new vistas in science and philosophy as they began to plumb the ocean of knowledge contained in Greek manuscripts and to translate them into Arabic. Through their contacts with India and China they also followed new developments in mathematics, medicine and astronomy and learned how to manufacture paper, gunpowder, ceramics and silk and muslin cloth. The Arabs now became the intermediaries in a dialogue which extended from China to Venice and then westwards to France, Spain and Portugal. As well as passing on Greek science and philosophy to the newly-developing world of the time, they propagated Indian mathematics, the new symbols of number and the decimal system that became the foundations of modern science. They also disseminated the science of chemistry, knowledge of the properties of metals and of new Chinese technologies, and above all medical information which opened up great possibilities in the human and biological sciences. Arab interest in astronomy led to the development of new concepts of the universe and of cosmogony. In the fields of art and architecture they allied the traditions of the past with scientific and mathematical precision and contributed new forms in building and new tastes in decoration which incorporated calligraphy and arabesque.

In this way the spirit of the Silk Roads was carried on. As the caravans plied from Khotan, Yarkand and Kashgar to Samarkand, Bokhara and Merv and beyond to the markets of the western world, or further south through Balkh, Hamadan and Damascus to Aleppo, or from China westwards to the Caucasus and then on to Istanbul and Venice, they kept alive a dialogue between the peoples of east and west, a process of mutual contact and cooperation that encouraged the peaceful growth of human civilization.

COPYRIGHT 1989 UNESCO
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