19 November 2024: Silk Roads
My wife and I are spending a few days in London to visit the Natural History Museum and The British Museum. Today we went to the British Museum, starting in their Silk Roads exhibition.
Note that Silk Roads is plural. The description “Silk Road” is apparently an 18th century invention. The Museum points out that there were many routes between Western Europe and the Far East, some of them involving sea voyages. And silk was only one of the commodities traded.
The exhibition mainly covers the period 500 to 1000 CE but traces the Silk Roads back much further. It starts in the earliest days in the Far East, when there was trade between Japan and China, and gradually takes you forward in time and westwards to end in the British Isles in Anglo-Saxon times.
As well as trading with Japan, China spread its network westwards to trade with India and places in between. Horses were particularly prized in China. Gold, silver, precious stones and spices were traded, as were slaves. Items from China ended up in Rome and vice versa, although the two empires were only vaguely aware of each other’s existence.
It was not only goods that were traded. Ideas and designs spread, influencing such things as building styles. Religions were spread through the trading routes as well, Buddhism being one of the first, followed by Christianity and Islam.
Some of the precious objects discovered at Sutton Hoo have been shown to include items sourced from the East, including garnets.
The Silk Roads exhibition took up our morning. After a snack in the Members’ Room, my wife and I split up to tour round the galleries that interested us. Comparing notes afterwards, we realised we had both spent some time in the Enlightenment section. The part we both looked at described the Enlightenment scholars and explorers and their attempts to understand the antiquities they had discovered. In many cases this was difficult because the ancient scripts and languages were unknown. It was not until multi-lingual objects like the Rosetta Stone were discovered that it was possible to work back to forgotten languages from languages that were known.