The Silk Road (or Silk Routes) is an complex interconnected network of trade routes across the Asian continent connecting East, South, and Western Asia with the Mediterranean world, as well as North and Northeast Africa and Europe. In recent years, it has also come to be used for the maritime as well the overland routes.
Introduction
The Silk Routes were not only conduits for silk, but also for many other products. They were very important paths for cultural and technological transmission that linked traders, merchants, pilgrims, missionaries, soldiers, nomads and urban dwellers among China, India, Persia and Mediterranean countries for almost 3,000 years.
Chinese jade and steatite plaques, in the Scythian-style animal art of the steppes. 4th–3rd century BCE. British Museum.
A pottery horse head and neck (broken from the body) of the Late Han Dynasty (1st–2nd century CE)
Woven silk textile from Tomb No. 1 at Mawangdui, Changsha, Hunan province, China, 2nd century BCE, Han Dynasty
Extending over 4,000 miles, the routes enabled people to transport trade goods, especially luxuries such as slaves, silk, satins and other fine fabrics, musk, other perfumes, spices and medicines, jewels, glassware and even rhubarb, while simultaneously serving as a conduit for the spread of knowledge, ideas, cultures, and diseases between different parts of the world (China, India, Asia Minor and the Mediterranean).
Trade on the Silk Road was a significant factor in the development of the great civilizations of China, India, Egypt, Persia, Arabia, and Rome, and in several respects helped lay the foundations for the modern world. For the most part, goods were transported by a series of agents on varying routes and were traded in the bustling mercantile markets of the oasis towns.
A late Zhou Dynasty or early Han Dynasty (c. 300–200 BCE) Chinese bronze mirror inlaid with glass and showing influence from Hellenistic civilization in Central Asia
The central Asian sections of the trade routes was expanded around 114 BCE by the Han Dynasty, largely through the missions and explorations of Zhang Qian, but earlier trade routes across the continents already existed. In the late Middle Ages, transcontinental trade over the land routes of the Silk Road declined as sea trade increased.
Woven silk textile from Tomb No. 1 at Mawangdui, Changsha, Hunan province, China, dated to the Western Han Era, 2nd century BCE.
As the silk road extends westwards from the ancient commercial centers of China, the overland, intercontinental Silk Road divides into the northern and southern routes bypassing the Taklamakan Desert and Lop Nur.
The northern route started at Chang'an (now called Xi'an), the capital of the ancient Chinese Empire, which, in the Later Han, was moved further east to Luoyang. The route was defined about the 1st Century BCE as Han Wudi put an end to harassment by nomadic tribes.
The route travels northwest through the Chinese province of Gansu from Shaanxi Province, and splits into three further routes, two of them following the mountain ranges to the north and south of the Taklamakan Desert to rejoin at Kashgar; and the other going north of the Tian Shan mountains through Turfan, Talgar and Almaty (in what is now southeast Kazakhstan).
The New Silk Road railway route
The last available link on the Silk Road was completed in 1990, when the railway systems of China and Kazakhstan connected in Alataw Pass (Alashan Kou). In 2008, the line is used by direct passenger service from Urumqi in China's Xinjiang to Almaty and Astana in Kazakhstan.
