Parts of the thoroughfare were ultimately incorporated into the Silk Road. The east-west trade routes between Greece and China began to open during the first and second centuries B. The Roman Empire and the Kushan Empire which ruled territory in what is now northern India also benefitted from the commerce created by the route along the Silk Road. The Silk Road routes included a large network of strategically located trading posts, markets and thoroughfares designed to streamline the transport, exchange, distribution and storage of goods.
From Seleucia, routes passed eastward over the Zagros Mountains to the cities of Ecbatana Iran and Merv Turkmenistan , from which additional routes traversed to modern-day Afghanistan and eastward into Mongolia and China.
Silk Road routes also led to ports on the Persian Gulf, where goods were then transported up the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Routes from these cities also connected to ports along the Mediterranean Sea, from which goods were shipped to cities throughout the Roman Empire and into Europe.
Trade along the so-called Silk Road economic belt included fruits and vegetables, livestock, grain, leather and hides, tools, religious objects, artwork, precious stones and metals and—perhaps more importantly—language, culture, religious beliefs, philosophy and science.
Commodities such as paper and gunpowder, both invented by the Chinese during the Han Dynasty, had obvious and lasting impacts on culture and history in the West. They were also among the most-traded items between the East and West. Paper was invented in China during the 3rd century B. In addition, the rich spices of the East quickly became popular in the West, and changed cuisine across much of Europe.
The origins of gunpowder are less well known, although there are references to fireworks and firearms in China as early as the s. Historians believe that gunpowder was indeed exported along the Silk Road routes to Europe, where it was further refined for use in cannons in England, France and elsewhere in the s.
The nation-states with access to it had obvious advantages in war, and thus the export of gunpowder had an enormous impact on the political history of Europe. The Silk Road routes also opened up means of passage for explorers seeking to better understand the culture and geography of the Far East. Venetian explorer Marco Polo famously used the Silk Road to travel from Italy to China, which was then under the control of the Mongolian Empire, where they arrived in Notably, they did not travel by boat, but rather by camel following overland routes.
They arrived at Xanadu, the lavish summer palace of the Mongolian emperor Kublai Khan. His journeys across the Silk Road became the basis for his book, "The Travels of Marco Polo," which gave Europeans a better understanding of Asian commerce and culture. The Pax Mongolica ushered in an era of stability and commerce that successfully connected Europe and East Asia. The Silk Road has connected far-flung peoples and civilizations throughout the world for hundreds of years.
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Related Resources. Silk Road. View Collection. The Silk Roads. View Map. The Pax Mongolica. View Article. Connecting the Globe Along the Silk Road. Silk was a form of currency; tens of thousands of bolts of the precious substance would be sent annually to the nomadic rulers in exchange for horses, along with other commodities such as grain which the nomads sought. Clearly not all that silk was being used by the nomads but was being traded to those further west.
For a time in the eighth and early ninth centuries, the rulers of the T'ang Dynasty were helpless to resist the exorbitant demands of the nomadic Uighurs, who had saved the dynasty from internal rebellion and exploited their monopoly as the main suppliers of horses. Beginning in the Song Dynasty 11thth centuries , tea became increasingly important in Chinese exports, and over time bureaucratic mechanisms were developed to regulate the tea and horse trade.
Government efforts to control the horse-tea trade with those who ruled the areas north of the Tarim Basin in the Xinjiang of today continued down into the sixteenth century, when it was disrupted by political disorders.
The best known example to illustrate the importance of the horse in the history of Inner Asia is the Mongol Empire. From modest beginnings in some of the best pasturelands of the north, the Mongols came to control much of Eurasia, largely because they perfected the art of cavalry warfare. The indigenous Mongol horses, while not large, were hardy, and, as contemporary observers noted, could survive in winter conditions because of their ability to find food under the ice and snow covering the steppes.
It is important to realize though that the reliance on the horse was also a limiting factor for the Mongols, since they could not sustain large armies where there was not sufficient pasturage. The early Chinese experience of reliance on the nomads for horses was not unique: we can see analogous patterns in other parts of Eurasia. In the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, for example, Muscovite Russia traded extensively with the Nogais and other nomads in the southern steppes who provided on a regular basis tens of thousands of horses for the Muscovite armies.
Horses were important commodities on the trade routes connecting Central Asia to northern India via Afghanistan, because, like central China, India was unsuited to raising quality horses for military purposes. The great Mughal rulers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries appreciated this as did the British in the nineteenth century.
William Moorcroft, who became famous as one of the rare Europeans to reach Bukhara in the early nineteenth century, justified his dangerous trip north from India by his effort to establish a reliable supply of cavalry mounts for the British Indian army.
Important as horses were, the camel was arguably of far greater significance in the history of the Silk Road. Domesticated as long ago as the fourth millennium BCE, by the first millennium BCE camels were prominently depicted on Assyrian and Achaemenid Persian carved reliefs and figured in Biblical texts as indicators of wealth. Among the most famous depictions are those in the ruins of Persepolis, where both of the main camel species--the one-humped dromedary of Western Asia and the two-humped Bactrian of Eastern Asia--are represented in the processions of those bearing tribute to the Persian king.
In China awareness of the value of the camel was heightened by the interactions between the Han and the Xiongnu toward the end of the first millennium BCE when camels were listed among the animals taken captive on military campaigns or sent as diplomatic gifts or objects of trade in exchange for Chinese silk.
Campaigns of the Chinese army to the north and west against the nomads invariably required support by large trains of camels to carry supplies. With the rise of Islam in the seventh century CE, the success of Arab armies in rapidly carving out an empire in the Middle East was due to a considerable degree to their use of camels as cavalry mounts.
The camel's great virtues include the ability to carry substantial loads pounds--and their well-known capacity for surviving in arid conditions. The secret to the camel's ability to go for days without drinking is in its efficient conservation and processing of fluids it does not store water in its hump[s], which in fact are largely fat. Camels can maintain their carrying capacity over long distances in dry conditions, eating scrub and thorn bushes. When they drink though, they may consume 25 gallons at a time; so caravan routes do have to include rivers or wells at regular intervals.
The use of the camel as the dominant means of transporting goods over much of Inner Asia is in part a matter of economic efficiency--as Richard Bulliet has argued, camels are cost efficient compared to the use of carts requiring the maintenance of roads and the kind of support network that would be required for other transport animals.
In some areas though down into modern times, camels continue to be used as draft animals, pulling plows and hitched to carts. Given their importance in the lives of peoples across inner Asia, not surprisingly camels and horses figure in literature and the visual arts. A Japanese TV crew filming a series on the Silk Road in the s was entertained by camel herders in the Syrian desert singing a love ballad about camels.
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