ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is a distillation of decades of working with Silk Road objects and landscapes. I could not even start to list all the people who have helped with its gestation since the idea took shape many years ago, let alone to remember or name all the people who helped me reach that point, often unwittingly. These latter include a long tradition of scholars, travelers, photographers, curators, conservators, scientists, archaeologists, and others, many from previous centuries, whose works have informed and inspired me. There are also the many people I have encountered in Silk Road travels—drivers, guides, and others, such as local families offering hospitality. It would be invidious to make a selection, and instead I take this opportunity to acknowledge and thank them all.
Many people have helped specifically and most recently by reading individual chapters in their areas of expertise and pointing out my worse mistakes and omissions. I acknowledge their role at the start of each chapter and thank them for their time and scholarly generosity. All remaining errors are my own. Of course, I must thank friends and colleagues who have been supportive during the inevitable up and downs of writing. And I must also thank the team at University of California Press, including the freelance staff, for all their work, most especially in helping me to chase up those elusive missing footnotes.
Finally I must acknowledge the many other—nonhuman—material objects that have played a part in the inspiration for this book; some of them get lead roles here, some bit parts, but many more are the supporting cast, hidden behind the scenes but vital nevertheless.
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND NAMES
If there is one point I would hope readers might take away from this book, it is the commonality of human experience among great diversity. That diversity includes languages and scripts, and thus the names of peoples, things, and places. The roman script is very much in the minority along the Silk Road, and the transliteration of languages into the roman script—romanization—while necessary for a book written in English and intended for many readers, can obscure this diversity. Except where words are in common English usage, I have deliberately retained diacritics/accents for languages that cannot be transcribed using the meager twenty-six letters of the Latin alphabet in order to try to impart something of the richness of the languages of the Silk Road.
For many scripts there are accepted romanization systems and I have used these for Chinese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan (pinyin, the IAST/ISO 15919 convention, and the Wylie system respectively). There is no standard transliteration for Turkic, and I have followed the advice of colleagues as to accepted current practice or common usage. For Arabic and Persian I have followed the systems used by the online versions of the Encyclopedia of Islam (http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2) and the Encyclopaedia Iranica (www.iranicaonline.org/) respectively. I am not a linguist and I apologize for the mistakes that are certain to have crept in despite my—and my editor’s—best efforts.
Consistency is difficult for the names of archaeological sites, towns, regions, countries, and political entities. I use contemporary names where possible or meaningful, but in some case historical accuracy has been sacrificed to clarity and then names are necessarily anachronistic.
MAP 1. Silk Roads by land and sea across Afro-Eurasia. For detail of area marked, see maps 5 and 6.
MAP 2. Silk Roads by land in central and East Asia with places discussed in Chapter 1.
MAP 3. Silk Roads across Asia with places discussed in Chapter 2.
MAP 4. Silk Roads by land and sea in West Asia with places discussed in Chapter 3.
MAP 5. Detail of Silk Road in Central Asia with places discussed in Chapter 4.
MAP 6. Silk Roads by land in Central Asia with places discussed in Chapter 6.
MAP 7. Silk Roads by land and sea linking Europe, North African and West Asia, with places discussed in Chapter 7.
MAP 8. Silk Roads by land through central Asia with sea routes to in South and East Asia with places discussed in Chapter 9.
Introduction
We are surrounded by things, and we are surrounded by history. But too seldom do we use the artifacts that make up our environment to understand the past. Too seldom do we try to read objects as we read books—to understand the people and times that created them, used them, and discarded them.
—STEVEN LUBAR AND W. DAVID KINGER,
History from Things: Essays on Material Culture
THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT THINGS ON THE SILK ROAD.1 Things or objects speak to us, in the sense of causing us to create a narrative. The narrative, however simple—“This is a receptacle made to hold my tea”—is dependent not only on the object’s qualities and context but on our qualities and context. This is a dialogue. The initial narrative might be one of many provoked by the object for one individual, let alone across individuals with different experiences, knowledge, beliefs, and cultural backgrounds. A drinking receptacle might be recognized as such across individuals, although some might see it as a cup for drinking wine, others as a cup for water. Outside its initial context—outside the space and time in which it was created—the object might no longer invoke the narrative intended by its creator. Such is often the case with objects created for religious or ritual purposes. Historians and archaeologists seek to understand more about the context in order to try to recreate the narrative of the object, its biography or history: How, why, when, and by whom was it made? Where, how, and by whom was it used, and for what purposes? Did it travel? Was it adapted, changed, broken, repaired? Without direct access to the original context, we have to accept that at times we might get the answers to these questions spectacularly wrong.2
Telling history through objects rather than people or events is not a new approach, but over the past two decades it has become more central in teaching and in popularizing world history.3 Particularly successful has been the history of commodities.4 This approach has increasingly been adopted by academic institutions, especially for modern history.5 Seeking alternative sources for history is not, however, restricted to commodities, and new textbooks in this area range across the mundane, the ornamental, the useful, and the built.6
This book focuses on made rather than raw materials but takes a broad view of objects or things—including commodities; “natural” and animate things such as people, horses, and camels; and complex created things, such as jewelry, glass, paintings, and buildings. I do not exclude texts. Instead of arguing that texts are distinct from other things—that texts are “not neutral epistles . . . like other products of human creativity” but are “active in the production, negotiation and transformation of social relationships”7—I view the nontextual