For some historiographers, the seduction of a key object is similar that of a “great man,” whereas others look at the humble but plentiful potsherds to understand the past. This book attempts to take a middle line, concentrating most chapters around a single object but considering its context by looking at related objects—including people. The objects selected have complex stories to be told, and this book aims to give this “thick description,” a close-grained analysis of each object in its times and places.9
Movement of objects—including people—is essential to the concept of the Silk Road, and most of the objects chosen here have journeyed along the Silk Road. But the vast majority of such objects—everyday or luxury, traded or not—have long disappeared: food, wine, and medicines were consumed; slaves, elephants, and horses died; textiles, wood, and ivory decayed; glass and pottery were broken.10 Only in rare cases did objects survive by design or accident, as in hoards of metal or glass, or in burials when objects were sufficiently valued to be interred with corpses, as in the case of three of the objects discussed here (chapters 1, 2, and 5). Texts are often the only evidence for the existence of other objects, but both the archaeology and the texts are extremely fragmentary.
Objects are not neutral and inert in this story: they change and also effect change. This is where a material culture approach is especially relevant to the Silk Road. In the interaction of the objects with the cultures they encountered—those that made them, carried them, received them, used them, sold them, discarded them—we can gain new perspectives on those cultures at those times. This book seeks to take account of more recent discussions of “things” to include their interactions with humans (themselves “things”), the usual approach to material culture, but also the interdependence of things and humans—their entanglement.11
This is a book set in a period and places characterized by such entanglement. Most of the objects selected here have more than one cultural context and find themselves entangled with things—including people—of different cultures and times. I do not restrict discussion to the object in its original setting but in many cases bring the story to the present, looking at a range of very different relationships—the entanglement of the object and the conservator, the curator, the scholar, the collector, the looter, and others.
Several of the objects I discuss are luxury or monumental objects—the earrings, ewer, silk, Qur’an, and stupa. The pair of earrings (chapter 1), were discovered in a tomb in the territories of the Xiongnu Empire and show characteristics and materials from a variety of cultures subsumed under the imperial labels of “Xiongnu” and “Chinese.”12 The presentation of their story often tends to veer to the dichotomous—steppe and settled, nomad and agriculturalist, barbarian and civilized—and I very much hope to avoid that here, as I believe it to be crude and unhelpful.13 The discussion is intended to challenge the use of binary labels or any such hard distinctions. These include those sometimes made between trade and tribute and between government and private trade. One intention of this book is to show that the issues are more complex than sometimes presented, to sow uncertainty and to give references for further reading.
The environment is an essential part of the stories of all the things discussed in this book. It provided materials, conditions, and impetus for the development of technologies, the exploitation and manufacture of items, and the movement of peoples.14 The changing environment, for example, is a catalyst in the story of the earrings: some scholars have argued that the Xiongnu peoples originated in the Altai but were forced out by changes in climate in the fourth century BC, thus moving south into Central Asia and the borders of China, where we encounter them in chapter 1.15 In turn, it is argued, this movement forced the existing population, the Yuezhi, to move west, where they established the Hephthalite Empire, possibly the makers of the Bactrian ewer discussed in chapter 5.
Another similarly complex issue raised in this first chapter is the question of where, by whom, and for whom things were made. Technologies, materials, fashions, and craftsmen all traveled—I would argue this is an important characteristic of the Silk Road—and we have at best tentative hypotheses about where these earrings were made. We have to accept that these might be challenged by future finds. In other words, in many cases, when dealing with the material culture of the Silk Road, we are on shaky ground.
The earrings survived, as they were buried in a tomb, and this is the case with another two objects discussed here: the Hellenistic glass bowl (chapter 2) and the Bactrian ewer (chapter 5). These were found in elite tombs, and it is possible that such objects were considered to be “foreign” or “exotic” and that their inclusion in the tombs was intended to heighten the status and cosmopolitanism of the owner. This would assume, in turn, that cosmopolitanism was considered positively in the owners’ societies.
The chapter on the Bactrian ewer raises the important and often overlooked role of the transmission of intangible cultural heritage on the Silk Road. Like the material object itself, which has antecedents in Roman and then Sasanian vessels but which has developed its own characteristics, the story depicted on the vessel, most probably part of the Trojan War cycle, has developed its own characteristics. Not least among these is the depiction of Paris holding two fruits, little resembling apples. Of course, we have no evidence to suggest that there was any direct knowledge of Roman ewers or the Trojan War epic, and the craftsmen who made this object and the original owner might well have seen it as an entirely local production representing a local story. However, as it moved eastwards into China, it would certainly have been viewed as foreign—as coming from the “west” even if that west was Central Asia and not the borders of Europe.
Glass and glass technology, discussed in chapter 2 on the Hellenistic glass bowl, present an interesting comparison and contrast to sericulture on the Silk Road (see chapter 8). The raw materials for glass were readily available throughout much of Eurasia. The techniques were also present, at least the firing of raw materials to transform them and the use of flux to reduce the firing temperatures. The technology was invented or diffused across Eurasia from at least the first millennium BC. But whereas silk started in the East, for glass the technology was refined in West Asia on the fringes of Europe— and spread east into Sasanian Persia and to China and Korea. The South Asia tradition might have developed independently but was certainly informed by objects arriving from West Asia. And, also unlike silk technology and its products, which were mastered and valued in all the major cultures across the Silk Road, glass technology had a stuttering progress in China. Perhaps this is because other materials—jade and increasingly fine ceramics—filled the aesthetic need for a translucent but hard material that glass filled in other cultures where ceramic technology was far less developed. But glass was clearly valued by some, as shown by the existence of items in elite tombs, the importance of glass in Buddhism, and the adoption of and experimentation with the technology at different times in China.
Silk is an ongoing and central part of this story, and in chapter 8 I have chosen a piece to discuss that comes from fairly late, from the eighth to tenth centuries, so that I can explore the spread of silk technologies—moriculture, sericulture, weaving—from their origins in China. While silk was not always the major trade item over the whole period or even the major item across some of the networks, it certainly remained significant. The raw and finished materials continued to be valued and traded throughout the period. We also see the development of new weaves as the materials and technologies spread outside China.
Silk—and glass—were both part of the story of Buddhism, playing an important role in the practice of the faith. Buddhism is explored