Lands of Asia layouts (Eng) 26.11.21

4 .1
4.1
THE SILK ROAD
The Silk Road is one of the most remarkable achievements of
civilisation. A transcontinental route, it meant that for the first time in human history
the West and the East were connected: the Mediterranean countries with the Far
East, the ancient classical civilisations with that of the Chinese.
The emergence of this route can be traced back to the second half of the 2nd
century BC when the Chinese envoy and traveller Zhang Qian first opened up the
Western Regions (the Chinese name for the countries of Central Asia) for China. In
this way, two great routes to previously unknown lands came to be connected. The
first, ran from west to east, from the Mediterranean to Central Asia, and was scouted
and traversed by the Hellenes and Macedonians during the campaigns of Alexander
the Great and the Seleucid general Demodamas. The second, running from east to
west, from the Han Empire to Central Asia, was the route taken by Zhang Qian as
he crossed these regions, moving from north to south through Dayuan (Ferghana),
Kangju (Transoxiana) and Bactria.
The Sogdians had a prominent role in the development of the Silk Road as they
moved eastwards to settle elsewhere following the conquest of Sogdia by Alexander
the Great. Later, Sogdian trading stations appeared all along the eastern part of the
route, stretching from Central Asia to Changan in China and, possibly even as far
away as Japan. At the end of the 6th century BC, the Sogdian merchant Maniah,
having skirted the Caspian and crossed the Black Sea, arrived in Constantinople,
thereby establishing a new route for the silk trade – the ‘Caucasian Silk Road’. There
is evidence that the Sogdians also traded along the maritime routes of the Silk Road,
which went from Arabia to India and thence further east to China.
The term ‘Silk Road’ – Seidenstrasse or Seidenstrassen (‘Silk Roads’, since there were
many routes), in German – was first coined and introduced into academic circles by
the German scholar Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877 in his seminal book on
China. His choice of the name was entirely justified, for it was silk, as another German
scholar Albert Hermann noted, which, at the end of the 2nd century BC, was the main
commodity responsible for bringing together the two different worlds of the West and
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