Database: Silk Roads

Map of the Silk Roads

The German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen coined the expression "Silk Road" in 1877 to designate the network of trade routes that connected Eurasia through antiquity and the Middle Ages. Though catchy and well-known, this expression is also misleading.

There never existed one single road linking China and Europe, almost no one travelled from one part of the continent to the other, and many goods other than silk were transported. Some geographical constraints (the Himalayas and Zagros mountains, the Taklamakan Desert) dictated the use of some common itineraries, but changing weather conditions or political situations frequently forced travelers to alter their plans. The length of the 12000 kilometer / two-year journey meant that few walked the entire route, giving rise to a host of middlemen who exchanged goods without traveling much more than 50 kilometers themselves. Baghdadi glasswork could therefore reach Korea without a Baghdadi merchant accompanying it. The overall impression was that of a global network connecting East-West as well as North-South overland routes with Indian Ocean maritime routes.

Baghdad, linked to the Indian Ocean by the Tigris River and located near the main valley crossing the Zagros mountains into Iran, was ideally situated to take advantage of these routes. This was a fact well-known to its founder, Caliph al-Mansur (r. 754-775), who, according to the ninth-century historian al-Tabari, declared upon the creation of the city: "Here is the Tigris with nothing between us and China, and on it arrives everything that the sea can bring."