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The Silk Road began as a way to transport good from culture to culture, across various land masses. Imagine today having no cars, trains, buses, no plains or efficient way to get across waters…imagine this, and one may imagine the ways in which the Silk Road helped cultures trade, and exchange cultural views.
The process by which the Silk Road succeeded lasted somewhere around two thousand years, with no vehicles or anything reminiscent of modern day transport, trade became a very lengthy process. The “Silk Road” was actually a complex network of several major routes which led across Eurasia. The different routes touched on all the major cities of the time and helped goods, ideas, and technology diffuse from one culture to the next.
The road was named because one of the main goods transported across the lands was silk from China, which also contributed other goods such as bamboo, gunpowder, paper, and ginger among other items. Other main contributors were Siberia and Central Asia, India, the Middle Easy, and the Mediterranean Basin[1].
Aside from the obvious benefits of cultures beginning to expand because of a growing exchange of goods, the intermingling which occurred also began an exchange of ideas and views. For example, cultures from Rome might adopt ideas from China. Sometimes the ideas would include religious aspects, such the diffusion of Buddhism across Eurasia, other time there would be noticeable culture changes in areas such as architecture or city layout.
The Silk Road was a blessing and a curse, while there were substantial benefits to the exchange of goods, people often suffered from disease, which was also transported from area to area across the continent. Diseases such as smallpox and measles are just two examples of transported illness which devastated cultures.
I would go as far as to say that without the development of the Silk Road the World today would not be as is. This was in amazing achievement for its time which helped communities and civilizations from all over Eurasia expand their cultures in most ways, a positive fashion. With the development of a high class road network across such a large landmass, most anything became plausible, interestingly enough, our road network today work in much a similar way…
[1] Robert Strayer, Ways of the World, a Brief Global History (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009) p. 221.
I was not aware of all the illness that traveled along Silk Road. Illness traveled faster during this time than it does now. I still did not think illness would have spread so rapidly and cause the road to be a curse.
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