The Silk Road: A New History (2 page)

RECOVERING HISTORY FROM RECYCLED PAPER
The needle marks and shape of this document indicate that it was part of a funerary garment, possibly a shirt, buried in a Turfan graveyard. The text records testimony given by an Iranian merchant before a Chinese court. This section of the document begins in the upper right-hand corner with the name of the merchant, Cao Lushan, and his age, thirty. Xinjiang Museum.

Introduction

T
he document on the facing page illustrates the subject of this book. It is a court record of testimony given by an Iranian merchant living in China sometime around 670
CE
. The Iranian requested the court’s assistance in recovering 275 bolts of silk owed to his deceased brother. He testified that, after lending the silk to his Chinese partner, his brother disappeared in the desert on a business trip with two camels, four cattle, and a donkey, and was presumed dead. The court ruled that, as his brother’s survivor, the Iranian was entitled to the silk, but it is not clear whether the ruling was ever enforced.

This incident reveals much about the Silk Road trade. The actual volume of trade was small. In this example, just seven animals carried all of the Iranian merchant’s goods. Two were camels, but the other five were four cattle and a donkey, all important pack animals. The presence of Iranian merchants is notable, since China’s main trading partner was not Rome but Samarkand, on the eastern edge of the Iranian world. Further, the lawsuit occurred when merchants along the Silk Road were prospering because of the massive presence of Chinese troops. This court case occurred during the seventh century, when Chinese imperial spending provided a powerful stimulus to the local economy.

Most revealing of all, we know about this lawsuit because it was written on discarded government documents, which were then sold as scrap paper, and finally used by artisans to make a paper garment for the deceased. About 1,300 years later Chinese archeologists opened a tomb near Turfan and pieced together the document from the different sections of the garment. As they connected the different pieces of paper, the testimony of the different parties was revealed.

In recent decades archeologists have reassembled thousands of other documents. What has emerged are contracts, legal disputes, receipts, cargo manifests, medical prescriptions, and the poignant contract of a slave girl sold for 120 silver coins on a particular market day over one thousand years ago. The writings are in a multitude of languages including classical Chinese, Sanskrit, and other dead languages.

Many of the documents survive because paper had a high value and was not thrown out. Craftsmen also used the recycled paper to make paper shoes, statues, and other paper mache objects to accompany the dead on their journey to the afterlife. Because recycled paper documents were used to make these funeral objects, guesswork is required to piece them together. The Iranian’s affidavit, for example, was cut with scissors and then sewn to make a paper garment for the dead, leaving part of the record on the cutting room floor. Skilled historians have used the shapes of the fragments and tell-tale needle holes to reconstruct the original documents.

These documents make it possible to identify the main actors, the commodities traded, the approximate size of caravans, and the impact of trade on the localities through which goods passed. They also elucidate the broader impact of the Silk Road, particularly the religious beliefs and technologies that refugees brought with them as they sought to settle in places more peaceful than their war-torn homelands.

The communities along the Silk Road were largely agricultural rather than commercial, meaning that most people worked the land and did not engage in trade. People lived and died near where they were born. The trade that took place was mainly local and often involved exchanges of goods, rather than the use of coins. Each community, then as now, had a distinct identity. Only when wars and political unrest forced people to leave their traditional homelands did these communities along the Silk Road absorb large numbers of refugees.

These immigrants brought their religions and languages to their new homes. Buddhism, originating in India and enjoying genuine popularity in China, certainly had the most influence, but Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, and the Christian Church of the East, based in Syria, all gained followings. The people living along the Silk Road played a crucial role in transmitting, translating, and modifying these belief systems as they passed from one civilization to another. Before the coming of Islam to the region, members of these different communities proved surprisingly tolerant of each other’s beliefs. Individual rulers might choose one religion over another and strongly encourage their subjects to follow suit, yet they still permitted residents to continue their own religious practices.

Among the many contributors to Silk Road culture were the Sogdians, a people living in and around the great city of Samarkand in today’s Uzbekistan. Trade between China and Sogdiana, their homeland, peaked between 500 and 800
CE
. Most of the traders named in the excavated documents came from Samarkand or were descended from people who did. They spoke an Iranian language called Sogdian, and many observed the Zoroastrian teachings of the ancient Iranian teacher Zarathustra (ca. 1000
BCE
, called Zoroaster in Greek), who taught that telling the truth was the paramount virtue. Because of the unusual conditions of preservation in Xinjiang, more information about the Sogdians and their beliefs survives in China than in their homeland.

Unlike most Silk Road books, which concentrate on art, this book is based on documents—documents that explain how things got to be where they are, who brought them there, and why Silk Road history is such a dazzling array of peoples, languages, and cultural cross-currents.

Not all documents discovered along the Silk Road from 200 to 1000
CE
(the main focus of this book) were on recycled scrap paper. Some were written on wood, silk, leather, and other materials. They were recovered not only from tombs but also from abandoned postal stations, shrines, and homes, and beneath the dry desert—the perfect environment for the preservation of documents as well as art, clothing, ancient religious texts, ossified food, and human remains (see color plate 1).

These documents are unique because many were lost, found by accident, and written by people from a wide swath of society, not only the literate rich and powerful. These documents were not consciously composed histories: their authors did not expect later generations to read them, and they were certainly never intended to survive. They offer a glimpse into the past that is often refreshingly personal, factual, anecdotal, and random. Nothing is more valuable than information extracted from trash, because no one has edited it in any way.

Most of what we have learned from these documents debunks the prevailing view of the Silk Road, in the sense that the “road” was not an actual “road” but a stretch of shifting, unmarked paths across massive expanses of deserts and mountains. In fact, the quantity of cargo transported along these treacherous routes was small. Yet the Silk Road did actually transform cultures both east and west. Using the documentary evidence uncovered in the past two hundred years and especially the startling new finds unearthed in recent decades, this book will attempt to explain how this modest non-road became one of the most transformative super highways in human history—one that transmitted ideas, technologies, and artistic motifs, not simply trade goods.

“Silk” is even more misleading than “road,” inasmuch as silk was only one among many Silk Road trade goods. Chemicals, spices, metals, saddles and leather products, glass, and paper were also common. Some cargo manifests list ammonium chloride, used as a flux for metals and to treat leather, as the top trade good on certain routes.

Another common trade item was paper, invented during the second century
BCE
, and surely a far greater contributor to human history than silk, which was used primarily for garments.
¹
Paper moved out of China via these overland routes first into the Islamic world in the eighth century, and then to Europe via its Islamic portals in Sicily and Spain. People north of the Alps made their own paper only in the late fourteenth century.
²

The term “Silk Road” is a recent invention. The peoples living along different trade routes did not use it. They referred to the route as the road to Samarkand (or whatever the next major city was), or sometimes just the “northern” or “southern” routes around the Taklamakan Desert.
³
Only in 1877 did Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen coin the phrase “Silk Road.” He was a prominent geographer who worked in China from 1868 to 1872 surveying coal deposits and ports, and then wrote a five-volume atlas that used the term for the first time.

His map, reproduced in color plate 2–3, depicted the route between China and Europe in Roman times as a trunk route. Von Richthofen read Chinese sources in translation and was the first European geographer to incorporate data from the dynastic histories into a map of the region. The orange line shows information from the classical geographers Ptolemy and Marinus; the blue line, from the Chinese histories.
⁴
In many ways his Silk Route resembles a straight railway line cutting through Eurasia. In fact, von Richthofen was charged with designing a potential railroad line from the German sphere of influence in Shandong through the coalfields near Xi’an all the way to Germany.
⁵

Gradually the term gained acceptance. Sven Hedin’s 1936 book about his Central Asian explorations carried the title
The Silk Road
in its 1938 English translation. In 1948 the
Times of London
included the following question in its “Fireside Questions for the Family: A Test of General Knowledge”: “From where to where do, or did,” the Silk Road run? The answer: “China borders by various routes to Europe.”
⁶
The term has shown considerable staying power as a designation for overland trade and cultural exchanges across Eurasia.

From its inception, the Silk Road was shown as relatively straight and well traveled, but it never was. Over a hundred years of archeological investigation have revealed no clearly marked, paved route across Eurasia—nothing remotely like the Appian Way of Rome—but instead a patchwork of drifting trails and unmarked footpaths. Because there was rarely a discernible route, travelers almost always hired guides to take them along a particular section, and they frequently shifted to another path if they encountered obstacles.

These meandering trails converge at oasis towns—the towns this book explores. When flying over this region today one merely has to identify the highest peaks to locate the principal sources of the streams nurturing the main Silk Road cities of ancient times. Because the documents are largely from these towns, this book is organized around seven ancient Silk Road sites—six in northwest China and one to the east of Samarkand—that form the chapters of this book.

These towns were semi-independent city states ringing the Taklamakan Desert. The rulers, whether on their own or on behalf of Chinese dynasties, strictly supervised trade and played a major role as the purchasers of goods and services. This produced a paradox: once the trade passed through totally wild regions and entered one of these oasis communities, it was suddenly highly regulated.

This was especially true when the Chinese stationed troops in Central Asia—primarily during the Han dynasty (206
BCE
-220
CE
) and the Tang dynasty (618–907
CE
). The central government made massive expenditures to supply these armies with grain and uniforms and to pay thousands of soldiers. Bolts of silk took on another important function during the Tang dynasty, which was unable to mint enough bronze coins to cover the expenses of the central government. The authorities recognized three commodities as currency: bronze coins, grain, and bolts of silk. Since they often suffered coin shortages, and since grain rotted, most of these payments were in bolts of plain-woven silk, shown in plate 5A. Many of the military subsidies to the northwest were paid in silk, and bolts of silk circulated widely in the Western Regions as a result. When the soldiers made many purchases at local markets, trade boomed. But when rebellion threatened the emperor and he summoned all troops back to central China, trade fell off markedly.

Even with the Chinese military presence, there was no documented traffic between China and Rome during the years of the Roman Empire. Contrary to popular belief, Romans did not exchange their gold coins directly for Chinese silk. The earliest Roman gold coins found in China are Byzantine solidus coins, including many imitations, as shown in plate 4a. They come from tombs dated to the sixth century, long after Emperor Constantine (reigned 312–37
CE
) moved the empire’s capital to Constantinople.