The Silk Roads: Continuity & Change in Documents & Artifacts

"The region of the Silk Roads is obscure to many in the English-speaking world. Yet the region linking East with West is where civilization itself began, where the world's great religions were born and took root, where goods were exchanged, and where languages, ideas and disease spread.

The Silk Roads were no exotic series of connections, but networks that linked continents and oceans together. They were - and still are - the world's central nervous system. This is where empires were won - and where they were lost. As a new era emerges, the patterns of exchange are mirroring those that have criss-crossed Asia for millennia." -Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads

The Silk Roads represent both the sweeping change and the surprising continuities of history. As much as these trade routes changed with the rise and fall of empires and emergence of new ideas and technologies, they also display certain continuities of history, especially the interplay of culture, environment, innovation and politics between individuals, states and nomadic groups. This site focuses on three general eras of the Silk Roads: the ancient Silk Roads, the Silk Roads of the Middle Ages, and the Silk Roads of the Mongol era.