The 'Myth' of the Silk Road

[Nathan Ross]

Isidore of Charax wrote Parthian Stations an itinerary of an overland route from Antioch to India... It was basically the same route followed by Maes' agents.

Ball says quite a bit about Isidore and his itinerary - however, he's less than impressed by it as 'silk road' evidence:

For the Parthian Stations is little more than the title implies: a record of just one of several official routes within Iran, relating to Parthian administration rather than trade, and even less to Rome. It makes no reference to any supposed connections beyond, neither to the Mediterranean nor to China. As evidence for Roman overland trade, therefore, it is practically valueless.

Rome in the East, p.134

This seems rather harsh, I must say! Isidore's itinerary surely provides evidence for an existing network of routes, that could also be used by traders, to the furthest limits of the Parthian domain; but these routes would take the traveller south-eastwards across modern Iran and Afghanistan towards northern India. This route was already known, of course - Alexander the Great had passed that way, and there were trading cities all along the way.

Titianus's agents seem to have ended up some considerable distance east and north though! Unless they branched off north from Afghanistan, they may have gone a different way altogether. I suppose we might imagine that they were searching for a trade route that avoided Parthian territory - but if they were, they don't seem to have done anything with the information beyond reporting back...

I should add, by the way, that Ball's book has a clear and obvious agenda, set out at the start - he's claiming that the dominant cultural, social and religious forms of the eastern Roman world were always far more eastern than western: that the cities of Roman Syria and Mesopotamia, for all their cultural hybridity, were at least as (if not more) influenced by native Syrian and Palmyrene, Arab and Iranian and Indian forms than they were by Hellenism or the west. Quite possibly his damning of the 'silk road' concept is an example of diligence in finding or rejecting evidence!

The Tarim city-states did not accept Chinese coins as currency for food, horses or jade until China slowly bought them under heel after expelling the Hsiung-nu but accepted silk which was bartered for goods the people of the Tarim needed like minerals and metals from Dzungaria, foodstuffs for some of them, leather and textiles like cotton from India.

That's interesting - thanks! At what point did the Chinese expel the Hsiung-nu?

Here is a map I copied from the book "The Spice Trade of the Roman Empire"

Good map, and it shows the land and sea routes from the middle east to India in detail. I'm not so sure about the northern plains routes though, or the connections north of the Himalayas - is there any real evidence for them during this period? We don't know of anybody or anything passing right the way along the route in either direction until the Middle Ages, as far as I know...

Sea travel had its own perils for merchants and mariners.

True, and that's a good point. However, for all its hazards the Indian ocean and Red Sea trade existed for over a thousand years. Ships could travel faster and carry more than camels, and clearly the risk was worth it.

We might also ask whether the risk of a sea journey on a well-established monsoon route China-India/India-Egypt would be lesser or greater than an overland journey to China of thousands of miles through virtually uncharted territory inhabited by largely unknown peoples!...

For a similar reason, merchants on the east coast of the USA were still sending goods to California by ship, around Cape Horn, well into the later 19th century.

the Antun delegation, 166AD and the one in 284AD missions may have been made by sea because Rome was at war with Parthia and the Sassanids... Han general Ban Chao sent an envoy Gan Ying to make contact with the Romans in 97AD but he was supposedly scared off by the Parthians.

That's an ingenious theory! Although, as I said above, if these 'missions' were intended to actually reach their destinations for some reason, rather than just exploring an alternative route of getting there, then the established sea transport system might be a better way of doing it...

Ball mentions Gan Ying - who he calls Kan Ying, presumably the same guy - but puts his mission to Iran at the end of the 1st century BC. This could be a typo (BC for AD), but is there some doubt about the date?