The 'Myth' of the Silk Road

[Alanus]

Hello, Nathan and Michael,

First, my last post was a tongue-in-cheek rebuttal to Ball's premise and I hope it didn't offend anyone. My personal feeling is this-- what we might call "international trade" (in the Old World sense) began shortly after the invention the wheel, along with the castration of the bull, and the taming of the horse and camel. In other words, a working trade system existed between Europe, Africa, and Asia, by the early Bronze age. Forgive me for a rapid succession of illustrations (below) but we can follow one item-- the ancient lap harp-- on its journey across the continents.

   
Here we have a Sudanese lap harp, age unknown. It shows up in Egypt during the New Kingdom, c. 2,000BC.

   
The lap harp then reaches the Hittites and Achaemenid Persians, about maybe 500BC, maybe earlier.

   
Then in 400Bc, the lap harp is buried in Pazyryk Kurgan 5 in the high Altai... along with other items from India (a mirror) and China (silk fabric).

It's what I call "hard evidence" of trade. No suppositions here; these are lap harps reaching corners of the earth by a chain of intermediaries. The so-called "Silk Road" was no different, not controlled by a single culture but many, who passed merchandise to the next trader, ad infinitum. I think Ball either missed the point, didn't look hard enough, or had an obtuse agenda.

   
Let's turn to Strabo's mention of the Aorsi. This is particularly important because the Aorsi route bypassed the anti-Roman sticky wicket-- Parthia. The above map (not a great map but it will suffice) shows a web of trade routes, including the far northern one used by Aristeas, but delineates the Aorsi one (in blue). It starts at Samarkand, runs down the Oxus (the Amu Darya on the map), then crosses the Caspian, runs overland, and enters Strabo-Land. What it doesn't show is the massive amount of territory (southeast of Parthia) controlled by the Aorsi. And why did this route work to the extent it was still used into the 7th century AD?

   
Who were the Aorsi, anyway? Around 120BC, they were called the Yancai... a split-off tribal union originally within the Yuezhi confederation. The Yancai then became the Alanliu, incorporating tribes from the Middle Sarmatian culture. Then, by the first century BC, they were recorded by Strabo as the North and South Aorsi (a lot like "Yorsi" as a single syllable). They controlled what was once the territories of the Massagetae all the way up to Filippovka (Orenberg Oblast), north and south of the western shore of the Aral Sea and the entire eastern shore of the Caspian. They were affiliated with the Yuezhi, aka the Kushans, and had trade access to both China and India. It would appear they established their route expressly to circumvent the east-west restrictions on trade between Asia and Europe (read "Rome" here) caused by a particular war that killed Crassus.

I see no reason the Aorsi venture did not include Chinese merchandise. Unless we have this scenario:

A Chinese Trader Walks into a Bactrian Bar

Bartender: "Hey! How's it going, Chung-Fang?"
Chung-Fang: "Finest kind. I just brought up two wagon-loads of silk from Louyang, both headed down to Kushana."
Bartender: "You ought to consider shipping silk to Rome. The Aorsi just opened up a new route to Europe."
Chung-Fang: "Naw. I can't be bothered."

Fact is, this trade route continued up the Ister. We have wonderful artwork containing Indian and Bactrian semi-precious stones-- agate, carnelian, turquoise, even rubies-- fashioned in northern Europe until the end of the Migration Period. Carnelian also reached Ptolemaic Egypt. Seems hard to believe that some sort of anti-silk bias existed.