The 'Myth' of the Silk Road

[Michael Kerr]

 I must admit that I am not quite sold on the Chera = Seres theory, all Roman reports, including Pliny have been compiled on the information of 3rd parties or middlemen. It appears that most ancient sources regard whoever sold them silk were Seres, whether they be Wusun, Kushans, or Indians. Kerala itself was famous for its pepper production and any silk finds in India have been found either at the Indus or Ganges rivers, much further north of Kerala and these finds were mainly twine for beads and jewellry and  were for the most part the products of wild silk cocoons like the bombyx mandarina silk moth, or the antheraea penyi or tussah silk moth which feeds on oak trees and not the bombyx mori or the domestic silk worm of China. India did not get serious about domesticated silk production till the early Gupta period which would have been in the middle of the third century AD like the Japanese and Koreans they managed to get hold of the larvae of the bombyx mori. I have no doubt that the Cheras traded in silk when they could get their hands on the stuff but as silk growers I don't think so. Unfortunately dating the origin and species of silkworm in ancient silk is a destructive process. Another theory For the origin of the word Sere and its transmission to Europe which is proposed by Adam Hyllested is the Sarmatian connection to the word Sere.

 It is commonly assumed that the term sericum and its deviations as well as the English word silk from Old English seoloc, seoluc, sioloc, seolc, Old Norse silki, Old High German silehho and countless other European words, as well as the Mongolian sirkeg, Manchu sirge, sirhe – ultimately derive from the Chinese word for silk se/sei. The first instances of the term serica appear in texts from the 2nd half of the first century BC. The term probably spread west and impacted on the European languages as a loan word (first Greek contact through the Black Sea and the Graeco-Bactrian kingdoms before they were destroyed by the Saka and Yuezhi and then on to Latin when the Romans dominated the Mediterranean and later on German, Slav and Rus) through transmission via the various nomadic groups travelling along the northern routes of the silk roads that played an important role in the distribution of silk, usually as agents in the silk trade with Europe. Aristotle wrote about the silk worm in the 4th century BC and about how wild silk worms were used on the island of Kos but he referred to them as bombycina with no mention of sericum/seres.

 Interestingly enough the word sere/silk could have developed firstly in the Altaic languages (Proto-Turkic, Mongolian, Tungusic) then possibly Tocharian and through to the Scytho-Sarmatian languages in the sub-group comprising Scythian, Sarmatian, Alanic, Iassic and Ossetian. We have the Pazyryk tombs in the Altai where preserved samples of both Indian wild silk and Chinese silk were found, then we have the Chinese giving annual gifts for peace to the Hsiung-nu.

 The first peace agreement ho-ch’in between the Hsiung-nu and China took place in 198 BC where the Han gave the Hsiung-nu silk sometimes from 8000 to 30,000 catties (a catty was about 500 grams) of lower quality silk floss which was used as a liner in clothing for warmth and similar amounts of raw silk (30,000 bolts of silk) as well as silk clothing, money, 34,000 bushels of rice, wine and other types of grain. After these items were distributed to the ruling elites for their loyalty you can see that the Hsiung-nu were swimming in silk which was used for trade and barter for other goods with the Tarim cities who owed their allegiance to the Hsiung-nu and even the Graeco-Bactrian kingdoms who probably sent some silk west to the Seleucids and later the Parthians when the Seleucid empire evaporated before Han China expelled the Hsiung-nu much later and dealt with the Parthians directly and various nomadic groups who shipped silk west following a northern route eventually reaching the Greek Black Sea city-states and more than likely passing through lots of middlemen. Any silk to Tarim would have probably been transported to India in exchange for cotton and other exotic products. I think many Central Asian steppe peoples valued horses and cattle in bolts of silk.

   

 Adam Hyllested in his paper Word migration on the Silk Road: the etymology of English silk and its congeners wrote that the ‘l’ variants are found primarily in Northern and Eastern Europe, notably Old English, Old High German, Old Norse, Baltic and Old Russian while the ‘r’ variants have basically spread through Greek, Mongolian and the Scytho-Sarmatian languages as well. A possible scenario is that the word Sere migrated north from Byzantium through Russia, Ukraine and then to Central and Northern Europe which would indicate that the Greek word was the more archaic version. There is no better example of this ‘r’ to ‘l’  than in the names of the Alans themselves Ariana, Aryan, Aorsi, Rauxs-Ariana (Roxalani)  to Alan. He goes into a lot more detail than I can fit into this post but if a foreign word sir or ser was borrowed into Scytho-Sarmatian then the suffix aka is often added making sirak or siraka and possible late development into silk.

Regards

Michael Kerr