Traversing ‘Silk Roads’

The German traveller and geographer Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833-1905) travelled as part of the Eulenburg Expedition from Prussia to Asia, publishing his findings from 1877 to 1912 in five volumes.… It was Richthofen who first coined the term Seidenstrassen (Silk Roads) to describe and give meaning to the latitudinal string of sites found under the deserts of Inner Asia, thereby leaving a semantic legacy that has endured.

Richthofen’s legacy has not gone unchallenged, and scholars have sought to clarify and critique the concept of ‘Silk Roads’. In the first place, the Silk Road was neither a single road nor a static set of routes but an unstable and shifting bundle of connections subject to the vicissitudes of ecological change and political power. The latitudinal artery across Eurasia that is commonly taken to constitute the Silk Road proper also branched off longitudinally north and south, bringing spices, cotton cloth and other goods from across the subcontinent and the Indian Ocean world into the circuits of Silk Road trade.

Second, the emphasis on silk is misleading, for it prioritises a single commodity and a single direction of exchange — namely, from the Orient to the Occident.


The mass of connections constituting the Silk Roads meant that a number of commodities moved in a number of directions across Eurasia. These included exotic elephant ivory and rhino horn, luxury textiles of silk and other threads, and precious illuminated manuscripts.

From “India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World”