Ancient Travel Routes: The Silk Road and Its Untold Adventures

Trade, travel, disease, ideas, the rise and fall of empires, and untold adventures. The Silk Road was a monumental accelerator of human connectivity that set the world stage for modern globalization.

Illustration courtesy of Lublin University of Technology, 3D Digital Silk Road.

The Silk Road—what is increasingly being now referred to as the Silk Routes—was an ancient network of prominent trade and travel corridors. Beginning in the 2nd century BCE and lasting until the middle of the 15th century CE, these routes once connected numerous cultures; spreading ideas, food, and items of trade; and bringing about untold growth and prosperity to many eastern and western regions throughout Eurasia and Africa for more than 1500 years.

Like many ancient travel routes, the Silk Road was not a singular road but a network of land and sea routes that stretched across the Eurasian and African continents over 8,000 miles, connecting China to eastern seaports on the Mediterranean. The route crossed numerous Central Asian cities and deserts leading into Afghanistan, India, Iran, and Turkey. Major ancient trade hubs boomed because of the Silk Road during this time, including coastal ports such as Acre, Antioch, Constantinople, and Damascus. It must have been an enchanting time to be alive and witness this cosmopolitan traffic venturing through one’s town or village and bringing an eclectic mix of formerly unknown foods and artifacts of distant cultures into one’s home and table.

Overland and sea routes of the Silk Road. Courtesy: UNESCO

Items traded along the Silk Road included not surprisingly, silk for textiles, but also herbs, tea, jade, dyes, perfume, porcelain, and other items from China, in exchange for horses, camels, gold, silver, furs, glass, honey, wine, wool, and ivory from the West. Enslaved peoples from many regions were also traded across these routes. Two other exchange items, paper, and gunpowder, are arguably the two greatest influential items that profoundly shaped world history. Indeed, this burgeoning trade network is what allowed the Tang Dynasty (616-907 CE) to flourish during this time, initiating a cosmopolitan golden age in China as cultural influences in music, poetry, dance, and architecture flowed in from Central Asia, India, Persia, Tibet, and many parts of the Islamic world.

Religion spread along these routes as well, most notably Buddhism emerged out of India to enter Afghanistan, China, and Japan via wandering sages seeking converts and spreading their holy texts. Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Manichaeism also spread at this time. A sect of Christianity known as Nestorianism flourished in China from the 7^th to the 10^th century in large part because of the Silk Road. Many languages and cultural customs naturally followed in the wake of this transcontinental exchange of ideas.

Disease also spread along this route. The infamous bubonic plague, or Black Death, ravaged much of Europe in the mid-14^th century and seems to have been as lethal as it was because of the enhanced connectivity of the East and West. Smallpox (and/or perhaps measles) epidemics erupted from the 2^nd to 4^th centuries CE across the path of the Silk Road and most notably may have destabilized the Roman Empire during this time, with population declines estimated between 10-35% in some areas. Many historians suspect these plagues originated in Asia with similar symptoms of these diseases being recorded in Han China around the same time.

As sea trade became a more reliable way to transport larger amounts of goods, especially across the Indian Ocean, the use of the Silk Road began to decline in conjunction with the collapse of the Tang Dynasty, which lost control of segments of the Silk Road around 907 CE. By the time the famed explorer Marco Polo came to wander the Silk Road at the culmination of the 13th century, this once popular route was already reduced to a trickle of travelers, most having taken to the high seas for trade, transport, and travel.

With the rise of the Ottoman Empire in 1453, trade was severed between East and West and the Silk Road essentially ceased to function as it had for 1500 years. But like a river abruptly impeded, new trade routes forked and diverged, causing the emergence of new routes that were to bring about European expansion on the high seas, leading to colonialism and the Age of Discovery. The Silk Road thus largely influenced our current world order and our arc toward globalization.

While historically much has been written about the great nexus points along the routes—otherwise known as cities—less scholarly attention has been dedicated to the connecting dashes on our maps—the trails or trade routes that connected all these emerging bustling cities. There remain countless untold tales of adventure on those dashed intermediaries of land and sea—the highways of the ancient world.

Historically speaking, I suspect that one reason our attention has been less focused on trade routes as a research topic is due to modern-day technology virtually obliterating the time it takes to travel for modern trade. Virtually all our goods get stacked on a gigantic cargo ship and lugged over the seas with relatively few people involved. They are boring intermediary periods between here and there, out of sight and out of mind. Thus, there isn’t much of a story in modern-day transport (unless some rogue terrorists happen to disrupt it), and this likely colors how we’ve unconsciously thought about trade routes.

However, when humans could only travel at three miles an hour on foot or an average of 25 miles an hour with the use of horses and camels, travel looked very different and was steeped in deep meanings of adventure and social interaction. It is in these outskirts beyond the city walls, gates, and security where some of the more fascinating and revealing stories and histories of humanity likely unfolded. And yet, these stories are still largely lost to time or little explored. That has changed in recent years to some degree but not much.

A highly influential text by the anthropologist Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, reveals that well before the rise of European powers, many trade routes across Africa and Eurasia had connected communities for centuries, which serves as a useful pretext to understanding the development of the modern world. As he argued,

“These voyages were not isolated adventures but manifestations of forces that were drawing the continents into more encompassing relationships and would soon make the world a unified stage for human action. In order to understand what the world would become, we must first know what it was.”^[1]

Although Wolf gives a general tour of what it was like to tour the Silk Road circa 1400 (especially in Chapter 2), it is still not as personalized as we would like it to be. Aside from the specific routes of the Silk Road, we’d also like to know what the day-to-day experiences were like for the common traveler. What may have compelled all these people to make such a trek besides a desire for wealth once getting their goods to market? After all, these back-and-forth journeys, swinging like a pendulum over the centuries, are essentially what enabled many hubs and seaports to prosper.

Without these ancient routes and all the people who dared to venture out along them, what could a city, state, or nation ever hope to become? Could it attain any amount of wealth, power, and prosperity without all the merchants willing to bring their caravans full of goods and knowledge across deserts, mountains, and plains? What is therefore most notable to me about the history of the Silk Road is how little we know about the actual people who originally charted and sojourned along these paths and what their tales were.

Who were the people that the Silk Road hosted and what were their untold adventures? The unfortunate thing is few of these stories survive to give us a glimpse of what the experience of traveling the Silk Road was like across the centuries. Thus, we can only speak in generalities and speculate about what it must have been like to trek across this vast network. Nevertheless, the travelers that traversed this behemoth transcontinental route over the centuries were many and included scholars, explorers, merchants, ambassadors, diplomats, generals, religious pilgrims, missionaries, monks, warlords, soldiers, sailors, porters, vagabonds, bandits, pirates, enslaved persons, and prisoners of war.

It is unlikely that anyone traversed the entire 4,000-mile land route of the Silk Road in one fell swoop. The concept of the thru-hiker trekking an entire long-distance trail like the Appalachian Trail or the Te Araroa in New Zealand for purely recreational reasons is a modern phenomenon. And yet, one still wonders if there were not a few courageous (or crazy) souls back then who wished to be the first to traverse the entire length just to say they did it.

Though uncommon, incredible distances were covered and reported by a handful of famous travelers, explorers, and scholars, like the famed Moroccan scholar and pilgrim Ibn Battuta. He is reported to have traveled over 70,000 miles during the 14^th century, with many miles spent on the Silk Road. Ibn Battuta holds the pre-modern record in most miles traveled, next to the Chinese mariner and explorer Zheng He (~31,000 miles), who traveled much of the sea routes of the Silk Road, and Marco Polo (~15,000 miles) who famously traveled with his father and uncle along large parts of the overland routes. Surely, there were a few more wanderers throughout the 1500 years of the Silk Road who at least attempted to complete the entire route but to my knowledge, such records do not exist.

While it is easy to romanticize travel on the Silk Road, travelers were frequently at risk of banditry and violence from raids and ongoing wars being waged by multiple empires vying for power across the continents. The landscape itself proved difficult to navigate as well, as much of the terrain was inhospitable, passing through large stretches of desert, mountains, and grasslands. Sandstorms, earthquakes, and harsh weather had to be endured. Thus, incredible amounts of foresight and planning were warranted for an excursion in a way that many travelers today do not have to consider.

A telling passage recorded by a Chinese monk Faxian in 414 CE, who crossed the Taklamakan Desert, reveals the dangers people often had to endure:

“In the desert were numerous evil spirits and scorching winds, causing death to anyone who would meet them. Above there were no birds, while on the ground there were no animals. One looked as far as one could in all directions for a path to cross, but there was none to choose. Only the dried bones of the dead served as signposts.”

The famous Venetian explorer and trader Marco Polo is perhaps the most famous traveler of the Silk Road, and his travelogue was highly influential in Europe, recounting his tales of wandering between 1271 and 1295. His writings exposed Europe to the distant realms of Asia. Of late, Marco Polo’s travels have undergone academic scrutiny, with many scholars questioning the accuracy of his tales but it is nevertheless one of the more insightful accounts we have of life on the Silk Road circa 1400. Thus, one of the most known accounts of travel during the Silk Road’s existence gives us only a small window through which to peer into the past.

Other medieval travelers of Europe, China, and the Islamic world are recorded as traveling parts of the Silk Road throughout its 1500 years of existence. However, their stories remain either fragmented, lost, contentious as to their historical accuracy, untranslated in Western languages, or obscure and unaccessible, only known to a small cohort of academics. There is still much research remaining for historians to dig through the archives to synthesize and compile a more comprehensive travel literature of the Silk Routes for the common reader. But even this list of known travelers of the Silk Road is far too short when we consider the breadth of time people spent traveling along its many routes. How many untold tales of adventures on the Silk Road might still be left unread and moldering on the shelves of monasteries or museums?

Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.

Cheers!

-JSB

More about the Silk Road:

Skinner, Tomas. "What Was the Silk Road & What Was Traded on It?" The Collector, (accessed October 24, 2021).

United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, About the Silk Roads, (accessed March 20, 2024).

Waugh, Daniel, and Adala Lee, “Travelers on the Silk Road” The Silk Road Foundation, (accessed March 27, 2024).

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[1] Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (University of California Press 2010) p. 24.