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Brennan: Should we call it the silk road?

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Brennan: Should we call it the silk road?

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The silk road should not keep its name. Though silk was the very first good to  travel the roads, it was not the most impactful occurrence that the silk roads achieved. The silk roads represented globalisation, culture, religion, collective learning, and trading. These things were far more significant than solely silk on its own. For example, in the article, 'Lost on the Silk Road' Peter Stark writes, "Almost more important than the goods (Silk) that travelled across the silk roads were the ideas and inventions that it carried from east to west and vise versa." Stark explains how the ideas changed human history forever. Historically, silk did not do much for westerners other than creating beautiful clothing. This didn't create much impact as only the richest people could acquire thous silk products. However, ideas like the early stories of Buddhism changed history forever. Sta\rk writes, "...broad ideas changed the course of human history. Buddhism first developed in India
in the sixth century BCE, and the Silk Road
helped carry the faith’s teachings to China
and elsewhere, until eventually it became
the dominant religion of much of Asia." This predominately shows that the ideas and inventions that were brought by the silk roads were far more impactful than just silk itself. Such historic events such as the silk roads should be named after what they're most impactful for, not what it was known for.

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Well, no, we should't call the network of trades and globalisation in the 19 century. The 'Silk Road' wasn't just the trade of Silk. Yes Silk was the main goods traveled between the East and the West but the Silk Road wasn't just a connection between silk, it was also the globalization of languages, art, culture, economics, and religion. For example, in the article 'The Spread of Religion & Philosophy along the Silk Road', Richard C. Foltz states, "Much of the Silk Road economy was in the hands of Buddhist traders and the monasteries they supported along the way, so they were the direct competitors of Muslim traders from the 7th century onwards." Buddhism and Islan both spread throughout Western and Eastern China. Not only was religon and culture spread by the Silk Road, the development of technologies spread across the Silk Road. Foltz remarks, "The Chinese seem to have acquired technologies such as wheeled transportation and forms of metallurgy, from Western traders. Technologies as paper production and gunpowder were transmitted later from China to the West." The transportation of the new upcoming technologies such as the wheel and production of gunpwoder and paper transmitted throughout China and to the West. This proves that Silk Road is an improper name to call the globalisation of languages, art, culture, economics, and religion.

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Shreya: Should We Call It The Silk Road? 

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Shreya: Should We Call It The Silk Road? 

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We should not call it the "silk road" because the silk road represents globilization, collective learning, trading, language, and religon/culture. Even though silk is one of the goods that has been traded through the silk road, it wasn't the main item. But it doesn't refer much to silk as it does to other products. For example, according to "Asiasociety.org", this article refers to how there are many items and ideas being passed through the silk road other than "silk". : "These examples and dozens more that could be mentioned make the point clear: ideas, inventions, devices and techniques spread readily and far along the Silk Road" This section of the article explains how there were over a dozen items, ideas and inventions were being passed though the silk road, and silk was barely involved. Another invention that spread entirely across Eurasia was irrigation and the waterwheel. Another invention was made by the Chinese: paper. Paper has globilized througt the whole globe and the "silk road" was the main way that paper traveled through Asia and other parts of the globe. Silk is not involved that much in the "Silk Road", so therefor, If silk is not connected much in any way, than why should it be called the silk road?

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This is connected to globalization and collective learning because when people trade/exchange goods and ideas through the silk road, people are integrating and sharing ideas with each other through the silk road, because with more ideas, the world would be more advanced, therefore, the silk road helped to sustain and develop our world.

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#4 The Spread of Religion & Philosophy along the “Silk Road”

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#4 The Spread of Religion & Philosophy along the “Silk Road”

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An interview with author Richard C. Foltz, an expert on religious traditions along the Silk Road. A German explorer, Ferdinand von Richtofen referred to the loose network of pre-modern overland trade route as the 'Silk Road'. Much of the Silk Road economy was in the hands of Buddhist traders and the monasteries they supported along the way, so they were the direct competitors of Muslim traders from the 7th century onwards. The Chinese seem to have acquired technologies such as wheeled transportation and forms of metallurgy, from Western traders. Technologies as paper production and gunpowder were transmitted later from China to the West.

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An Interview with author Richard C. Foltz.

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The silk road, though important and impactful, caused numerous of tragedies and hard times for its followers. Mountains were extremely tall and steep, and were hard to walk up. Unpredictable weather made it extremely difficult to manoeuvre in the rough terrain. Though hard to pass through, the silk roads carried extremely important information that changed the course of human history. The Silk Roads were described as, "...it served like the internet does, as a linked network of communication nodes." The roads were distanced 10,000 miles, from China to France. The first use of the silk roads was of course, silk. The Chinese sold or traded silk to wealthy European royal families for extraordinary prices. The silk was high valued for being very refined and extremely soft. China, led by Zhang Qian in 200-114 BCE traded for things like cattle, horses, leathers, and furs. Yaks and camels were used to transport these goods and carried a load of about 300 pounds. However, the ideas and inventions that were passed through the silk roads were far more important than the goods being passed. Music, songs and stories traveled along the silk road, being shared around campfires while travelers rested. Broad human ideas such as Buddhism travelled, which ultimately changed the course of human history.

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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Ideas, Inventions, and Techniques all travel along the silk road. The silk road helped the people trade/exchange goods and also help attach groups together by connecting the world by creating a travel route from all across Eurasia. There are dozens of examples, like paper, Pots, Wheels, Food supply. But not only was the silk road helpful, but it killed many individuals because the Black Death plague came from the silk road from Asia.

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by John Major

Good ideas and innovation travel easily-and far. Historically, these ideas spread along trade routes. This essay looks at the great Eurasian Silk Roads as a transmitter of people, goods, ideas, beliefs and inventions.

Good ideas travel easilyand far along trade routes, and the Silk Road was no exception to that rule. A famous example of a Chinese invention that helped to transform the world is paper. Paper was invented during the Han dynasty, probably just at the time the Silk Road trade was beginning to flourish. (Many accounts ascribe the invention of paper to a Latter Han official at the beginning of the 2nd century CE, but actual paper at least two centuries older than that has been archaeologically excavated from Han tombs.) Far superior to the narrow wooden strips or hard-to-handle rolls of silk that the Chinese had previously used for writing, paper soon became the writing material of choice throughout China and East Asia. It was found also in the Buddhist temples of China's northwest, but seemed not to make inroads beyond that for a long time, perhaps in part because the Chinese tried to protect the secret of its manufacture, and perhaps in part also because other writing materials, such as parchment and papyrus, were well established in the west.

But under the Mongols in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a group of Chinese workmen set up a papermaking establishment in Samarkand. Their product quickly spread by trade and imitation, and paper soon supplanted other writing materials in most of western Eurasia.

In China, the invention of paper stimulated the invention of printing, sometime during the 6th century CE-a development energetically supported by Buddhism, according to which the duplication of sacred texts was an act of religious merit. The re-invention of printing in Europe centuries later did not employ East Asian-style printing technology, but it may have been stimulated by accounts of Chinese printing that could have circulated in the Middle East.

Another invention that spread entirely across Eurasia was the noria, or irrigation waterwheel. This simple, ingenious device, invented in Roman Syria, consists of a vertical waterwheel to the rim of which are attached a series of pots or tubes. As the current of a river rotates the wheel, the pots fill with water at the bottom of the cycle and empty into a chute at the top; a large noria can lift water as much as forty feet with no input of human or animal energy. This inspired invention was obviously a good idea, and rapidly spread along the Silk Road and its tributaries. There is a famous example in Toledo, Spain, others along the upper reaches of the Yellow River in China, and many more in between.

Foodstuffs also count in this category of the travel of ideas and techniques Apples spread, in prehistoric times via the steppe belt, in both directions from the region of modern-day Kazakhstan; oranges went (via the maritime route) from China to the Mediterranean world; grapes went from the western reaches of the Silk Road to China.

These examples and dozens more that could be mentioned make the point clear: ideas, inventions, devices and techniques spread readily and far along the Silk Road, and the traffic was very much a two way, or perhaps one should say a multi-way, street. In the process the Silk Road enriched not just the merchants who carried and exchanged goods, but the people of countries and cultures all across Eurasia.

It is perhaps worth noting, however, that long-distance trade can have unexpectedly bad side effects as well as direct beneficial effects. For example, the Black Death plague that devastated Europe in the 14th century is believed to have come via the Silk Road from Central Asia, where plague is endemic among local rodents. One theory holds that a load of marmot pelts (destined to be used on fur-trimmed garments), contaminated with plague-bearing flea eggs, was brought from somewhere in Central Asia to a Middle Eastern port. There the eggs hatched into fleas that infested some local rats; some of the rats eventually went on shipboard and were carried to port cities in Italy. There the plague spread, via fleas, to other rats, and then to people; and a disaster was in the making.

Additional Background Reading on Asia

Why were there so many Chinese fans in the bleachers at this year's FIFA World Cup, when the Chinese team wasn't even on the field? Student Jerry Tian gives us his perspective.

by John Major
Good ideas and innovation travel easily-and far. Historically, these ideas spread along trade routes. This essay looks at the great Eurasian Silk Roads as a transmitter of people, goods, ideas, beliefs and inventions.

Good ideas travel easilyand far along trade routes, and the Silk Road was no exception to that rule. A famous example of a Chinese invention that helped to transform the world is paper. Paper was invented during the Han dynasty, probably just at the time the Silk Road trade was beginning to flourish. (Many accounts ascribe the invention of paper to a Latter Han official at the beginning of the 2nd century CE, but actual paper at least two centuries older than that has been archaeologically excavated from Han tombs.) Far superior to the narrow wooden strips or hard-to-handle rolls of silk that the Chinese had previously used for writing, paper soon became the writing material of choice throughout China and East Asia. It was found also in the Buddhist temples of China's northwest, but seemed not to make inroads beyond that for a long time, perhaps in part because the Chinese tried to protect the secret of its manufacture, and perhaps in part also because other writing materials, such as parchment and papyrus, were well established in the west.

But under the Mongols in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a group of Chinese workmen set up a papermaking establishment in Samarkand. Their product quickly spread by trade and imitation, and paper soon supplanted other writing materials in most of western Eurasia.

In China, the invention of paper stimulated the invention of printing, sometime during the 6th century CE-a development energetically supported by Buddhism, according to which the duplication of sacred texts was an act of religious merit. The re-invention of printing in Europe centuries later did not employ East Asian-style printing technology, but it may have been stimulated by accounts of Chinese printing that could have circulated in the Middle East.

Another invention that spread entirely across Eurasia was the noria, or irrigation waterwheel. This simple, ingenious device, invented in Roman Syria, consists of a vertical waterwheel to the rim of which are attached a series of pots or tubes. As the current of a river rotates the wheel, the pots fill with water at the bottom of the cycle and empty into a chute at the top; a large noria can lift water as much as forty feet with no input of human or animal energy. This inspired invention was obviously a good idea, and rapidly spread along the Silk Road and its tributaries. There is a famous example in Toledo, Spain, others along the upper reaches of the Yellow River in China, and many more in between.

Foodstuffs also count in this category of the travel of ideas and techniques Apples spread, in prehistoric times via the steppe belt, in both directions from the region of modern-day Kazakhstan; oranges went (via the maritime route) from China to the Mediterranean world; grapes went from the western reaches of the Silk Road to China.

These examples and dozens more that could be mentioned make the point clear: ideas, inventions, devices and techniques spread readily and far along the Silk Road, and the traffic was very much a two way, or perhaps one should say a multi-way, street. In the process the Silk Road enriched not just the merchants who carried and exchanged goods, but the people of countries and cultures all across Eurasia.

It is perhaps worth noting, however, that long-distance trade can have unexpectedly bad side effects as well as direct beneficial effects. For example, the Black Death plague that devastated Europe in the 14th century is believed to have come via the Silk Road from Central Asia, where plague is endemic among local rodents. One theory holds that a load of marmot pelts (destined to be used on fur-trimmed garments), contaminated with plague-bearing flea eggs, was brought from somewhere in Central Asia to a Middle Eastern port. There the eggs hatched into fleas that infested some local rats; some of the rats eventually went on shipboard and were carried to port cities in Italy. There the plague spread, via fleas, to other rats, and then to people; and a disaster was in the making.

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by John Major Good ideas and innovation travel easily-and far. Historically, these ideas spread along trade routes. This essay looks at the great Eurasian Silk Roads as a transmitter of people, goods, ideas, beliefs and inventions. Good ideas travel easilyand far along trade routes, and the Silk Road was no exception to that rule.