What Commodities Were Traded Using The Silk Road

The Silk Road wasn't a unmarried route, just rather a vibrant trade network that crisscrossed central Eurasia for centuries, bringing far-flung cultures into contact. Traveling by camel and horseback, merchants, nomads, missionaries, warriors and diplomats not only exchanged exotic goods, but transferred cognition, technology, medicine and religious beliefs that reshaped ancient civilizations.

The term "silk road" was coined in 1877 by Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen, a German geographer, who focused on the flourishing silk trade between the Chinese Han Empire (206 B.C. to 220 A.D.) and Rome. Simply modernistic scholars recognize that the Silk Road (or Silk Roads) continued to enable cantankerous-continental trade until big-scale maritime trade replaced overland caravans in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Hither are eight of the nigh important trade goods that fueled centuries of Silk Route cultural exchange:

1. Silk

It's chosen the Silk Route for a reason. Silk, starting time produced in Red china equally early as iii,000 B.C., was the ideal overland merchandise item for merchant and diplomatic caravans that may have traveled thousands of miles to reach their destinations, says Xin Wen, a historian of medieval Prc and Inner Asia at Princeton University.

"Your carrying capacity was very limited, and so y'all brought any was most valuable, just also the lightest," says Wen, whose upcoming volume is titled The King's Road: Diplomatic Travelers and the Making of the Silk Road in Eastern Eurasia, 850–1000. "Not but does silk fit these characteristics exactly—high value, low weight—but it'southward also extremely versatile."

The Roman elite prized Chinese silk as a luxuriously thin textile, and later, when silk-making technology was brought to the Mediterranean, artisans in Damascus created the reversible woven silk textile known as damask.

Merely silk was more than wear, says Wen. In Buddhist cultures it was made into ritual banners or used as a canvas for paintings. In the of import Silk Route settlement of Turfan in Eastern Cathay, silk was used every bit currency, writes historian Valerie Hansen, and in the Tang Dynasty (618 to 907 A.C.), silk was collected as a form of tax.

2. Horses

Terra cotta statues of a Qin Dynasty Horseman, on display in France 1992. — Terracotta statues of a Qin Dynasty Horseman, on display in French republic 1992.

Patrick Aventurier/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

Horses were first domesticated in the steppes of Cardinal Asia effectually 3700 B.C. and transported nomadic tribes that hunted and raided beyond vast territories that bordered China, India, Persia and the Mediterranean. Once the horse was introduced into agrarian societies, it became a sought-later on tool for transport, cultivation and cavalry, writes historian James Millward inSilk Road: A Very Brusque Introduction.

The silk-for-horse trade was one of the most important and long-lasting exchanges on the Silk Road. Chinese merchants and officials traded bolts of silk for well-bred horses from the Mongolian steppes and Tibetan plateau. In turn, nomad elites prized the silk for the status information technology conferred or the boosted goods information technology could buy.

Wen says that horses, by providing their own transportation, were the ultimate high-value, low-weight article on the Silk Route, and were "a very unique luxury item for the aristocracy of the Eurasian world."

It's not surprising that the famous tomb of the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang (259–210 B.C.) not only contains 8,000 terracotta warriors, but also lifelike statues of 520 chariot horses and 150 cavalry horses.

3. Newspaper

Paper, invented in China in the 2nd century A.C., showtime spread throughout Asia with the dissemination of Buddhism. In 751, paper was introduced to the Islamic world when Arab forces clashed with the Tang Dynasty at the Battle of Talas. The Caliph Harun al-Rashid built a paper manufactory in Baghdad that introduced paper-making to Egypt, N Africa and Kingdom of spain, where paper finally reached Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries, writes Millward.

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On the Silk Route, travelers carried paper documents that served as passports to cross nomadic lands or spend the dark at a caravansary, a Silk Route oasis. But the most important function of newspaper along the Silk Road was that it was bound into texts and books that transmitted entirely new systems of idea, especially religion.

"Information technology's not a coincidence that Buddhism spread to China around the same time that paper became prevalent in the region," says Wen. "Aforementioned with Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism. One of the central significances of the Silk Road is that information technology served as a channel for the spread of unlike ideas and cultural interactions, and much of that relied on paper."

four. Spices

Cinnamon seller, miniature from Tractatus de herbis, 15th-century France. — Cinnamon seller, miniature from Tractatus de herbis, 15th-century French republic.

Leemage/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Spices from East and South Asia, like cinnamon from Sri Lanka and cassia from Prc, were exotic and coveted trade items, just they didn't typically travel the overland routes of the Silk Road. Instead, spices were mainly transported along an ancient maritime Silk Road that linked port cities from Republic of indonesia westward through India and the Arabian Peninsula.

Across the Silk Route, spices were valued for their use in cooking, only too for religious ceremonies and as medicine. And unlike silk, which could be produced wherever silk worms could be kept live, many spices were derived from plants that only grew in very specific environments.

"That ways there's a clearer origin for spice than for some of the other luxury items, which adds to their value," says Wen.

five. Jade

Millennia before there was such a affair every bit the Silk Road, China traded with its western neighbors along the so-chosen Jade Route.

Jade, the crystalline-green gemstone, was central to Chinese ritual culture. When jade supplies ran low in the 5th millennium B.C., information technology was necessary for Mainland china to establish merchandise relations with western neighbors similar the aboriginal Iranian Kingdom of Khotan, whose rivers were rich with hunks of nephrite jade, the all-time variety of jade for carving intricate figurines and jewelry. The jade trade to China flourished throughout the Silk Road flow, as did trade in other semi-precious gems like pearls.

6. Glassware

Westerners ofttimes assume that most Silk Road goods traveled from the exotic Far Due east westward to the Mediterranean and Europe, but Silk Route merchandise went in all directions. For case, archeologists excavating burying mounds in China, Korea, Thailand and the Philippines have plant Roman glassware amidst the prized possessions of the Asian elite. The distinct type of soda-lime glass made in Rome and fashioned into vases and goblets would have eagerly been traded for silk, which Romans were obsessed with.

7. Furs

The taiga is the vast stretch of evergreen forest that runs through Siberia in Eurasia and continues into Canada in N America. In the days of the Silk Road, writes Millward, the taiga attracted hardy bands of trappers who harvested fob, sable, mink, beaver and ermine pelts. This northern "fur route" supplied luxurious coats and hats to Chinese dynasties and other Eurasian elites. Millward writes that Genghis Khan cemented one of his earliest political alliances with a souvenir of a sable glaze. By the 17th century, in the waning days of the Silk Road, rulers from the Chinese Qing Dynasty could buy furs from Siberian trappers.

viii. Slaves

Enslaved people were a tragically common "trade proficient" forth the Silk Road. Raiding armies would take captives and sell them to private traders who would observe buyers in far-flung ports and capitals from Dublin in the West to Shandong in Eastern China, writes Silk Road historian Susan Whitfield. The slaves became servants, entertainers and eunuchs for regal courts.

Wen says that while enslavement was pervasive in premodern Eurasia along the Silk Road, none of these kingdoms or societies could be classified every bit "slave-based" in the same manner that the African slave trade operated in the New World.

"Slaves were more than like an ornament of the life of the Silk Road aristocracy," says Wen, "Not a major economic source."