British Museum unveils vast network of the Silk Roads

The Silk Road is often thought of a single trade route that linked Europe and Asia, from the second Century BC until the 15th Century AD.
The popular imagination perhaps conjures images of camels plodding across vast steppes laden with silk and spices.
And although camels, silk and spices all played a role in the Silk Road – it is just a tip of the iceberg.
A major new exhibition at the British Museum wants to dispel myths and shed light on the stories behind this major trade network.
To illustrate how interconnected cultures were in the medieval period, the first exhibition greeting visitors is a Viking Buddha.
This tiny bronze statue was discovered on the Swedish island of Helgo, west of Stockholm, and was likely produced in the Swat Valley, now in modern day Pakistan.
It must have travelled 5,000 km in the late 500s AD and perhaps found a home with a powerful Viking chief.
The exhibition Silk Roads deliberately pluralises the title to show it was not one single route but a much wider network that spanned Asia, Africa and Europe, from Japan to Ireland, from the Arctic to Madagascar.
Sue Brunning, a curator of European Early Medieval Collections at The British Museum explains: “People might be used to an idea of the Silk Road as a single trade route between east and west. But in this exhibition we’re presenting a rather different vision of that. And that we’re calling it Silk Roads, plural. And the plural is important because we’re presenting it rather as a network of overlapping routes that linked communities across Asia, Africa and Europe in all directions, not just by land, but also by river and sea.”
The exhibition focuses on a timeframe of just 500 years, between 500AD and 1000AD.
Perhaps surprisingly, this omits Marco Polo who – at least in the West – is a name associated with travels along the Silk Road in the 13th century.
The exhibition cuts off at 1000 AD because at this point Viking explorers landed on the North American continent and a whole new trade network stretching across the Atlantic was began.
The timeframe encompasses the Tang dynasty in China, the Islamic Rashidun Caliphate, the Byzantine Empire in modern day Turkey and beyond, and the Carolingian Empire in France.
The museum tells the story with objects from its own collection as well as those borrowed from 29 international lenders, many of which have never been shown in the UK before.
One of the most striking is this enormous mural that once hung in the Hall of Ambassadors in Afrasiab, in what is present day Samarkand in Uzbekistan.
It was a prized artwork of the Sogdians – a culture not familiar to most people today, but they were once among the greatest traders of the Silk Road.
The mural shows characters from India, Korea and China at a funeral procession for the powerful Sogdian King, Varkhuman.
“One of the most spectacular loans that we have on display in the exhibition is this fantastic wall painting, which is on loan to the UK for the very first time from our partners in Uzbekistan. And this is a wall painting that is associated with a group known as the Sogdians, who were great traders along the Silk Road at this time, moving very vast distances. We have traces of them, for example, from China into India and the Middle East. And this wall painting shows a procession which includes the camels, which you might expect to see in a Silk Road show, but also elephants and people from across different parts of the world who are all processing to an ancestral tomb in the Sogdian’s heartland of Sogdiana and the capital at Samarkand is where this spectacular object came from. So we’re very pleased to have it on display, and I think it will be extremely popular with visitors and hopefully bring this group of people to a wider audience,” says Brunning.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the Silk Roads is how so many major world religions met for the first time, including Buddhism, Islam, Christianity and Judaism.
Religious differences must have been common, but a shared interest in trade bonded the interactions and there is evidence in Silk Roads how the cultures shared their knowledge and learned new technologies and skills from one another.
The Anglo Saxon burial at Sutton Hoo in Eastern England is a good example of this interconnectivity.
New analysis on a piece of jewellery from the museum’s permanent collection has revealed where the precious stones inlaid in the piece originated.
Brunning says: “”Another one of our key displays in the exhibition is golden garnet metalwork from the Sutton Hoo ship burial, which is, of course, a key part of the museum’s permanent collection. But we’re able to show it here in context with so many other things from the wider world. Now, this metalwork is really interesting because the technique of inlay and garnets into gold metal work has itself travelled. So we think that the technique itself probably originated in the West Asian Caucasus or Black Sea region, and it spread west throughout Europe, reaching Britain, we think, by around the 500s AD and reaching its absolute zenith in quality at Sutton Hoo in Eastern England in about the early 600s. Now, what’s really exciting about the metal work is we’ve been able to undertake new scientific analysis specifically for this show in order to try to understand where the garnets came from. And that analysis revealed that the garnets in the metalwork came from Czechia, so relatively close by, but also much further afield in Sri Lanka and India, particularly at a site in Rajasthan which was a purveyor of these really beautiful sort of plum purple coloured stones.”
One thing is certainly true – you can’t have a Silk Road without silk.
This precious commodity was highly-valued in the Middle Ages and its secrets were only known to a select few in China.
It had been produced in China over 5,000 years ago and was used as currency in the Tang dynasty’s financial system.
One of the exhibits in Silk Roads depicts a story of early industrial espionage, as the secrets of this enigmatic technology were stolen by a young princess.
Luk Yu-Ping, a curator of Chinese Paintings, Prints and Central Asian Collections at The British Museum chose this votive wood panel as one of her favourite objects in the exhibition.
She says: “So the story goes, according to the historical records, that there was this princess from an eastern kingdom who hid silkworm eggs and also mulberry tree seeds in her headdress in order to smuggle that out of her homeland to the Kingdom of Khotan. When she was about to marry the king of Khotan, because the kingdom of Khotan didn’t have the technology of how to farm, silkworms and to create real silk from cocoons. So she wanted to bring that to her new home.”
Eventually the secrets of silk would arrive in Europe, no doubt hastened by trade along the Silk Road.
Yu-Ping enjoys the story and the role a young woman played in the spread of silk.
“And it’s a really important story, I think, because obviously with the Silk Road silk is a key material. And also it reminds us that a woman could also play a part in the story of the Silk Roads too. For example, elite women who were part of marriage alliances also travel long distances and help to have some role to play in the transmission of knowledge and technology. And also probably she was followed by attendants, female attendants, who probably helped her with that transmission as well. So it’s a really great story that we wanted to include in the exhibition,” she says.
The exhibition shines a light on human stories, and indeed tragedies, along the road.
This fascinating legal document, co-signed by a Buddhist monk and nun, details the sale of an enslaved woman for five bolts of silk.
The extraordinary detail in the contract records the woman’s name as Xiansheng and her age at 28 years-old.
Her fate is lost to history, but this document remains today.
Silk Roads runs from 26 September 2024 until 23 February 2025 at the British Museum in London.