Silk Roads: Peoples, Cultures, Landscapes

An expansive definition of the Silk Roads shapes this striking volume, which measures 9 by 11.5 inches, weighs more than 5 pounds, and contains 450 color photographs and 200 black-and-white images, many of them difficult-to-obtain shots of extraordinarily high quality. Whitfield articulates her subject at the start of the book as “a system of substantial and persistent overlapping and evolving interregional trade networks across Afro-Eurasia by land and sea from the end of the first millennium BCE through to the middle of the 2^nd millennium CE, trading in silk and many other raw materials and manufactured items—including, but not limited to, slaves, horses, semi-precious stones, metals, pots, musk, medicines, glass, furs and fruits—resulting in movements and exchanges of peoples, ideas, technologies, faiths, languages, scripts, iconographies, stories, music, dance and so on” (15). In sum, this volume aims to cover every item and idea that moved anywhere in Afro-Eurasia between...