The Overland and Maritime Silk Roads

When a nineteenth-century writer coined the term ‘Silk Road’ for the central Asian trade route connecting the Roman Empire with Han China, it would have been hard to foresee its later adoption as a dominant paradigm of first millennium interactions. Although the name obviously originally alluded to the traffic in silk, this was far from the only commodity that travelled with the caravans, and these encounters also concerned diplomacy, espionage, military campaigns and pilgrimage. The ‘Silk Roads’, plural, in fact encompassed many different routes including maritime travel through the Red Sea and Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean and the east Asian seas – and thus connected much of the Afro-Eurasian world for over a thousand years. These were also networks of ideas, trends, fashion and influence. New archaeological research is beginning to reveal how Late Iron Age Scandinavia was a significant western terminal of the Silk Roads, and that the Norse were actively venturing east at an early date, long before the time of the vikings. Illuminating these activities, in practical detail rather than as theoretical possibility, is one of WIVA’s main objectives.