Humanities Homework Help

PART 1: Answer the following prompt in 300 words.

What do these artifacts tell us about life along the Silk Roads?

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/china/exploring-silk-roads

PART 2: Respond to TWO CLASSMATES

Classmate 1 (Craig)

The silk road was not a “road” at all. It was a network of trading routes that not only traded goods and manufactured products (which had far-reaching economic effects) but also served as a means for communication and the transference of ideas, such as, religious, political, and the spread of customs and culture. The route stretched from northeastern China, through northwestern China and the middle east, and on to the Arabian peninsula. According to the text The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History, “Musicians and dancing girls traveled, too—as did camel pullers, merchants, monks, and pilgrims. The Silk Road was not just a means of bringing peoples and parts of the world into contact; it was also a social system” (225). I guess it could be said that the route was a precursor to our modern-day internet (e.g. blogs, social media sites without anonymity).

Marc Aurel Stein (1862–1943) was a Hungarian academic who embarked on four expeditions to northwest China and several others across the middle east to locate and excavate culturally important artifacts. The Stein collection at the British Museum highlights numerous artifacts from the silk road that Stein collected from the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang. The web article “Exploring the Silk Roads” describes it as “a vast Buddhist cave temple complex filled with magnificent wall paintings and clay sculptures primarily dating from the 4th to the 14th centuries” (1).

After exploring the digital collection of artifacts from the Silk Road at the British Museum, I am amazed by the sheer number and variety of items. There are tools, earthen vessels (i.e. vases, cups), writing materials, weapons, religious artifacts, paintings, sculptures, manuscripts, jade, jewelry, etc. There is such a span of cultural diversity present in the artifacts which tells us how different the region was between China, the Middle East, and Europe. I can now start to understand how religious ideas can be easily propagated across a continent through verbal means and artifacts. Life along this route must have been treacherous and at times miserable but at the same time it must have been a wild adventure full of surprises and intellectually stimulating. it is so clear how and why historians consider the silk road so important to the development of the region (i.e. socially, politically, economically, and spiritually).

Works Cited

Bulliet, Richard W., et al. The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History. Cengage, 2019.

“Exploring the Silk Roads.” The British Museum, www.britishmuseum.org/collection/china/exploring-silk-roads.

Classmate 2 (christopher)

The Silk Road was a dangerous route of trade that stretched across the northern parts of the Asian continent. As a route it offered in a sense trading routes in a world economy at a time when the world was smaller in the eyes of our ancient ancestors. Reaching across China this route connected China with Japan, India, Turkey, Italy, and Korea by way of land and sea. The artifacts shown give some insight to the amount of wealth that moved between these places as merchant trade for goods and valuables were exchanged. The route unlike most modern trade routes was also dangerous where travelers would be faces with hot arid sands, and mountains where they would face severe heat and arid climates to blistering cold high mountain terrain. Many probably had to fight off looters and bandits as well only adding to the risks of trading on this route. Due to the potential for trade and the value of the materials to be sold it was a risk the reward in compensation or the spiritual significance of the items it was well worth it to risk such conditions to navigate The Silk Road. Life on The Silk Road would have been tough and treacherous but the reward seemed to be enough to drive an international economy.

I feel it is important to capture the significance of silk and the Chinese production of such a fabric. In ancient China silk production was a protected secret to the extent that wars had even been fought over its production and you will find silk throughout the world due to its extravagance and value to society of this time. Everyone it appeared sought after silk for many purposes and so it was a commodity of great value and demand so much so that the route took on silk as its namesake.