TRAVEL WISDOM #SILK ROAD #COLIN THUBRON

 

In Tang* times nobody spoke about the SILK ROAD.  It was a 19th century term coined by a German Geographer, and it was not a single road at all , but a shifting network of arteries and veins , laid to the Mediterranean, Historians claim its inception for the second century BC, but the traffic started along before accounts of it were written. Chinese silk from 1500 BC has turned up in tombs in North Afganistan and strands were discovered twisted into the hair of a 10th century BC Egyptian Mummy................

- pg 24

........as the first caravans departed with their bolts of pale silk and yarns , traders began returning with wares whose origins were unexplained . For centuries , China and the West continued in ignorance of one another. Just as the Romans familiar with the cotton, imagined that silk grew on trees, so the Chinese deducing from the silkworm , imagined that cotton must emanate from an animal . .........

-page 86   

-from  "SHADOW OF THE SILK ROAD , by  COLIN THUBRON  read on  26/1/2015

The New SILK ROAD-:

*refres to Cheng Tang (1675- 1646) BCE - the first king of the Shang Dynasty in Chinese territory