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Introduction

We are surrounded by things, and we are surrounded by history. But too seldom do we use the artifacts that make up our environment to understand the past. Too seldom do we try to read objects as we read books—to understand the people and times that created them, used them, and discarded them.

—STEVEN LUBAR AND W. DAVID KINGER,

History from Things: Essays on Material Culture

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT THINGS ON THE SILK ROAD.¹ Things or objects speak to us, in the sense of causing us to create a narrative. The narrative, however simple—“This is a receptacle made to hold my tea”—is dependent not only on the object’s qualities and context but on our qualities and context. This is a dialogue. The initial narrative might be one of many provoked by the object for one individual, let alone across individuals with different experiences, knowledge, beliefs, and cultural backgrounds. A drinking receptacle might be recognized as such across individuals, although some might see it as a cup for drinking wine, others as a cup for water. Outside its initial context—outside the space and time in which it was created—the object might no longer invoke the narrative intended by its creator. Such is often the case with objects created for religious or ritual purposes. Historians and archaeologists seek to understand more about the context in order to try to recreate the narrative of the object, its biography or history: How, why, when, and by whom was it made? Where, how, and by whom was it used, and for what purposes? Did it travel? Was it adapted, changed, broken, repaired? Without direct access to the original context, we have to accept that at times we might get the answers to these questions spectacularly wrong.²

Telling history through objects rather than people or events is not a new approach, but over the past two decades it has become more central in teaching and in popularizing world history.³ Particularly successful has been the history of commodities.⁴ This approach has increasingly been adopted by academic institutions, especially for modern history.⁵ Seeking alternative sources for history is not, however, restricted to commodities, and new textbooks in this area range across the mundane, the ornamental, the useful, and the built.⁶

This book focuses on made rather than raw materials but takes a broad view of objects or things—including commodities; “natural” and animate things such as people, horses, and camels; and complex created things, such as jewelry, glass, paintings, and buildings. I do not exclude texts. Instead of arguing that texts are distinct from other things—that texts are “not neutral epistles . . . like other products of human creativity” but are “active in the production, negotiation and transformation of social relationships”⁷—I view the nontextual objects of human creativity also to be active in the production, negotiation, and transformation of these relationships. This book therefore takes the approach of historical archaeology, described by John Moreland as recognizing “that people in the past conducted their social practice, and construed their identities, through the Object, the Voice and the Word in specific historical circumstances.”⁸

For some historiographers, the seduction of a key object is similar that of a “great man,” whereas others look at the humble but plentiful potsherds to understand the past. This book attempts to take a middle line, concentrating most chapters around a single object but considering its context by looking at related objects—including people. The objects selected have complex stories to be told, and this book aims to give this “thick description,” a close-grained analysis of each object in its times and places.⁹

Movement of objects—including people—is essential to the concept of the Silk Road, and most of the objects chosen here have journeyed along the Silk Road. But the vast majority of such objects—everyday or luxury, traded or not—have long disappeared: food, wine, and medicines were consumed; slaves, elephants, and horses died; textiles, wood, and ivory decayed; glass and pottery were broken.¹⁰ Only in rare cases did objects survive by design or accident, as in hoards of metal or glass, or in burials when objects were sufficiently valued to be interred with corpses, as in the case of three of the objects discussed here (chapters 1, 2, and 5). Texts are often the only evidence for the existence of other objects, but both the archaeology and the texts are extremely fragmentary.

Objects are not neutral and inert in this story: they change and also effect change. This is where a material culture approach is especially relevant to the Silk Road. In the interaction of the objects with the cultures they encountered—those that made them, carried them, received them, used them, sold them, discarded them—we can gain new perspectives on those cultures at those times. This book seeks to take account of more recent discussions of “things” to include their interactions with humans (themselves “things”), the usual approach to material culture, but also the interdependence of things and humans—their entanglement.¹¹

This is a book set in a period and places characterized by such entanglement. Most of the objects selected here have more than one cultural context and find themselves entangled with things—including people—of different cultures and times. I do not restrict discussion to the object in its original setting but in many cases bring the story to the present, looking at a range of very different relationships—the entanglement of the object and the conservator, the curator, the scholar, the collector, the looter, and others.

Several of the objects I discuss are luxury or monumental objects—the earrings, ewer, silk, Qur’an, and stupa. The pair of earrings (chapter 1), were discovered in a tomb in the territories of the Xiongnu Empire and show characteristics and materials from a variety of cultures subsumed under the imperial labels of “Xiongnu” and “Chinese.”¹² The presentation of their story often tends to veer to the dichotomous—steppe and settled, nomad and agriculturalist, barbarian and civilized—and I very much hope to avoid that here, as I believe it to be crude and unhelpful.¹³ The discussion is intended to challenge the use of binary labels or any such hard distinctions. These include those sometimes made between trade and tribute and between government and private trade. One intention of this book is to show that the issues are more complex than sometimes presented, to sow uncertainty and to give references for further reading.

The environment is an essential part of the stories of all the things discussed in this book. It provided materials, conditions, and impetus for the development of technologies, the exploitation and manufacture of items, and the movement of peoples.¹⁴ The changing environment, for example, is a catalyst in the story of the earrings: some scholars have argued that the Xiongnu peoples originated in the Altai but were forced out by changes in climate in the fourth century BC, thus moving south into Central Asia and the borders of China, where we encounter them in chapter 1.¹⁵ In turn, it is argued, this movement forced the existing population, the Yuezhi, to move west, where they established the Hephthalite Empire, possibly the makers of the Bactrian ewer discussed in chapter 5.

Another similarly complex issue raised in this first chapter is the question of where, by whom, and for whom things were made. Technologies, materials, fashions, and craftsmen all traveled—I would argue this is an important characteristic of the Silk Road—and we have at best tentative hypotheses about where these earrings were made. We have to accept that these might be challenged by future finds. In other words, in many cases, when dealing with the material culture of the Silk Road, we are on shaky ground.

The earrings survived, as they were buried in a tomb, and this is the case with another two objects discussed here: the Hellenistic glass bowl (chapter 2) and the Bactrian ewer (chapter 5). These were found in elite tombs, and it is possible that such objects were considered to be “foreign” or “exotic” and that their inclusion in the tombs was intended to heighten the status and cosmopolitanism of the owner. This would assume, in turn, that cosmopolitanism was considered positively in the owners’ societies.

The chapter on the Bactrian ewer raises the important and often overlooked role of the transmission of intangible cultural heritage on the Silk Road. Like the material object itself, which has antecedents in Roman and then Sasanian vessels but which has developed its own characteristics, the story depicted on the vessel, most probably part of the Trojan War cycle, has developed its own characteristics. Not least among these is the depiction of Paris holding two fruits, little resembling apples. Of course, we have no evidence to suggest that there was any direct knowledge of Roman ewers or the Trojan War epic, and the craftsmen who made this object and the original owner might well have seen it as an entirely local production representing a local story. However, as it moved eastwards into China, it would certainly have been viewed as foreign—as coming from the “west” even if that west was Central Asia and not the borders of Europe.

Glass and glass technology, discussed in chapter 2 on the Hellenistic glass bowl, present an interesting comparison and contrast to sericulture on the Silk Road (see chapter 8). The raw materials for glass were readily available throughout much of Eurasia. The techniques were also present, at least the firing of raw materials to transform them and the use of flux to reduce the firing temperatures. The technology was invented or diffused across Eurasia from at least the first millennium BC. But whereas silk started in the East, for glass the technology was refined in West Asia on the fringes of Europe— and spread east into Sasanian Persia and to China and Korea. The South Asia tradition might have developed independently but was certainly informed by objects arriving from West Asia. And, also unlike silk technology and its products, which were mastered and valued in all the major cultures across the Silk Road, glass technology had a stuttering progress in China. Perhaps this is because other materials—jade and increasingly fine ceramics—filled the aesthetic need for a translucent but hard material that glass filled in other cultures where ceramic technology was far less developed. But glass was clearly valued by some, as shown by the existence of items in elite tombs, the importance of glass in Buddhism, and the adoption of and experimentation with the technology at different times in China.

Silk is an ongoing and central part of this story, and in chapter 8 I have chosen a piece to discuss that comes from fairly late, from the eighth to tenth centuries, so that I can explore the spread of silk technologies—moriculture, sericulture, weaving—from their origins in China. While silk was not always the major trade item over the whole period or even the major item across some of the networks, it certainly remained significant. The raw and finished materials continued to be valued and traded throughout the period. We also see the development of new weaves as the materials and technologies spread outside China.

Silk—and glass—were both part of the story of Buddhism, playing an important role in the practice of the faith. Buddhism is explored further in the discussion of the main stupa at Amluk Dara Stupa in chapter 4. As an architectural object, this stupa has not moved along the Silk Road, but it reflects the movement of Buddhism and the changing landscape—environmental, cultural, religious, political—of a place, in this case the Swat valley. It also brings into discussion the complex logistics involved in the transmission of architectural forms.

The wooden plaque, discussed in chapter 6, also belongs to the story of Buddhism, but I chose it because of the other narratives it tells, especially about the importance of the horse and the role of smaller and often forgotten Silk Road cultures: in this case, that of the Khotanese. It also exemplifies how far we have to travel yet as scholars to understand the Silk Road: it depicts iconography that is commonly found throughout Khotan but that we are still struggling to interpret.

The three textual objects in this book are selected because in each the text has a different context. Chapter 3 looks at a hoard of coins from the Kushan Empire. Coins fall on the cusp of text and object, and it is therefore perhaps not surprising that numismatics is a discipline that straddles both history and archaeology. In many cultures coins confirm other sources about the chronology and names of rulers and sometimes complete gaps. For the Kushan Empire, coins are the main source for reconstructing this chronology. Their inscriptions enable historians to reconstruct a time line of rulers, even though there has been considerable dispute about where to place the start of this time line.¹⁶ Few other extant written records have been found that are produced by the Kushans themselves, and the names of rulers in the annals of neighboring empires, such as the Chinese Later Han dynasty, are difficult to reconstruct. Therefore archaeology plays a much greater role in our understanding of Kushan history than in many other literate cultures. The cache of coins considered here have a further story to tell, as they were discovered, not in Kushan or a neighboring country that was a trading partner, but thousands of miles away in a Christian monastery in what is now Ethiopia. The reason for their journey is not certain, although we can hypothesize, but the fact of their making it is indicative of long-distance routes across sea and land at this time.

The second text considered here (chapter 9) is from a culture (China) where evidence from text and evidence from archaeology are both plentiful and have sometimes supported each other—notably, for example, in the case of the Shang rulers. In China, there are numerous texts, including detailed political histories. And Chinese history has given primacy to the word over the archaeological and other evidence, though as Charles Holcombe has pointed out, “Three subjects that mainstream traditional Chinese historians seldom addressed were trade, Buddhism and foreigners.”¹⁷ The transmitted texts are very much the voice of the literate and official elite. But the textual fragment here comes from an archaeological context, not subject to the same selection, and thus gives voice to another part of the culture. It is a fragment of a printed almanac, a popular but proscribed text at the time. This chapter considers the role of texts in largely illiterate or semiliterate societies, arguing that they also “spoke” to these groups.

The third text is a sacred object, a folio from the “Blue Qurʾan” (chapter 7) that was produced by the elite. This copy of the Islamic text was written in Arabic using gold and silver on indigo-colored parchment. Its provenance and inspiration are both uncertain and have been subject to much debate. Possible links to similar texts being produced thousands of miles away in Buddhist East Asia have been suggested.

Although I have tried to cover a wide range of topics, some have inevitably been neglected. I would like to have discussed music, medicine, and foodstuffs, and I have not included a specifically military item. My decision to include a slave, though, was very deliberate. Slaves are found across the Silk Road, regardless of period or culture, and they undoubtedly formed a major part of Silk Road trade. Despite this, they often appear only in passing in histories of the Silk Road.

I have worked with Silk Road things for over three decades, but I remain surprised that, when I come to ask more about the objects, I encounter a lack of understanding of—or interest in—their materiality. In some cases this is because what they are made of or how they are made is not certain: we have lost techniques mastered by past craftsmen and struggle to replicate methods and, sometimes, materials. But often it seems to be a matter of a lack of interest, either to find out or to question assumptions made without any evidence.

This leads to numerous cases in which the material descriptions of the object are at best imprecise and at worst inaccurate. An example of the former is the designation in many catalogs of Western medieval manuscripts of the medium as “vellum.” This tells us only that the parchment is finely made and does not specify the animal skin from which it is made (see chapter 7). The same can be said for the use of the terms hemp and mulberry to describe the paper of East Asian medieval manuscripts. These are also imprecise terms, usually denoting quality of paper rather than its main fiber, and as such are often misunderstood. While centuries of work have been done on identifying texts, much less effort has been spent on identifying the parchment or paper.¹⁸

A striking case of inaccuracy is found in descriptions of most glass excavated in China, dating from around Han-period contexts and deemed to be foreign. Such glass has usually been labeled “Roman”—even though some pieces are certainly Hellenistic and some were probably locally produced.¹⁹

In an exhibition I curated in 2009, I assumed that the description given in the institutional records of the glass bowl discussed in chapter 5 as “Roman” was correct. But when I started to study glass in more detail my misjudgment became clear, and, as at so many other times in my scholarly career, I had to question what I thought I had learned. This book is a part of this process: an attempt to accept the many uncertainties of Silk Road history and material culture while trying, by listening to the many “things” of the Silk Road, to find some small areas of firm ground on which to base further research and knowledge.

1. I use the terms objects and things interchangeably here. See below for my explanation of their scope.

2. The South African film The Gods Must Be Crazy used this scenario to good effect. A tribe living in the Kalahari Desert are perplexed by a Coca-Cola bottle that lands in their village after having been thrown from a small plane. In this new context, the object, which they see as a gift from the gods, is bestowed with all sorts of meaning completely unrelated to its original function. It should be noted that even access to the culture does not guarantee that an outsider will correctly interpret the situation, as some anthropological reports have shown.

3. Most notably with MacGregor (2011).

4. See, e.g., Mintz (1985); Kurlansky (2002).

5. Such as the project “Commodities in World History, 1450–1950,” carried out by the University of California Santa Cruz’s Center for World History.

6. See, for example, Harvey (2009) and Hicks and Beaudry (2010).

7. Moreland (2001: 31).

8. Moreland (1991: 119).

9. “Culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviours, institutions, or processes can be casually attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly—that is, thickly—described” (Geertz 1973: 316).

10. “Transport of horses and elephants from India both to Sri Lanka and southeast Asia” (Ray 1994: 39).

11. For a recent and detailed discussion of the entanglement of humans and things, see Hodder (2012).

12. The steppe (and sea) routes links across Eurasia were included under the “Silk Road” rubric in a 1957 report on Japanese scholarship on the Silk Road ( Japanese National Commission 1957 and Whitfield 2018).

13. Whitfield (2008).

14. For the relationship between objects, people, and the environment, see Ryan and Durning (1997).

15. Schlütz and Lehmkuhl (2007: 114). They might also have spread to the borders of Europe, if we accept that these are the peoples subsumed under the term Huns in the literature of the settled. For a critique of this assumption, see Kim (2016: 141) and chapter 1.

16. On Kushan chronology, see Falk (2014a).

17. Holcombe (1999: 285). See also chapter 1 for tensions between the Chinese historical records and archaeology regarding the peoples of the Xiongnu alliance and others on China’s borders.

18. This is not to undervalue the contributions of people who have worked in this area and asked these questions.

19. See chapter 5. Also see Watt et al. (2004) and Whitfield (2009) for acceptance of this description.