The Uzbek mountains hold many secrets, although they have only recently yielded one of their biggest. The scientific journal Nature published a feature last week revealing that researchers have discovered long-lost remains of two medieval cities above the ancient Silk Roads. These cities were positioned at a crossroads of the trade routes, making them particularly significant.
Until 23rd February 2025, however, you don’t have to travel to Uzbekistan to uncover the wonders of the ancient routes. The Silk Roads exhibition in the British Museum is a brimming treasure trove of exploration and wonderment, weaving a fascinating historical and cultural narrative of international trade.
The exhibition explains that, though some people imagine a ‘Silk Road’ as being one long road linking east and west, the Silk Roads were a variety of routes going in many different directions, over land and sea.
You begin your exhibition journey in East Asia, exploring trader interactions between Japan, the Korean peninsula and mainland China. The exhibition then follows a journey of key cities and regions throughout Central Asia to Arabia, the Mediterranean and ending in the northwest Europe region.
As you step into the darkened room, names of these ancient cities appear above you, serving as a map to direct you around the exhibition room. You may find yourself politely jostling around the crowded room in a very British kind of queue, so popular is the attraction.
Trading goods
The ambient background noise playing overhead includes the sound of horses and carts, which is particularly apt with all the images of goods transportation popping into sight: pack horses and camels; carts and ships.
Yet how beautiful the goods themselves are! Beautifully-decorated ceramic bowls from Iran, boasting deep greens and ink blues. Jewellery from India, inlaid with sapphires and emeralds.
One of my favourite exhibits has to be a set of chess pieces from Samarkand, Uzbekistan, excavated in the AD 700s – the earliest known set of chess pieces in the world! As I gaze at them, I reflect that this particular exhibit would probably also appeal to chancellor Rachel Reeves, renowned for her passion for chess. I momentarily entertain a hope that she will play a match with me one day! However, I think she might have more significant things to attend to this week…
For those familiar with the world of export controls, there’s also an entertaining story of the somewhat rogue Bishop Willibald. Facing a scenario of tight export controls in the AD 720s, he managed to smuggle chrism (a blended oil used in Christian rituals) past Umayyad customs officials at Tyre. He concealed the chrism in a hollowed-out gourd, beneath a layer of a different oil in order to mask its unique fragrance. I’m not quite sure what our Export Controls Special Interest Group at the Chartered Institute of Export & International Trade would make of that!
Trading ideas
Beyond goods, the exchange of ideas – including innovations, political systems and belief systems – is also clear throughout the exhibits. Whether it was the attraction of scholars to Baghdad – the wealthy capital of the Abbasid caliphate (AD 749-1258) – the discovery of 400,000 texts within a Jewish synagogue in Fustat (a former twin city of Cairo), or the monument erected in Chang’an to document the early history of the Christian church in the East, religious influence often spread along the trade routes.
Paper, of course, made it easier for ideas to spread. Papermaking technology from what was then known as ‘Tang China’ (Tang dynasty – 618-906 AD) fuelled the transmission of these ideas, with all kinds of significant works being translated from Greek, Sanskrit and Persian into Arabic, for example.
This technology would also enable the paper-based foundation of trade systems for centuries. We have now moved on so very far from those early foundations that some countries (including the UK, last year) have created measures which move traders away from paper systems to paperless ones.
What would our trading ancestors of the Silk Roads think if they could see the incredible technological progression of today? They could not foresee that we would be going beyond physical checks on goods to embracing digital ones. They could not foresee that there would be infrastructure where a person could purchase, at the mere click of a button, a good from the other end of the world. They could not foresee how far-reaching and beneficial enhanced trade and digital agreements would be in the future.
I wonder what we are currently unable to imagine that will one day be commonplace in the international trade landscape. Will our descendants look back at our transport, processes and infrastructure and consider them outdated? Maybe. What the Silk Roads exhibition has reminded me is that there is a timeless quality to the ability of humans to share their creativity, fruitfulness and ingenuity with each other over great distances.
The exhibition ends with a particularly beautiful piece – the ‘Franks Casket’, a whalebone casket made in northern England in around AD 700. The scenes carved all around the casket are a mix of narratives of Jewish and Roman history, Christian stories and northern European myths. It’s unsurprising that the curators have chosen this piece to round off your journey around the exhibition. After all, it’s a perfect example of how nations that trade goods and ideas with each other almost inevitably deepen their understanding of each other. In a world currently plagued by many troubles, trade is surely still one of the most effective aids to peace.
