No Such Thing as the Silk Road

From David Morgan's review of Valerie Hansen's The Silk Road in the TLS, Dec. 20, 2013:

. . . considered as a route which ran all the way from China, across Central Asia and to Persia, the Silk Road did not really exist at all. Some goods, though probably no individuals, did find their way from one end to the other. But we should note that the western terminus seems to have been Persia, not the Roman Empire (no Roman imperial coins have been found in China, which must be a significant pointer). As the author puts it, "The Silk Road was one of the least traveled routes in human history." She points out that scholars who have studied the individual Silk Road sites have asserted that in their particular case, there is little or not surviving evidence of long-distance trade, whatever may be true of the others. . . .

So is the Silk Road no more than a mirage? Not entirely: it is perhaps the refugees who are key to what its real significance was, in Hansen's view: "While not much of a commercial route, the Silk Road was important historically -- this network of routes became the planet's most famous cultural artery for the exchange between east and west of religions, art, languages, and new technologies." It is the people who traveled, and what they brought with them -- in terms of culture rather than commerce -- which lends the Silk Road its permanent historical significance.

Incidentally, the phrase Silk Road was coined in 1877 by German geographer Ferdinand von Richtofen.