Considering that cellist Yo-Yo Ma has traveled from his own Chinese ethnic origins to an international reputation in Western classical music, it is hardly surprising that he should have initiated a project centered on the Silk Road, the ancient highway that pioneered exactly that same East-West connection.
This book is one of the many products of Ma's Silk Road Project, inaugurated in 1998 with the aim of studying the historic flow of ideas across the area, and assisting the cultures of what are for the most part now impoverished places in the remoter regions of Central Asia.
The name "the Silk Road" was only given to this network of highways in the 19th century by a German explorer, Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen. But the route in its trading form goes back over 2,000 years, with its heyday in the late Middle Ages. As well as silk, it dealt in horses, jade, gems, lacquer ware, ivory (unfortunately), tea, cotton, incense and linen.
Nevertheless it was silk above all that the West desired, and the ancient Romans paid enormous sums for it. They had no idea how it was made, but they knew what a sexual allure this thinnest of all materials gave the wearer.
One Greek commentator wrote that women could be technically clothed but effectively naked in it, and possession of silk became one of the Roman empire's greatest status symbols. Knowledge of how it was made only reached the West (Byzantium) in around 600 CE.
No one merchant traveled the Silk Road entire, it seems. It was a network along which traders moved and exchanged goods, so that items passed through many hands, with a price increase each time, before arriving at their final customer.
But the route itself is far more extraordinary than that. The book's most astonishing chapter, by Merton C. Flemings, points out that this was the line along which mankind itself migrated, from our African birthplace to East Asia, then across to Alaska, and down to the tip of South America.
The Silk Road is therefore actually the oldest major human trail on the entire planet. In view of this, it is surely misnamed and should perhaps now be re-labeled Mankind's Great Migration Route.
The mixture of scholarly disciplines that went to make the book is no accident. As Flemings points out, it is a similar collaboration between human biologists, linguists, geologists and archaeologists that is being brought to bear on the history of the human race itself.
Even Noah's flood is now being postulated as a breakthrough of Mediterranean water into the Black Sea at a rate equivalent to 200 Niagaras. The movement of modern man's predecessors, the upright-walking hominids of 2,500,000 years ago, along what was basically the Silk Road route, with homo sapiens (us) following in their footsteps, is no less extraordinary. It's an idea now being tested by DNA sampling of current populations, side by side with analyses of their language structures.
According to this theory, man moved from Africa into the Middle East about 100,000 years ago, and from there across Asia to the far east 67,000 years ago, with branches going down into India and southeast Asia (and thence Australia). From Siberia we moved across to North America 20,000 years ago, and down to South America 13,000 years ago. Ice Ages delayed the move from the Middle East into Europe, and this probably finally happened 40,000 years ago. The book has a marvelous map showing just this.
Flemings is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is responsible for the Singapore-MIT Alliance, focusing on distance learning. He sees himself as furthering in the digital age the same west-east contacts the Silk Road pioneered in ancient times. No wonder he is so interested in it, and so absorbing when writing about its history. Yo-Yo Ma calls the Internet the modern Silk Road.
Ma himself describes how he met four Mongolian musicians playing in an Amsterdam street. They had driven there along the ancient route in seven days, and Ma invited them to share a concert stage with him, causing a near-riot of astonishment and acclaim.
This slim book is in invaluable guide to all of this. It has a photographic chapter on the sacred sites of the route (including Mount Kailash), and another that contains speculations on when horses were first tamed, providing the fastest means of travel across land man was to know until the invention of the steam engine in the 19th century.
Technologies moved in both directions. The creation of bronze (copper with a small percentage of tin, and the hardest metal known) happened in Ur in Mesopotamia around 2600 BC, but the tin came from Iran, via the Silk Road.
Printing, by contrast, moved from China to the West, but along the same route.
The editor contributes a fascinating chapter on astrology, linking Japanese mandalas to esoteric astronomical knowledge, culminating in speculation on reasons why the number 108 is so central to Buddhist and Hindu lore and practice. She illustrates the hypothesis with information on the mystical significance of Cambodia's Angkor Thom, on a southern spur of the Silk Road linking it to ancient international sea routes.
Even the less world-shattering chapters are informative and useful. The overview of Iranian cinema, for instance, highlights the honest treatment of the life of ordinary people, praising the sparse style and gentle humanism of Iranian films.
This, the author points out, contrasts strongly with the political and religious rhetoric that sometimes emanates from other areas of the country's national life.
Ma's foundation is nothing if not well-connected. The immensely prestigious Smithsonian Institute and its associated Arthur M. Sackler Gallery were, for example, involved in this book's creation.
Along the Silk Road, which at first glance looks like a coffee-table item, contains some extraordinarily stimulating material. It both looks elegant and is written by experts in their fields.
This combination makes for an enormous achievement, spreading genuine learning in a concise, accessible and attractive form. It's a staggering book, and I will not part with my copy under any conditions whatsoever.
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