The History of the World Podcast, written and presented by Chris Hasler

volume three the classical world

episode 71 the silk road The Silk Road. So, This week's episode essentially focuses on trade networks. The history of trade is not something that we have

focused on specifically, but there has been a strong undercurrent of the aspect of

trade throughout the entire history of this podcast going all the way back to the first volume.

In the Middle East during the Neolithic we are aware that Obsidian was finding its way to different places to its origin and we speculated that

due to it being desirable in appearance that Obsidian trade was taking place.

However, there is a feeling among historians that trade has existed for as long as humans have communicated with each other. During the

course of this volume we have focused on the Persian empires, the European

empires, the South Asian empires, the step cultures and empires and the Chinese

empires. So we have good and the

and Chinese empires. So we have good understanding of the Eurasian network of cultures.

The Persians and the Europeans were closely linked through their borders with one another and

likely the Persians and South Asians were too. We know that the step cultures became more directly linked in the politics of the highly

urbanized ancient society, but they were also very closely linked to the Chinese societies

who were geographically detached from the rest of Eurasia.

The special link between China and the rest of Eurasia was facilitated by the high mobility of the step cultures.

So this links as to why the Silk Road is called the Silk Road.

The Silk Road is a modern Western name for this trade route which would have been of great interest to the societies of the West when these unknown exotic goods started to emerge. One of the products of China that was unknown

to the Western world was silk. So silk represented this new trade link well.

Although the Silk Road flourished for the first time during the period of the Hand Dynasty of China, it's not impossible that the

product would have never traveled down these routes earlier.

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