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Celestial Horses and Dragon Spittle

The Transfer of Material Culture on the "Silk Routes" before the Twelfth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Lucette Boulnois
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To mention what is called the “Silk Routes” today is to evoke more than two thousand years of history on two continents, Europe and Asia. Naturally, over such a long period and such vast territories, hundreds of products were transported, exchanged, stolen, conquered, transferred, in short, from one country to another. For some of these products, the very source of the raw materials and the techniques of production themselves were transferred.

Everyone knows that the Chinese invented paper, printing, gunpowder and the compass—great technological advances; as for the last three, their transmission throughout the world goes back only to the Crusades, which is quite recent. Here we are interested in transfers that are less known and more ancient, the most ancient for which precise records exist, starting from the time of the “opening” of the silk routes, which, according to Chinese classical history, was during the second century B.C. We shall stop around the eleventh century A.D., at the time of the Sung dynasty. This period includes the two most interesting epochs, in our opinion, in the history of the exchanges on these routes: the Han dynasty (from 206 B.C. to 220 A.D.) and the Tang dynasty (618-907), epochs whose time frames encompass the Western Roman empire, the Eastern Roman empire, the kou-chau empire, Sassanid Persia, and the first centuries of Islam.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 42 , Issue 167 , September 1994 , pp. 15 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

Among the many titles that make up the basis of useful readings in the history of the “silk routes,” and which are too many to list here, the following documents have been particularly useful for this article:.Google Scholar
The Natural History, Pliny the Elder.Google Scholar
The chapters on Western countries in the Chinese dynastic chronicles, especially: chapter 96 of the Ch'ien Han shu, chapter 118 of the Hou Han shu; chapter 97 of Peishe (Beishi); chapter 221 of the T'ang shu.Google Scholar
The many notes in the work by Ali Mazahéri, La Route de la soie (Paris, 1983).Google Scholar
Aeginata, Paulus, The Seven Books of Paulus Aeginata (London, 1844-1847).Google Scholar
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