Forbidden areas, i.e. areas (sites, cities, countries) that are inaccessible for topographical reasons or especially because of decisions based on political, religious, or other motivations are usually surrounded by an aura of mystery and almost necessarily arouse curiosity. The dream of generations of explorers was to reach Lhasa. An area can be closed not only to outsiders but also to “insiders:” nobody is allowed to leave for the “outside.” The isolation imposed on Japan by the Tokugawa regime was such a two-way seclusion aided, of course, by geographical conditions and hence easily enforceable. It has been suggested, perhaps not quite seriously, that the famous Chinese wall was meant not only to keep out barbarian invaders, but also to prevent Chinese from leaving. That there was some kind of border control is also suggested by the leger, according to which Lao-tse, before disappearing into the west, committed his teaching, the Tao-te-kinq, to writing at the request of the “gatekeeper.” One may well wonder whether there exists another equally influential text written at the behest of a border policeman!

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.

Sappho, Xenophon: these two juxtaposed texts, chosen for their dissonant tones, well introduce the Greek representation of weaving as a privileged metaphoric terrain defining the presence and the essence of an imaginary feminine, often expressed in antithetical terms, as a polarized place, with an ever precarious equilibrium. As discourse, weaving is no longer a naturalistic depiction of an edifying occupation of the gynaeceum, an answer to the day-to-day realty of household tasks. As a literary object or ritualized activity, the loom appears as a “gendered” space, a place symbolic of feminine activity.

“The first thing discovered in the excavation begun on the Tower of the Annunciation was a painting eleven hands wide and four and a half hands high. It depicts two large festoons of fruits and flowers, a man's head, which is very large and jovial, a ram, an owl, various birds and other things. It seemed to me to be one of the greatest paintings found to date. Having stopped in with me to see it this morning, the sculptor ordered it removed on Tuesday …

“April 10: Detached from the wall and placed on a cart this morning, the great painting arrived at the royal palace in excellent condition.”

La diversité des témoignages historiques est presque infinie. Tout ce que l'homme dit ou écrit, tout ce qu'il fabrique, tout ce qu'il touche peut et doit renseigner sur lui.
Marc Bloch

Judging from all the evidence we have, it appears that History must start again to look at aspects of the human existence in their time and must open up to the realm of imagination, of affectivity, and of mental attitudes; to put it differently, it must work from a new basis of sensibility and with different questions, with novel sources and themes that permit us to learn more about what happens in the public and private spheres, about the exceptional and the common, about the real and the symbolic, about social practices and about the dominant ideology, as well as the links that connect those divergent fields. Such an approach presupposes a particular attitude toward historical evidence.

In 1866, six Inuits were taken to the United States for the purpose of serving as specimens to American scientists at the Natural History Museum. Shortly after their arrival in New York, four of them had died. One of the survivors returned to the Arctic, while the sixth, Minik, now alone, fought to make possible the return of the remains of his dead companions to their village. Since the latter were being exhibited, as was then often the case (and happens even today in many museums), in order to offer visitors examples of the Inuk people, Minik protested in vain. In 1909 he returned to Greenland when the scientists denied that the remains of his friends still existed. Several years later, still pursuing the issue, he went back to the United States to take up the fight against the bureaucracy for the repatriation of the bodies. He died in the United States in 1918. It was only in 1993 that he won out and that the remains of the four were returned to the Arctic homeland.

All societies are made up of members who have a certain number of things in common, by virtue of which they understand, identify and communicate with each other, on the one hand, and establish differences with members of other societies on the other. Among the most important of these things is language.

In this regard, let us recall two examples raised by Ferdinand de Saussure. The first: “Language is both a social product of the faculty of speech and an ensemble of necessary conventions adopted by the social body to allow for the exercise of this faculty in each individual.” The second: “Speech, distinct from language, is on the contrary an individual act of intelligence and will … by which the speaking subject uses the code of language to express his personal thought.”