(Virtual) Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East

The Silk Road was and still is more an idea than an actuality. In the distant past, it was mapped only in the minds of those who traveled it and, then, only partially. Today it can be mapped more completely in retrospect by historians, archaeologists, and latter-day, arm-chair travelers such as ourselves. The Silk Road of old was more than a road and carried more than silk. This was a complex interlocking and overlapping network of land routes paralleled or supplanted here and there by sea passages. Through this network moved all manner of goods, hosts of peoples and beasts of burden (and the parasites and plagues they carried), ideas and whole systems of belief. Nodes on that network—Petra, Persepolis, Samarkand—are now found in the modern Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Republic of Uzbekistan in Central Asia. It is through these places we will travel as we backtrack along the Silk Road from west to east, pausing to consider how the Near East pivots gradually but perceptibly toward Asia.

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