Lesley Downer reviews the Silk Roads exhibition at the British Museum, open until February, 2025.
There’s something irresistibly romantic about the Silk Roads. The very name conjures up images of caravans of camels, piled high with baggage, wending their way across desert and steppes. It makes you want to pack your bags and set off immediately.
The Silk Roads exhibition at the British Museum aims to recreate some of that allure. Mountains soar and deserts dotted with oases ripple on screens around the walls. The hall is bedecked with evocative place names, some familiar – Dunhuang, Bukhara, Samarkand – some less so. Birka, for a start, was new to me. (It’s a Viking city in Sweden.)
The curators have cast their net wide. The exhibition is all about multi-culturalism, not the Silk Road but the Silk Roads, a network of arteries criss-crossing the Eurasian continent from East to West and back again and stretching into Africa.
It focuses on the years between AD500 and 1000 which, far from being the Dark Ages, as commonly portrayed, was a vibrant time when merchants and teachers of different faiths travelled enormous distances, bringing about the mingling and interchange of cultures, ideas and goods and leading to the spread of Buddhism, Islam and Christianity.
The exhibition starts in Japan’s ancient capital, Heijō-kyō (now Nara), which in the eighth century was the bustling hub at the far eastern end of the Silk Roads, where people from as far afield as Greece, Rome and Central Asia came to exchange culture and goods.
Among the treasures on view is a copy of a small beautifully facetted glass bowl which had travelled as part of an ambassador’s gift to the emperor all the way from the Sasanian Empire in Iran by camel, horse or ox cart and ship to Japan.
Silk Roads gives us a taste of legendary places such as the extraordinary caves of Dunhuang and the city of Chang’an, the magnificent capital of a succession of Chinese dynasties.
Here horses from the steppes of Central Asia were paid for in bolts of silk and craftsmen turned out gloriously realistic ceramic horses, figures and camels.
We see the incredible variety of goods that were transported. We can sniff incense, musk and camphor and be transported through time and space to the bazaars of Central Asia.
The interchange wasn’t just by road. There’s a Chinese ship which was wrecked off Java in 880 on its way to Aksum or the Red Sea laden with goods all carefully packaged up. It was found in 1998 with its goods still beautifully wrapped. Among them is a gold drinking vessel shaped not like a handleless Chinese cup but like a Sogdian drinking vessel.
The Sogdians are the stars of the show. These great traders were based in Sogdiana, in Central Asia, now Uzbekistan and Turkestan. This was the heart of the Silk Roads. The cities of Bukhara and Samarkand were glorious long before Timur created Registan Square with its magnificently mosaiced mosques in the 14th century.
The most spectacular exhibits here have been loaned by the Uzbek government. There’s a huge mural from a Sogdian merchant’s house dating from the mid 600s AD, depicting a bejewelled elephant, bearded merchants and a flock of geese.
I also enjoyed some of the more modest exhibits, such as a Sogdian guard’s neatly stitched beige felt shoe with leather patches on the sole and heel and a drawstring round the ankle. I could almost imagine him standing there.
Having begun in the Far East, in Japan, the exhibition ends in the Far West, at Sutton Hoo, with a whale bone casket intricately carved with depictions of the Magi, Romulus and Remus and the Roman army attacking Jerusalem, along with fragments of Syrian bitumen used to construct the boat. ‘Made in Syria, buried in Essex,’ as the caption has it.
This exhibition covers an enormous amount of places, most of which get only a cabinet each. There are plenty of small treasures to mull over but I could have done with a bit more grand spectacle. It’s a taster which leaves you hungry for the real feast.
Silk Roads at the British Museum runs until February 23, 2025. Tickets are £22 (adults); members are free.
The Shortest History of Japan by Lesley Downer was published on 10 September, 2024.
Read Lesley’s Historia feature about remarkable Japanese women, court ladies, warriors, and courtesans, spanning the centuries from 1006.
On the Narrow Road to the Deep North (written as Lesley Chan Downer) was reissued on 3 October, 2024.
See more about this book.
You may also be interested in International trade in the early Middle Ages, a feature by Hilary Green.
Browse Historia’s Reviews section, where you’ll find books, TV, and films as well as exhibitions.
Images:
- Head of a camel, detail from a sancai ceramic tomb figure, Tang dynasty, before 728: © The Trustees of the British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
- Cut-glass bowl, Iran, Sassanian period: Tokyo National Museum via ColBase: Integrated Collections Database of the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, Japan (public domain)
- Standing Fergana horse, Tang dynasty, early 8th century: Zde for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
- The Franks Casket: © The Trustees of the British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
