Empires of ancient Eurasia : the first Silk Roads era, 100 BCE - 250 CE / Craig Benjamin.

Empires of ancient Eurasia : the first Silk Roads era, 100 BCE - 250 CE / Craig Benjamin.

9781107114968 (hardcover)
1107114969 (hardcover)
9781107535435 (paperback)
1107535433 (paperback)
9781108635400 (electronic book)

Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2018.

©2018

English

xi, 304 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.

D22 .B46 2018

950/.1

The Silk Roads are the symbol of the interconnectedness of ancient Eurasian civilizations. Using challenging land and maritime routes, merchants and adventurers, diplomats and missionaries, sailors and soldiers, and camels, horses and ships carried their commodities, ideas, languages and pathogens enormous distances across Eurasia. The result was an underlying unity that traveled the length of the routes, and which is preserved to this day, expressed common technologies, artistic styles, cultures and religions, even disease and immunity patterns. In words and images, Craig Benjamin explores the processes that allowed for the comingling of so many goods, ideas and diseases around a geographical hub deep in central Eurasia. He argues that the first Silk Roads Era was the catalyst for an extraordinary increase in the complexity of human relationships and collective learning, a complexity that helped driver our species inexorably along a path towards modernity--back cover.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 284-297) and index.

New approaches to Asian history ; 16.

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