Between Rome and China: History, Religions and Material Culture of the Silk Road

by Samuel Nc Lieu, Gunner Mikkelsen (Editor)

The eight studies in this volume by established and emerging scholars range geographically and chronologically from the Greek Kingdom of Bactria of the 2nd century BCE to the Uighur Kingdoms of Karabalgasun in Mongolia and Qoco in Xinjiang of the 8th-9th centuries CE. It contains a key study on sericulture as well on the conduct of the trade in silk between China and the Roman Near East using archaeological as well as literary evidence. Other topics covered include Sogdian religious art, the role of Manichaeism as a Silk Road religion par excellence, the enigmatic names for the Roman Empire in Chinese sources and a multi-lingual gazetteer of place- and ethnic names in Pre-Islamic Central Asia which will be an essential reference tool for researchers. The volume also contains an author and title index to all the Silk Road Studies volumes published up to 2014. The broad ranging theme covered by this volume should appeal to a wider public fascinated by the history of the Silk Road and wishing to be informed of the latest state of research. Because of the centrality of the topics covered by this study, the volume could serve as a basic reading text for university courses on the history of the Silk Road.

300 pages, Paperback

Published June 2, 2016

Reviews

[Fred Kohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned of this book due to the fact that one of the articles therein was referenced in a book I was reading about Manichaeism. As it turned out, most of the articles were of little interest to me, since my main interest is religion. Nonetheless, as is my habit, I read them all. Most of the articles at least had some reference to the religions of the East, which added to my knowledge of religion. There was a lot of material on eastern geography which was quite obscure to me and sent me scurrying to the internet to find out where Turkistan and Sogdia were. Whatever did we do before the internet?

The article "Manichaean Architecture and the Eastern Uighur Khaganate" was worth the price of admission. This was the article I got the book for. It was the longest article in the book, occupying more than 70 of the book's 256 pages of text. I certainly found it the most interesting of all the articles in the book. There were a lot of archaeological descriptions that I found hard to follow; not because they were poorly written but because I’ve always had problems visualizing verbal descriptions of space, as my wife can abundantly attest to. Fortunately these descriptions were often accompanied by photographs.

This book is clearly not aimed at casual readers such as myself. For example, in the aforementioned article, it said, "As is well known, Manichaeism was packaged in China in thoroughly Sinicized, Buddhist terms." Well known? Not to me! At any rate I am happy to have read this book and to have learned a couple of things that are well known to scholars.