Marked Chang’an (Xi’an)

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The Silk Roads

Overland routes linked China, Central Asia, Iran, India and the Mediterranean for more than 1,500 years. Silk, horses and paper travelled along them, and so did Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and plague.

Place
Chang’an (Xi’an) · Dunhuang · Samarkand · Merv · AntiochAsia, The Middle East, Europe
Laid out as
A routeA road, a sea lane or a trade network, followed stop by stop.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. Chang’an (Xi’an)
  2. Dunhuang
  3. Samarkand
  4. Merv
  5. Antioch
  1. IZhang Qian goes west
  2. IIChang’an to Samarkand
  3. IIIMerchants of Sogdiana
  4. IVFaiths on the road
  5. VDunhuang and its library cave
  6. VIPlague on the road

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Zhang Qian
  • Xuanzang
  • Marco Polo
  • Aurel Stein

Objects

  • The Diamond Sutra from Dunhuang
  • Sogdian letters
  • Silk fragments

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

130 BC to 1450. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?