HIST 330 Silk Road and its Travelers
"Silk Road" is a modern name given to a vastly important commercial and cultural transmission route across mountains and desert from Byzantiumor Baghdad to Imperial China. This course studies, via accounts of extraordinary travelers, the expanding networks of cultural communication and commercial exchange within Afro-EurasianEcumene (area of settled civilization and contacts) in the period from ca. 200 B.C.E. to 1500 C. E. along this Silk Road as well as other land and maritime routes lining Africa anEurasia. We will examine these accounts sources of knowledge both of the worlds the travelers came from and the regions where they traveled. This analysis of travelers' texts wil lbe supplemented by visual, and modern musical texts that confirm the Silk Road's role as the cultural transmission system linking China and Europe and all regions in-between.