The Silk Roads: blood and gold

"No man is an island." Globalism, the interconnectedness of distant cultures, is not as modern a concept as it sounds. For millennia humans have been sharing treasures, ideas, food - and other humans, which is far less spoken of when reminiscing about the romantic past. 

First part of the exhibition: China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia

We cannot forget that the brutalism of the ancient world always accompanied its greatest beauties. That is one of the threads woven into the story of Silk Roads, the new exhibition at the British Museum.

Filigree gold necklace with gogok or comma-shaped jade pendant,
Noseo-dong no. 215 tomb, Gyeongju, early 500s.

From the museum website: "Rather than a single trade route from East to West, the Silk Roads were made up of overlapping networks linking communities across Asia, Africa and Europe, from East Asia to Britain, and from Scandinavia to Madagascar. This major exhibition unravels how the journeys of people, objects and ideas that formed the Silk Roads shaped cultures and histories."

Dagger and scabbard from Gyerim-ro 
tomb no. 14, Gyeongju, late 400s to early 500s.

The gates between East and West, and the trade routes everywhere in between, have been open for much longer than most people assumed, and the whole history of what we think of as "the Silk Roads" would take not one but several exhibitions. 

Byzantine necklace and earrings from the time of Justinian,
around 500-600.

So for this exhibition, the curators and partners focused on the period of AD 500 to 1000, when exploration, production and especially the religions that would divide as well as unite continents were all on the rise.

Tang ceramic tomb figure of dark-skinned Southeast Asian,
referred to as one of "the enslaved people of Kunlun", 618-750.

wonder | wander | women were so blown away by this exhibition that there was no way we could cover it all in one post. So here is the first of our Silk Roads at the British Museum series, about the most precious treasures of the ancient world and the human cost that came with them.

Islamic silver traded by Viking sailors, 800-1100 AD.

Vikings had a close relationship with Islamic traders and frequently traded the people they captured on raids for Islamic silver: coins, jewellery and raw pieces. 

Neck restraint, found in Uppland, Sweden, late 800s-900s,
and silver neck ring, found in Estonia, late 900s.

This slave collar, worn by one of the prisoners sold to one of the labour-hungry Middle Eastern empires of the time, has a hauntingly similar shape to the neck ring cast of the same silver paid for human lives. This booming trade is said to be where the word "slave" itself originated.

Romano-Byzantine ornaments found at Lagucci Farm,
San Marino, c. 450-550.

The word "slave" is from the Byzantine Greek word sklabos, itself thought to derive from the Slovenes, a Slavic tribe. The glittering Byzantine empire was one of the greatest "customers" of prisoners captured from all over the world and sold to toil to death in a foreign land.

Garnet cloisonne shoulder clasps and sword-scabbard button,
likely of Byzantine origin, found at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, England, early 600s.

We hope that the wonder of this exhibition and the surprises that it uncovered will give us all food for thought in these new days of unprecedented global connections.