Silk, Slaves, and Stupas: Material Culture of the Silk Road

Following her bestselling Life Along the Silk Road, Susan Whitfield widens her exploration of the great cultural highway with a new captivating portrait focusing on material things. Silk, Slaves, and Stupas tells the stories of ten very different objects, considering their interaction with the peoples and cultures of the Silk Road—those who made them, carried them, received them, used them, sold them, worshipped them, and, in more recent times, bought them, conserved them, and curated them. From a delicate pair of earrings from a steppe tomb to a massive stupa deep in Central Asia, a hoard of Kushan coins stored in an Ethiopian monastery to a Hellenistic glass bowl from a southern Chinese tomb, and a fragment of Byzantine silk wrapping the bones of a French saint to a Bactrian ewer depicting episodes from the Trojan War, these objects show us something of the cultural diversity and interaction along these trading routes of Afro-Eurasia.
 
Exploring the labor, tools, materials, and rituals behind these various objects, Whitfield infuses her narrative with delightful details as the objects journey through time, space, and meaning. Silk, Slaves, and Stupas is a lively, visual, and tangible way to understand the Silk Road and the cultural, economic, and technical changes of the late antique and medieval worlds.   
 

• Life along the Silk Road: Second Edition
• The Silk Road: A New History with Documents
• Empires of Ancient Eurasia: The First Silk Roads Era, 100 BCE - 250 CE (New Approaches to Asian History)
• The Silk Road in World History (New Oxford World History)
• Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination
• The Silk Roads: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford Series in History and Culture)
• The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Möngke, 1253–1255 (Hackett Classics)
• The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
• The Rise and Fall of Khoqand, 1709-1876: Central Asia in the Global Age (Central Eurasia in Context)
• The Silk Roads: A New History of the World