Critique: evaluating ‘route inertia’

2.5.1 ‘Historical routes’ as models for earlier ancient route systems Combining the information from the above sources for eastern Anatolia (Figure 2.17) and western Central Asia (Figure 2.18) onto two maps starkly illustrates the limits of this summary of routes, in particular its differential coverage: the level of detail on the map of western Central Asia is considerably less than that of eastern Anatolia. No doubt further research would produce more comprehensive results, but it is tempting to see these differences as a fair indication of the relative development of and extent of knowledge about historical geography more generally in each region. The overlay of all the 3rd and 2nd millennium archaeological sites in the database created in the course of researching this book also reveals the limitations of the archaeological research in the earlier period.

There are some areas (such the Upper Euphrates in Turkey or the Kopet Dag piedmont in Turkmenistan) whose high density of sites may be as much to do with the intensity of archaeological investigation as with the intensity of ancient

settlement; conversely there are numerous blank areas with what turned out to be important corridors in later periods. The chief challenge then of any large-scale synthesis such as this is taking account of this uneven knowledge in our analysis.

The above review has emphasized the fact that we cannot simply project the routes of later periods backward and assume that they functioned identically in the past. Far from straightforward continuity, these various sources of information – although incomplete – hint at changing route hierarchies and densities of travel.

Though the possibility of travelling along certain corridors in the landscape was available topographically throughout this time, different cultural and political boundaries and the evolution of new social imperatives and economic motivations framed and constrained movement within those landscapes. The development (or disappearance) of new transportation technologies (including road-building, bridges, the wheel, the horse, the donkey, the camel) had considerable effects on both the types of paths selected and on the time taken to travel certain distances, and simultaneously and consequently on the ‘reach’ of economic systems. The smaller ‘reach’ of economic (and political) systems is what Gil Stein’s ‘distance-parity’ model was designed to address (Stein 1999). The review has also highlighted the fact that synthetic knowledge of the routes of most historical periods is – in any case – actually rather limited, particularly with regards to the intensity of travel along certain routes. With the exception, perhaps, of Old Assyrian trading accounts, much greater attention has been focussed on individual travellers and one-off itineraries than on the repetitive movements made by unnamed traders, migrants and other ‘everyday travellers’. Besides the analysis of roads, studies of material culture that might give clues about these everyday encounters and interaction are often lacking. Additionally, the manner in which the reconstruction of ancient route systems has normally been undertaken is problematic and circular:

reconstructions must be based on the reconstructions of routes from later periods.

For example, reconstructions of the route of the ‘Persian Royal Road’ through Anatolia, have relied to a large extent on projecting the knowledge of Roman roads backwards. This is an understandable and perhaps necessary approach with some value, but it should be remembered that whilst there is certainly a connection – earlier routes begat later routes through their pre-existence (hence

‘inertia’) – independent evidence is required to confirm this ancestry. Perhaps more serious is the fact that routes have often been treated uncritically, and the concept assumed to be unproblematic. ‘Roads’, ‘tracks’, ‘paths’, ‘itineraries’ and

‘routes’ have sometimes been treated synonymously when it may be better to make distinctions. The result is that routes are almost always inevitably represented visually as emulated modern road maps (‘pseudo-road-maps’), which frame our understanding of routes in general. This may be appropriate for some periods, such as the Roman era when roads presumably functioned in a similar way to modern ones – but not for many others in which pathways grew more organically.

2.5.2 Routes in the archaeological imagination

Many of the earliest archaeologists working in the Near East were concerned with routes, including W. Ramsay (1890) and Aurel Stein (1929). The origin of this interest may, in part, be related to the Victorian conception of landscape that had a strong military or colonial components. Essential to the colonial enterprise was detailed understanding of mountain passes, water sources, river

Figure 2.17. Combination of all reconstructed routes and itineraries in eastern Anatolia (blue lines). Black dots represent archaeological sites in database (see Appendix B) dating to 3000-1500BC.

Figure 2.18. Combination of all reconstructed routes and itineraries in western Central Asia (blue lines).

Black dots represent archaeological sites in database (see Appendix B) dating to 3000-1500BC.

0 250 500 km

Figure 2.19. The evolution of route systems in eastern Anatolia (according to Marro 2004): (a) Old Assyrian.

(b) Urartu and Neo-Assyrian. (c) Hellenistic. (d) Medieval. (e) Early Modern.

a

c

b

d

e

valleys and distances in terms of marching days (Sprenger 1864), particularly as part of the ‘Great Game’ across the Pamirs (see, for example, Meyer and Brysac 1999; Hopkirk 1992). This is starkly illustrated in the British Naval Intelligence reports mentioned earlier in this chapter. The ‘road’ or route also had romantic connotations – illustrated perhaps by Kipling’s sublime description of the Great Trunk Road of India or the passes of the Pamirs in Kim – that fed this desire to consume accounts of travels and routes. These same approaches to mapping also played out in the cultural sphere as an interest in reconstructing the route of Alexander’s marches into Iran and Central Asia, and identifying the likely passes by which migrant tribes (such as the ‘Indo-Europeans’) had supposedly entered new regions. The retreat from these forms of historical geography accompanied the retreat of European military and intellectual colonialism. In Anglo-American archaeology, an interest in routes was lost as part of the paradigmatic shift from the 1960s onward to systemic or processual approaches and away from historicism (already mentioned in Chapter 1), in which emphasis was placed instead on (1) indigenous or local developments over interaction and movement; and (2) on generalized systematic processes and patterns over particular historical events. But routes have aspects of both events and processes: the accumulation of particular trips taken repeatedly is a process that constructs what we identify as a route. It is also in the context of the widespread adoption of air travel by archaeologists that the question of ‘routes’ and the ‘tyranny of distance’ has become a less obvious subject of research. It is only in a few exceptional accounts lying outside of dominant theoretical discourses, that routes have remained or re-emerged as a topic for discussion: for example, in Tuba Ökse’s examination of the topography and routes between the Kızılırmak and Euphrates rivers (Ökse 2005), Catherine Marro’s (Marro 2004) attempt to summarize the ‘evolution’ of route systems across Eastern Anatolia through different periods (her sequence redrawn here as Figure 2.19), Michael C. Astour’s (Astour 2000) attempt to look at wider Near Eastern ‘road connections’ through time, or, on an even larger scale, Andrew Sherratt’s graphic reconstructions of expanding route networks across Eurasia (A.

Sherratt 2004). In many cases, it is difficult, however, to perceive exactly how (i.e.

on what specific quantitative or qualitative evidential basis) each author came to the particular characterizations of routes (or roads) illustrated – the reader must simply decide whether to trust the author’s judgement.

2.5.3 Mythical routes? The ‘Silk Road’ as literary trope

One ‘historical route’ was intentionally left out of the above analysis. The ‘Silk Road’ (or ‘Silk Routes’) is certainly the most famous of trade routes in popular culture – and provided the original inspiration for this book. Closer examination of the term, its constituent routes and the sources of information about its nature, soon leads to confusion and uncertainty, however. By common definition, it is the road, or rather set of land routes, which connected the western and eastern ends of Eurasia across Central Asia from the Han period in China (the last centuries of the 1st millennium BC), until sometime after AD 1500-1600 when sea routes across the Indian Ocean started to replace these land routes. The ‘high point’ of the Silk Road in China is considered to be the Tang era (AD 618-907) when Chinese control over the northwest reached its furthest extent and we have considerable written evidence of commercial and cultural exchange across the Tarim basin

(what the Chinese today call Xinjiang, the ‘new territories’) into Central Asia and beyond into Persia and the Near East. The term ‘Silk Road’ itself of course references only one of the many valuable commodities to have travelled along these trade routes (see e.g. Schafer 1963). The Silk Road is often described in association with Chinese history, such that one would be forgiven for thinking that the whole thing was a purely Chinese enterprise. The reason for this is probably the origin of the phrase. Von Richtenhof ’s coinage of the term and his student Sven Hedin’s popularization were both performed in the context of research into western China (Waugh 2007). However, there were many other groups involved in Central Asia with equal or greater importance: particularly local peoples and polities of the Tarim basin, Sogdia and Bactria who had connections in all compass directions, which the written material uncovered at Dunhuang shows us in vivid detail (see, for example, the selections translated in Whitfield 2001). It should further be remembered that, at least by the Tang period, there was no Chinese monopoly on the manufacture of silk: there were local productions of silk in Sogdia and even Byzantium. Again, by common definition, the Silk Road(s) is/are said to have passed through both our special regions of interest, western Central Asia and eastern Anatolia. Western Central Asia in particular is understood as a

‘pivotal’ region for this entity, taking in the major cities of Afrasiab, Balkh and Merv, for example. The area of Transcaucasia and eastern Anatolia (especially the cities of Erzurum, Baku, Djulfa, Tebriz) is sometimes represented as an optional alternative to the main ‘trunk’ of the Silk Road (which is seen as passing south through Iran to Baghdad before climbing up the Euphrates to Anatolia, or via Aleppo and Antioch to the Mediterranean).

The way in which the term ‘Silk Road’ has evolved is extremely problematic, however. First, as many researchers have stressed and the eastern Anatolian example reminds us, there was no one single road or route involved in the east-west trade of the constituent periods. Many different routes were in use contemporaneously.

Further, if one compares the very many representations of the ‘Silk Roads’ in map form, it is clear that there is little agreement or direct knowledge on the location of the constituent routes. Moreover, there was certainly no contemporary idea of ‘the Silk Road’ or even a set of ‘Silk Roads’ for which we could identify the

‘official’ version from historical texts or archaeological data. What there is instead is a modern attempt to create a fixed identity for a very vague idea about trade across Eurasia in the pre-modern age. In this manner, the term has become useful to academics and other cultural creators alike, since it serves as a shorthand for certain themes (trade, interaction, hybridity, ancient history, ‘lost cities’), certain objects or architectures (silk, caravanserais), certain regions or places (China, East-West, Central Asia, the Middle East) and certain times (particularly Tang and Islamic periods). It is sometimes used as a shorthand or lazy way to add time-depth and allusions to more information than we really have. The term’s semantic slipperiness has also allowed it to be co-opted by states, NGOs and companies keen to draw on the aura of these same values: in UNESCO World Heritage applications, in the marketing blurb of energy companies, or simply in tourist brochures. This widespread usage generates a counter-flow desire to ‘fix’

the authentic routes especially on the UNESCO project – a project that unless treated carefully may be doomed to anachronism and false historicity, if it is not properly recognized that the concept is a modern invention.

All of this shows the ‘Silk Road(s)’ to be a modern myth: a powerful story that we have told ourselves and which can be used for legitimation of various moral and political messages inside and outside of academia (Ball 1998). This lack of analytical value means that whilst we may use the term ‘silk routes’ loosely to encapsulate the range of east-west routes in use during the 1st and 2nd millennia AD, we should always acknowledge this vagueness and instead try to use more concrete data (specific textual sources, specific classes of archaeological evidence) when we try to compare the route systems of other periods.