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An amateur historian's favorite books about the Silk Road

18 points by bwb

by johngossman

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Good list. It does not include "Silk Roads" by Frankopan, which I agree with. That's a good read but much more a history of world trade (hence the plural) and strangely western-centric. I saw strangely because in the introduction Frankopan says he wanted to write a history from the point of view on central Asia, but its not that at all. Dalyrymple's "Golden Road" succeeds at Frankopan's objective and I found it much better in general. I don't want to sound too negative on "Silk Roads" but I think the title is subtly misleading if you want to learn about the trade general referred to as the Silk Road.

by qart

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The author of the first book listed there explains there was no ancient Silk Road. This concept was dreamt up in 1877.
https://youtube.com/shorts/Ki4UQ20tWQk

by bwb

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Great list by an absolute expert on the subject :)
I'm hoping to do the Silk Route by bike in the next couple of years. TAD Global Cycling puts together yearly runs, and it looks amazing: https://tdaglobalcycling.com/silk-route

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by paganel

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About this book: "Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders", and especially about this source of information:
> Shlomo Goitein used the documents that were serendipitously discovered in the geniza of the Cairo synagogue
I'm still waiting for a proper "inclusion" of their contents in the "main" historical discourse, it's a pity that there aren't much many historians going through them and using their contents. From the dedicated wiki page [1]:
> The Cairo Geniza, alternatively spelled the Cairo Genizah, is a collection of some 400,000[1] Jewish manuscript fragments and Fatimid administrative documents that were kept in the genizah or storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat or Old Cairo, Egypt. (...) comprise the largest and most diverse collection of medieval manuscripts in the world.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_Geniza