There’s something irresistibly romantic about the Silk Roads. The very name conjures up images of caravans of camels, piled high with baggage, wending their way across desert and steppes. It makes you want to pack your bags and set off immediately.
The Silk Roads exhibition at the British Museum aims to recreate some of that allure. Mountains soar and deserts dotted with oases ripple on screens around the walls. The hall is bedecked with evocative place names, some familiar – Dunhuang, Bukhara, Samarkand – some less so. Birka, for a start, was new to me. (It’s a Viking city in Sweden.)
The curators have cast their net wide. The exhibition is all about multi-culturalism, not the Silk Road but the Silk Roads, a network of arteries criss-crossing the Eurasian continent from East to West and back again and stretching into Africa. […]
From Historia Magazine, first published on 29 November 2024.