Empires of Ancient Eurasia: The First Silk Roads Era, 100 Bce - 250 CE (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781107114968)

The Silk Roads are the symbol of the interconnectedness of ancient Eurasian civilizations. Using challenging land and maritime routes, merchants and adventurers, diplomats and missionaries, sailors and soldiers, and camels, horses and ships, carried their commodities, ideas, languages and pathogens enormous distances across Eurasia. The result was an underlying unity that traveled the length of the routes, and which is preserved to this day, expressed in common technologies, artistic styles, cultures and religions, and even disease and immunity patterns. In words and images, Craig Benjamin explores the processes that allowed for the comingling of so many goods, ideas, and diseases around a geographical hub deep in central Eurasia. He argues that the first Silk Roads era was the catalyst for an extraordinary increase in the complexity of human relationships and collective learning, a complexity that helped drive our species inexorably along a path towards modernity.

Author: Craig Benjamin
ISBN-10: 1107114969
ISBN-13: 9781107114968
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 05/30/2018
Pages: 316
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.24lbs
Size: 9.23h x 6.02w x 0.81d