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.

Report

"No one knows more about the material culture of the Silk Road than Susan Whitfield. With this book it's now clear that no one tells the story of the early world through objects better than she does. Whitfield carries her readers to the far corners of the earth through her deep and vast research on Silk Road artifacts." - Xinru Liu, author of The Silk Road in World History

Product details

• Authors: Susan Whitfield, Whitfield Susan
• Publisher: University Of California Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 13.03.2018
• EAN: 9780520281783
• ISBN: 978-0-520-28178-3
• No. of pages: 376
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Asia, HISTORY / Europe / General, HISTORY / Asia / General, HISTORY / World, Social & cultural history, Material Culture, Social and cultural history, Asian History