The Tech of Silk Road

Last week I saw a talk by Northwestern professor Nina Wieda on the history of the Silk Road, a network of trading routes across Asia active from the second century BCE until the mid-15th century. I knew of the Silk Road but was surprised by how much it used and fostered various technologies. 

It started with a technology that allowed for traveling long distances with limited access to water, better known as a camel. Travel was slow, it could take nearly two years to get from one end (modern day Turkey) to the other (China). Cities grew along the way for travelers and their protection, and for trading.

The travelers did not just carry silk and other materials for trade, the routes became an information superhighway of a sort. Religions spread including Buddhism, early Christianity and Manichaeism, an old religion that mostly divided the world into good and evil. Artistic style and influences spread as well with motifs like halos and winged figures appearing across widely separated cultures. Traders needed to converse in several languages, and documents could have several translations. 

The roads carried knowledge about technology itself from astronomy, calendars, medical information, geography and mathematical methods in text translated among the many languages. Travelers brought scribes that created a written language for Mongolian among others. Chinese papermaking made its way west reducing the cost of recording and transmitting information. Gunpowder technology also made its way into Europe from the east. 

A confluence of technologies helped hasten the end of the Silk Road. Marco Polo wrote about his travels along the Silk Road at the end of the 13th century but the account spread more widely with the advent of the printing press in the 15th century. The book inspired explorers who used advances in ship building and navigation to find water routes to the East (and Christopher Columbus to try a western route). These water routes would prove a faster cheaper way to ship goods between Europe and East Asia. The technological revolution shrunk or shuttered cities that used to host traders on the Silk Road. On the other hand, wealthy European traders would help fund and usher in the Renaissance. 

The Silk Road harkens to a time where, for the most part, people, goods and information travelled along the same routes at the same speed. Large cargo still moves fastest by ship, people by airplanes and information via wires and satellite nearly instantaneously.

When we think of technological disruption we think of the industrial revolution or even what's happening today, but the Silk Road reminds us that disruption has always been a part of the world's history, for bad and for good.