The art of crossing continents – ‘Silk Roads’ at the British Museum, reviewed

From the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

The ‘Silk Road’ is notoriously tricky to define. Since its invention in the 19th century, the term has been suggestive of laden camels plodding across the desert from China through Asia to Europe. In recent years, though, this romantic vision has been overtaken by a more radical idea popularised by the historian Peter Frankopan: the Silk Road – or Roads, as both he and the new British Museum exhibition more properly have it – as a way to move the centre of world history from west to east. At the same time, China has developed its (definitively singular) ‘Belt and Road’ initiative to give a softening historical gloss to its own economic progress. Another issue is the sheer geographical and temporal range of the Silk Roads: this show goes from China through Korea, modern Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Middle East, Europe, Spain and eventually Britain, between 500 and 1000 AD. Not to mention the salient fact that the trade routes were as much about spices and slaves as silk, and more often went by sea rather than road.

Glass drinking horn (550–600), Italy. British Museum, London. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum

The curators try to make this apparent confusion a virtue by giving us an impressive – and sometimes overwhelming – range of objects that purposefully do not fit into neat categories. The exhibition opens with a small seated Buddha made in the sixth or seventh century in what is now the Swat Valley in Pakistan, but which somehow ended up on the Swedish island of Helgö. How did it get there? Did the people who bought it understand its spiritual significance – or was it more like a modern suburban garden ornament? We can’t know for sure in this case, but the show tries to piece together the more general question of cultural overlaps and exchanges, turning the Silk Roads into a metaphor of interlaced identities and fuzzy boundaries that resists nationalistic gatekeeping.

It is easier to see the connections when the countries are geographically closer. Some of the earliest Buddhist sculptures in Japan were imported from Korea – one suggested example is a gilt bronze bodhisattva with a hand raised in respectful greeting – as well as Tang China. In its turn, the Korean Silla kingdom absorbed Chinese funerary customs such as burying ceramic figures with the deceased: witness the figure of a civil official from the Yonggang-dong Tomb sporting a bushy beard and Tang robes, fashions that may have been picked up after a diplomatic mission to China by the future King Muyeol.

Figure of a civil official (8th century), excavated from the Yonggang-dong Tomb, Gyeongju, Korea. Gyeongju National Museum

It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that cultures that trade with or indeed invade other lands will adopt whatever they see as useful or attractive. But fantasies of imagined cultural purity are hard to shift and, once activated, can be dangerous. The exhibition pointedly examines current geopolitical hotspots. Take the gravely beautiful banner from the 10th or 11th century showing a high-ranking Uyghur man called Kara Totok. Elegantly bearded and holding a tall flower stalk, he could have been a royal minister or Manichaean priest – the Uyghurs at that point had not yet converted to Islam.

The rise of the Islamic empire in the seventh century is a huge part of the story, but the emphasis here is not on how Islam changed the world so much as how the world changed Islam. One piquant example is a sample of the patterned floor from Qusayr ‘Amra, a unique Umayyad-era bathhouse which features inscriptions in Arabic and Greek, portraits of nude women and zodiac symbols. The catalogue also shows a picture of the main cardo (thoroughfare) of the city of Anjar, east Lebanon, an astonishing mash-up of Roman and Muslim architecture currently under severe threat from Israeli bombing.

Early Muslim coins also drew on Byzantine and Sasanian models – including the famous Standing Caliph gold coin probably minted in Damascus, which shows a bearded figure with a sword, usually identified as ‘Abd al-Malik, the caliph who built the Dome of the Rock. Though it is a minority view, some scholars such as Robert Hoyland think that this is actually a portrait of the Prophet Muhammad in imitation of Byzantine coins that feature a bearded Jesus. (It was minted in 695, so the person who designed it could plausibly have met people who had personally known the Prophet.) Similarly, it is striking to see in both the Sasanian and Aksumite coins on display the motif of the crescent moon and star later adopted by Muslims.

Once the Islamic empires spread, their coins accrued symbolic power. King Offa of Mercia had minted an imitation ‘Abbasid dinar with the declaration of faith written in (admittedly mistaken) Arabic alongside the words OFFA REX. Though less an example of inter-cultural appreciation than one of economic pragmatism – think of it like a developing country pegging its currency to the dollar – it is undeniably beguiling in its sheer oddity.

The historian William Dalrymple has complained that India is left out of the show but it’s hard to see how it could have been squeezed in. Sensory and historical overload makes these Silk Roads tough to navigate. Tantalising sections on Andalusia or the Sogdians deserve to be expanded into exhibitions of their own. By the end it’s hard not to feel that the curators have modelled themselves on the excavators of the Belitung shipwreck, who in 1998 unearthed 60,000 Chinese ceramics and other goods from the coast of Indonesia, dragging out treasure after treasure to cram the exhibition space.

But what this show lacks in clarity and clean lines it makes up for in ambition and scope: nearly everyone visiting will find something intriguingly unfamiliar and surprising. And its messiness is very much the point: a rebuke to those who see history as a battle between bounded civilisations rather than the inconsistent and improvised reality that these beautiful objects evoke.

‘Silk Roads’ is at the British Museum, London, until 23 February 2025.

From the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.