The Newsletter 68 Summer 2014

The Silk Road: an early technology highway

Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood

IN RECENT YEARS there have been many books, articles and exhibitions about the so-called Silk Road and how ‘it’ was used to transport goods and ideas, notably silk and Buddhism, from one part of the world to another. Yet, this series of merchant trade routes also had another function. It enabled technology to move from one region to another.