Silk Road: News, Events, Articles

The word-combination "Great Silk Road" sounds like a poetic metaphor and at the same time it is a term that very clearly and fully denotes the physical and cultural character of a global historic and cultural phenomenon. How important it is to comprehend the true meaning of a discovery and provide it with proper definition! In science they say that new terms and notions should not be instituted without actual need. Christopher Columbus failed to realize the significance of his discovery and so the whole continent was called America, not Columbia. As a rule, there should be a social need for a term to appear. For example, Karel Chapek invented the word "robot" just for a single use in one of his plays; yet now it is an international term that is widely used in science and technology.

For a long time the transcontinental road between Europe and Asia, the longest in the world history, stretching in its best times from the ancient Rome to the ancient Japanese capital Nari, was practically nameless. Only some sections of the Road had names: Lapis Lazuli Road, Nephritic Road, and Cornelian Road. Those were the roads leading from the deposits of the precious and semi-precious stones in Badakhshan, Yarkend and Sogdiana to North China, West Asia and Egypt.

The term "Great Silk Road" was coined by Ferdinand Richthofen, the famous German geographer, geologist and explorer. Ferdinand von Richthofen was born in 1833 in a rich noble family in the small town of Karlsruhe, Silesia. He got his university education in Breslau and Berlin, where the lectures on Geography were delivered by famous explorer and naturalist Alexander Humboldt. While he was still a young man, F. Richthofen successfully carried out geological site explorations in Tirol and Transylvania and proved himself a serious scholar. In 1859, as a geologist he accompanied a Prussian diplomatic mission in their long travel to Asia. He visited Ceylon, Japan, Philippines, Java and India. Not only was he charmed by the exotic environment of these countries but he was also impressed by the visible traces of their ancient civilizations. He then developed a dream to make a trip to China and to thoroughly explore this country, so mysterious to Europeans.

From 1868 to 1872 he went on seven expeditions to almost all parts of China. His investigations covered not only the matters of physical geography, geology and geomorphology, but also various aspects of anthropogeography. On returning home, he devoted himself to processing the huge scientific data he had gathered in China. He pursued his research work as a professor of Bonn University, Leipzig University and, later, Berlin University – till his death in 1905.

F. Richthofen's life-work was the comprehensive treatise "China" in 5 volumes, which included an atlas with orographical and geological maps (Richthofen F. China. Ergebnisse eigener Reis en und darauf gegrundeter studiuen. Bd 1-4. – Berlin, 1877– 1883).

In this treatise, rich in reviews on the history of China and other Asian countries, the scientist, being guided by hydrographical data, defined the geographical name "Central Asia"

In volume I, in the part dealing with the historical geography of China, in the chapter titled "Trade Routes in Tarim Basin in the 1st – 2nd centuries" F. Richthofen for the first time introduced the term "Silk Road" ("Seidenstrassen"). He assigned this term to the system of roads that connected different parts of the vast Eurasian continent.

Before Ferdinand Richthofen the term "Silk Road" or "Great Silk Road" had hardly ever been used in ancient literature or scholarly works of the previous centuries. But in the 20th century, thanks to the unique research work by Ferdinand von Richthofen, this term first became a constant visitor on the pages of scientific publications and then was called for by international community. Today "The Great Silk Road" is a global historical brand, used in both commercial and political contexts.

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