noThere aren't many exhibits that turn world history upside down. The British Museum's Fascinating Silk Road does just that, showing how Asia, Europe and North Africa shared cultures over 1000 years ago. Far from developing in isolation, far from a “clash of civilizations”, East and West were once interconnected by a magnificent trade route known as the Silk Road, carrying China's precious discovery, silk, to the rest of the world. If that sounds boring, the British Museum transforms it into a fairy tale of magic and beauty, following the merchants' route through amazing oases, desert palaces, synagogues, mosques and ancient tombs.
We arrive at the first oasis on a clay camel — a nearly three-foot-tall, two-humped Bactrian camel, to be exact, made of painted ceramic, rearing its head and groaning. This magnificent 8th-century figurine was unearthed in a tomb in China's Henan province, and its saddle is tethered with silk cords valuable enough to be sold or traded across the globe.
Join the long-dead rider of this cantankerous, tenacious beast as you journey west to Dunhuang, an oasis city on the eastern edge of the Gobi Desert. Now in China, this Silk Road stop was ruled by the mighty Tibetan Empire between 786 and 848. In 1900, a treasure trove of Buddhist art was discovered in the hidden caves of the Mogao Caves temple complex, transporting you to a new world of wonder.
The silk and linen drapes hanging from this “Library Cave” depict the Buddha in his red robes. You can enter into a meditative silence as you marvel at the tattered fragility of this masterpiece, which is more than 1,200 years old. The delicacy of the Buddha's face and the faces of the saints surrounding him are also impressive.BodhisattvaThe painting is hypnotic, as is a mandala of mysterious geometric shapes in black and white, painted presumably in private ritual, next to a delightful, animated caricature of a traveller – but he's a monk, not a merchant.
Silk wasn't the only thing the Silk Road carried. This exhibition can't tell the whole story of the East-West trade route, from its ancient origins to its decline with the Renaissance. Instead, it focuses on the period between 500 and 1000 AD that European historians called the Dark Ages. One of the many lessons learned here is why that term is no longer used: this was a time when new religions emerged at the same time that old ones spread in new forms. They overlapped, intermingled, and shared artistic ideas.
Once in Afghanistan, I see another Buddha: a clay figure from Bamiyan, headless and handless but wearing a graceful pleated robe. Next to it is a photograph of giant contemporary Buddhist rock carvings destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. Early Islamic writers hailed the Bamiyan Buddhas as wonders of the world.
There's also a stunning display of artwork from Cordoba, Andalusia, where cultures mixed freely – intricate capitals intertwine classical and Islamic decoration alongside Christian crosses – while the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Egypt's Arab capital Fustat (now Old Cairo) houses an archive of Hebrew documents that offer a glimpse into Jewish life along the Silk Road, including a letter to the Jewish community in Kiev for help.
Kiev? Cairo? How many Silk Roads were there, and how many points did they connect? The exhibition doesn't dwell too much on meticulously recreating the actual routes; in this interconnected medieval wonderland, you could travel by sea as well as by land. The evidence of the connections is in the art: early Islamic mosaics in Jordan's desert palaces not only adopt Byzantine designs but also reuse Byzantine mosaics.
The Silk Road's most striking moment comes at the crossroads between the Show and the Old World, where a Eurasian people long forgotten or ignored as barbarian emerges here as an artistic show-stopper. The Sogdians aren't history's best-known civilization. But their treasures in the capital, Samarkand, are a sight to behold. Bright blue-and-red murals depict white horses seemingly ready for the journey; there's a decorative clay ossuary covered with combat nudes and enigmatic deities, another enigmatic deity carved into a charred wooden door. It's a mini-Pompeii that preserves the lost world of a civilization that disappeared by the 12th century.
During the Tang Dynasty, China had to trade with nomads to transport goods across the deserts and steppes of Central Asia. The great statues of the Tang Dynasty represent what the nomads owned and could buy with Chinese silk: horses. But the horse-riding nomads were not just mounted warriors; they made great art. The funeral curtain of a Uighur named Kara Totok is a masterpiece of realism. Against a golden background, he holds a leafy branch and looks out with wise eyes from beneath a triangular crown. Later the Uighurs became Muslims. Today their descendants are a persecuted minority in modern China.
On the other side of the world, other strong elites were thriving. A seated Buddha was found in Sweden that had belonged to a Viking. What did these born killers think of the peaceful atmosphere? Meanwhile, at Sutton Hoo, a Saxon king was buried in a ship, which had a gold buckle with a red garnet from Rajasthan.
So even England was connected to the global network in Anglo-Saxon times. This island was never an isolated one. As a child, I explored Offa's Causeway, an earthwork built by the King of Mercia to keep out the Welsh. This King Offa minted one of the final wonders of the exhibition, a gold coin painstakingly crafted by artisans to imitate the Islamic dinar. They copied the Islamic Declaration of Faith on the back. After all, what are borders?
