Social Sciences, asked by preetambhat, 1 year ago

what kind of cultural exchange were made through silk route


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Answers

Answered by sinunajla
4

The importance of the Silk Road is probably exaggerated. I mean, sure, it’s got the best name of any trade route ever, but it didn’t have that until centuries after it had ceased to exist as a functional trade route.

At the time, it was a significant source of cavalry horses for the Chinese, which is surely something of some importance, but it’s not clear to me what the specific impact was, nor whether or not the Chinese empire would have been able to find adequate alternative sources had trade routes through the Taklamakan into Ferghana and Bactria not worked out (though the development of the “tea horse road” suggests that possibility). Nevertheless, the volume of goods to travel that route was far less than any sea routes one might name.

To the extent it was important, I think it was in keeping a bare minimum of contact open across the Old World. Very few people made the trip along the entire length of the silk route, but information and goods trickled across the huge land mass. Technologies like glass, paper, and silk got around, enriching the societies they entered. And the expensive luxury goods which traveled the silk routes created and kept alive an idea of the Far East which created conditions for Europe’s colonial age. Without the lure of spices, silks, porcelain, dyes, medicines, and so on, there would have been no trade to enrich the cities if Italy during the Renaissance, and no reason for the Portuguese to explore sea routes around Africa to find India or for the Spanish crown to commission similar expeditions to the west, inadvertently finding the New World in the process. The Silk Road, then, wasn’t terribly important for the specific goods it carried so much as the idea of those goods and the wealth they implied. 5 mark answer

The Silk Road or Silk Route was an ancient network of trade routes that were for centuries central to cultural interaction originally through regions of Eurasia connecting the East and West and stretching from the Korean peninsula and Japan to the Mediterranean Sea.1 mark

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