Life Along the Ancient Silk Road

Mt. Holyoke College

Led by Professor Stephen Jones

With an Optional extension to Uzbekistan

June 22 - July 09, 2008

Main Program Land Cost: $5,595.00

This trip took place in June/July 2008. Check our trip listings or emailus at travel@siemerhand.com for information on possible future dates.

Study Leader - Stephen Jones

Stephen F. Jones has been a member of Mount Holyoke’s faculty for nearly 20 years, teaching courses on post-Soviet Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Georgia. He is widely published and has appeared repeatedly on the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, the BBC World Service and National Public Radio. In addition, Dr. Jones ...more

Summary

The Silk Road was a braided array of trade routes that for centuries was the primary link between Western and Eastern cultures.

Periodically geography funneled the various paths of the Silk Road through fertile oases. At these strategic points magnificent city-states evolved into some of the most sophisticated and cosmopolitan cultural centers. They were centers of learning and places where a dozen languages would be heard in the marketplaces.

Bukhara, Samarkand, Kashgar, Turpan and other city-states flourished as the cities taxed the lucrative caravans that passed through their hands. But trade was not all the Silk Road carried; ideas, religions, philosophies and technologies also traveled the 5,000 mile route and were extremely significant to the development of the modern world. Architecture, and a myriad of religions including Buddhism and Islam, traveled east and west long before Marco Polo’s historic 13th-century journey as one of the first Europeans to traverse the entire Silk Road.

European nations greatly benefited from superior technologies China had developed. Ironically, Europe’s exploitation of Chinese innovation – gunpowder changing the balance of power, the astrolabe, compass, map-making skills and the tiller and rudder mechanism leading to the development of maritime trade – led to the decline of the Silk Road’s importance.