Word: silke
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Despite vivid accounts of Eastern wonders relayed by traders along the Silk Road, there was always suspicion in the Occidental mind about whether the fabled bounty of the trade link truly existed. It wasn't until Nicolo Polo and his son Marco returned from their second trip along the legendary route laden with the treasures and innovations that Nicolo had claimed to see on previous journeys that Venetians began to believe the tales. Even then, at Marco's deathbed, a priest came to ask whether he would be willing to confess his falsehoods. "I did not tell half of what...
...This ability to demonstrate the Silk Road's influence over the lives of the people who lived along its path is the great achievement of the British Library's exhibition, which runs until September 12 in London. Unlike the countless adventurers the Silk Road has attracted over two millennia, the exhibition is not after earthly treasures or visions of empire but focuses on the trade route's role as a passage for ideas. Though the exhibition, which has been five years in the making, brings together pieces from museums such as the Mus?e Guimet in Paris, the Museum of Indian...
...This debt ranged from knowledge of wine making to polo and Buddhism but was often paid back in kind. China sent silk, paper, porcelain and gunpowder along the Silk Road. In exchange, astrological findings from its western reaches deepened China's knowledge of the heavens. The principal trade routes lay between 30 and 40 degrees latitude, ensuring that Silk Road kingdoms from the Mediterranean to China saw the same stars and could benefit from shared observations. Manuscripts depicting the movements of the Moon and planets found in Arabic and Indian astronomy, which had been shaped by the discoveries of Babylon...
...exhibition is designed to take viewers on a virtual journey along the Silk Road. It begins in the ancient Sogdian capital of Samarkand in present-day Uzbekistan?one of the last of Alexander the Great's conquests before he went south to India?and moves east through the now vanished western kingdoms of Khotan, Kroraina and Miran before ending in China. Over the course of this journey eastward, remarkably well preserved 1,000-year-old manuscripts and icons reveal the growth and evolution of the Silk Road's most illustrious commodity: Buddhism. The merging and morphing of regional beliefs produced...
...Sutra of the 10 Kings, discovered in the Chinese city of Gaochang in Xinjiang province, shows one of the earliest known Chinese depictions of hell and is the exhibit's best example of the evolution of Buddhism along the Silk Road. Composed in the 10th century by a Chinese monk, the sutra illustrates the purgatorial journey of the soul from death to rebirth in one of seven orders of being, ranging from the highest, bodhisattvas (those who have attained enlightenment), to hungry ghosts or, still worse, those who have been banished to hell. The sutra was one of the first...