The Pros And Cons Of The Silk Road

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Silk Road, a network of trade routes where goods such as ivory, silver, iron, wine, and yes, silk were exchanged across the ancient world, from China to the West. Along with all these consumer goods, things like disease and ideas made the trip as well. It was an overland route where merchants carried goods for trade, but it was really two routes: one that connected the eastern Mediterranean to central Asia and one that went from central Asia to China. Further complicating things, the Silk Road involved sea routes: Many goods reached Rome via the Mediterranean, and goods from central Asia found their way across the pacific to Japan and even Java. So we shouldn’t think of the Silk Road as a road but rather as a network of trade routes. But just as now, the goods traveled more than the people who traded them. Very few traders traversed the entire Silk Road instead, they’d move back and forth between towns, selling to traders who’d take the goods further toward their destination, with everybody marking up prices along the way. So what’d they trade? Well silk, for starters. For millennia, silk was only produced in China. It is spun from the cocoons of mulberry tree-eating worms and the process of silk making as well as the techniques for raising the…show more content…
It also lends itself fairly well to herding, and since nomads are definitionally good at moving around, they’re also good at moving stuff from point A to Point B, which makes them good traders. Plus all their travel made them more resistant to diseases. Although Silk Road trading began more than a century before the birth of Jesus. It really took off in the second and third centuries CE, and the kushan Empire became a huge hub for that Silk Road trade. By then, nomads were being eclipsed by professional merchants who travelled the silk roads, often making huge profits, but those cities had been founded by nomadic people became hugely
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