Sailing the Ancient Trade Routes from Central Asia to Europe and Back Again
In c.286-282 BCE the Seleukid admiral, Patrokles, was charged with exploring the Caspian Sea to ascertain whether it connected with the Oxos River (modern Amudaria).Patrokles reported that indeed it did connect, and that great quantities of Indian goods sailed down the Oxos and across the Caspian to Albania.From there they were transported along the Kyros River (modern Kura) eventually reaching various Black Sea ports like Sinope and Amisos, by way of such cities as Phasis and Kokhis (Strabo 11.7.3).Some two centuries later Marcus Terentius Varro, while serving under Pompey, also learned of this same route (Pliny, Natural History, 6.52).Modern scholarship, however, has questioned the veracity of these accounts.They are regarded as either unfounded stories believed by na(i)ve explorers, or, at best, as exaggerations of an insignificant, irregular commercial exchange network involving small incidental items like coins and spices.This paper seeks to question these assumptions by re-examining the archaeological evidence gleaned from the eastern side of these routes, at the Hellenistic site of A(i) Khanoum in Baktria (northeastern Afghanistan).A number of the items found at this city originated in the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions as well as in India, while the report of Zhang Qian, the ambassador from Han China in the mid-second century BCE, speaks of Baktrian merchants returning from India with Chinese goods (in the Shiji compiled in the first century BCE by Sima Qian).The excavations at A(i) Khanoum suggest that the city participated in regular commercial relations between Europe and South Asia.Thus we need no longer imagine that western imports arrived in Baktria on the backs of animals or men, but in boats that sailed from the Mediterranean and Black Seas to Central Asia.
Jeffrey D.LERNER
Wake Forest University
国内会议
天津
英文
69-79
2012-06-16（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）