The 1988 film, “They live”, tells the story of John Nada (read his name in Spanish) who finds a box full of sunglasses. Putting a pair on, he sees how ideology works by keeping the truth hidden.
Sean Sheehan
Visiting the Silk Roads exhibition at the British Museum is like putting on these sunglasses, revealing eurocentrism not by what it proclaims but by what it doesn’t say.
What it keeps neatly hidden from view is brought into the open in this stunning exhibition.
There was never a Silk Road in the sense of a single very long road stretching from the east to the west. Many routes were traversed, not always going through the same territory but between them, across land and sea, products, technologies and ideas travelled westwards and changed how people lived and saw the world.
The journey starts over a thousand years ago in East Asia and the exchange of influences between mainland China, Japan and the Korean peninsula. It then travels, as does the visitor’s imagination in the exhibition, to cities and regions throughout Central and South Asia and Arabia. It ends where Eurocentrism would have us place the fount of culture, in the Mediterranean region and northwest Europe.
Another exhibit is a humble shoe found at a desert hill fort in western China and dated to around the 8th or 9th century. It is made of thick woollen felt with leather patches protecting the soles and heels and decorated with fan-shaped stitching.
Wonderfully well preserved, you want to know whether it was a product for sale or an item worn by a trader.
There are some beautiful exhibits, including a 7th-century mural found in a house in Samarkland, in Uzbekistan. It pictures a procession honouring a Sogdian ruler (ancient Iran) and the representations show influences from Korea, India and China.
A fascinating section of the exhibition is devoted to Islam’s journey across North Africa and the Strait of Gibraltar to present-day Spain and Portugal in the year 711. The region, renamed al-Adalus, was first governed as a province of the Umayyad dynasty whose capital was in Damascus. The Islamic world was open to new ideas and papermaking technology from Tang China facilitated the translation of works from Greek, Sanskrit and Persian into Arabic.
There is an astonishing range of around 300 exhibits, many never seen before in the UK, loaned by Uzbekistan’s Art and Culture Development Foundation and museums from Tajikistan (in lands that the silk roads crossed). There is just too much to take in on one visit and the accompanying British Museum book overcomes this limitation with its splendid photographs of the exhibits and essential explanatory text to what is a remarkably rich and underappreciated story of cultures connecting across continents.
“Silk roads” is on at the British Museum until 23 February 2025. Early bird tickets from £17, under-16s free when accompanied by a paying adult, 2-for-1 tickets for students on Fridays, and concessions and group rates available.
The book of the exhibition is available at the exhibition or online from British Museum Shop.
(Photos authorized for publication)
.jpg)
