Naming of the Silk Road

Abstract

In the ancient Eurasian and African continents, several separate and self-contained civilizations had gradually formed after thousands of years of social evolution on the basis of agricultural production, mainly including the ancient Chinese civilization in the valleys of the Yellow River and the Yangtze River, the Mesopotamian civilization on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia in Western Asia, the Indus Valley civilization, and the ancient Egyptian civilization on the Nile River Valley in Northern Africa. These centres of civilization, distributed on the Old Continent, were separated by mountains, deserts, and oceans. For example, the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau, the birthplace of the Yellow River and the Yangtze River, known as the “roof of the world”, separates China from India. Located in the hinterland of Asia, the Taklimakan Desert stretches more than 1,000 kilometres from east to west and more than 400 kilometres from north to south. In the untraversed desert, severe wind and dust storms occur frequently, and the weather is either scorching hot or freezing cold. The complicated landforms and climatic conditions limited the depth, breadth, and frequency of exchanges between these centres of ancient civilization, especially exchanges between China and other centres of civilization. Most of the limited exchanges took place along the edges of the plateaus and the deserts, which had led to the formation of several routes for personnel exchanges and goods circulation. This is the basic background for the formation of the Silk Road. For thousands of years, people on the Eurasian continent exchanged needed goods on these roads, starting the historical journey of mutual learning among the civilizations.