Silk Roads: Peoples, Cultures, Landscapes

Finally, the most important land trade route in the medieval world has a proper illustrated survey. This is a beautiful book, with brief but authoritative articles on all topics connected with ancient and medieval trade. The "maritime silk road" from south China via the Indian Ocean to the Near East is covered in the last few chapters. The book's hundreds of illustrations range from exciting new finds to classic photos going back over 100 years.It brings back happy memories. The chapter on caravanserais reminded me of staying in a caravanserai in the Bamiyan Valley in 1974. The building was adobe. The bed was a built-up adobe platform with some old quilting. Lighting was a candle. Food was the incomparable bread, made from fresh-ground local hard mountain wheat, baked in a huge underground tandur oven the size of a small room. As a matter of fact, that very caravanserai or its next neighbor is illustrated on p. 127 of this book! Another familiar view on p 364 shows a mountain forest cleared of non-valuable trees, leaving the wild apples and others and opening the ground for grazing; I have been in such spots in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan.If you have any interest in the Silk Roads, you will want this book. If you have no interest, it will make you want to go and look.

If you're looking for Central Asian history and the silk roads this is an excellent reference tool, great pics also

Gorgeous book that I will enjoy for years.

I know very little about central Asia, so I thought this book would be a good start. I was wrong. The book has lots of wonderful pictures and is very wide-ranging in its content, but I have found that I need to consult Wikipedia on every page. Who are the Parthians? the Hephthlalites? the Xiongnu? A chapter on history would have been nice.

A little disjointed. But, appreciate this book for what it is. The title is misleading. It covers trade routes spanning Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North Africa, not just the multi-branch Silk Road. There are many objects and images you have probably never seen, many of them. And short descriptions of cultures, religions, materials, geography, et al., a real kitchen sink. But if you are interested in the cultures and art across the wide expanse it covers in space and time, you will be entertained and informed.

Lovely book and it was delivered to Canada without a hitch.Thank you for the service.

I love reading history and I love traveling through it, the cities, culture and artifacts. Surprisingly, this was the only book I could find with a lot of photos (color at that). So, this is my new favorite coffee table book! Susan Whitfield has produced a tour de force for folks like myself that like to view gorgeous pictures to supplement the narrative. Supremely happy 😊 I took the time to search for a book like this. I don’t know anything about Susan, but from my searching I found out she has written several books on the Silk Roads. Suffice to say, she must be well educated on the subject and is certainly passionate about it to have authored so many tomes. It truly is a wonderous book. I added some photos so you could see in part the detail and grandeur of this book. Apologies, for the sideways and uppsy-downsy of the attached picts. This is my first-time uploading photos in a review, but felt it necessary to better illustrate some of the goodies in this book. You’ll just have to turn your head or tablet a little or a lot to level things out.If you feel your not getting your intellectual itch scratched enough. Susan certainly has a number of other Silk Roads books that I know nothing about (for now). Or order Peter Frankopan’s highly reviewed treatise to fill in any gaps.Anyway, I hope my short & sweet review was of some benefit to my fellow vicarious Silk Road travelers. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. Course I’ve been wrong before.. 😉 Stay safe & healthy!

The book is very beautiful. Good pictures and colors. As so it is very nice for display on the tea table to start a conversation between guests and visitors. However it lacks deeper virw of the history of the place.