Speaker: Dr. Sitta von Reden, Professor of Ancient History, University of Freiburg
ISAW presents this lecture on Tuesday, November 6th 2025 from 5:30pm to 7pm in the ISAW Lecture Hall. A reception will follow the lecture. Register for the Event: (Link Here)
Abstract:
“Ancient exchange across Eurasia is usually imagined as trade along the Silk Road: terrestrial and maritime routes linking far-away places with each other, allowing goods, ideas, religions, artistic styles, and technologies to travel over long distances. And while most scholars distance themselves from the idea that the Silk Road was a route that carried silk from one way station to the next between China and Rome, the image of an interconnected trade network linking the Afro-Eurasian world in antiquity drives much valuable archaeological and historical work. Yet the exchanges crisscrossing continents and oceans in antiquity did not lead to the circulation of a range of goods in a connected world in antiquity. And as much as we wish to discover forms of globalization in the ancient world, the entanglement of ancient empires cannot be conceptualized as one of commercial connectivity.
Prof. von Reden will offer alternative ways of thinking about why we find Chinese silk in Palmyra, Egyptian glass vessels in Afghanistan, and Roman coins in Thailand and Vietnam. Using insights from empire and frontier-zone research, as well as concepts of cultural economics, she will argue for a more layered understanding of exchange patterns across Eurasian empires. Wherever we look, we find different reasons for the transaction of different quantities and kinds of goods, and different social groups and exchange mechanisms were involved in their movement and production. In collapsing these differences into “routes” and “trade,” we risk letting colonial ideas creep into our understanding of ancient imperial entanglement. What did the Roman consumption of Indian pepper have to do with the Han emperors’ craving for rhinoceroses from Sri Lanka? Identifying several transactional forces and frontiers, Prof. von Reden will offer us a much richer story of trans-imperial exchanges than the traditional narrative of the Silk Road has to tell.”