num_pages: 376
description: Following her bestselling Life Along the Silk Road  Susan Whitfield widens her exploration of the great cultural highway with a new captivating portrait focusing on material things. Silk Slaves and Stupas tells the stories of ten very different objects considering their interaction with the peoples and cultures of the Silk Roadthose who made them carried them received them used them sold them worshipped them and in more recent times bought them conserved them and curated them. From a delicate pair of earrings from a steppe tomb to a massive stupa deep in Central Asia a hoard of Kushan coins stored in an Ethiopian monastery to a Hellenistic glass bowl from a southern Chinese tomb and a fragment of Byzantine silk wrapping the bones of a French saint to a Bactrian ewer depicting episodes from the Trojan War these objects show us something of the cultural diversity and interaction along these trading routes of Afro-Eurasia. Exploring the labor tools materials and rituals behind these various objects Whitfield infuses her narrative with delightful details as the objects journey through time space and meaning. Silk Slaves and Stupas is a lively visual and tangible way to understand the Silk Road and the cultural economic and technical changes of the late antique and medieval worlds. 
language: English
title: Silk, Slaves, and Stupas: Material Culture of the Silk Road
publisher: University of California Press