description: Ever since the label was coined in the late nineteenth century, the idea of the Silk Road has captivated the Western imagination with images of fabled cities and exotic peoples. Religions of the Silk Road looks behind the romantic notions of the colonial era and tells the story of how cultural traditions, especially in the form of religious ideas, accompanied merchants and their goods along the overland Asian trade routes in pre-modern times. As early as three thousand years ago Hebraic and Iranian religious ideas and practices traveled eastwards in this way, to be followed centuries later by the great missionary traditions of Buddhism, Christianity, Manichaeism, and Islam. But the Silk Road was more than just a conduit along which these religions hitched rides East; it was a formative and transformative rite of passage, and no religion emerged unchanged at the end of the journey.
language: English
title: Religions of the Silk Road
titlecomplete: Religions of the Silk Road
genres: History, Religion, Ancient History, Medieval, The World, Research, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 161
publisher: Palgrave Macmillan