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xv NAME AND SOURCE AND WHY DOES IT MATTER? The idea of the Silk Road has become popular in our contemporary world. It conjures up notions of heav- ily laden camel caravans crossing through inhospi- table deserts and mountains to bring treasures from one distant land to another and has come to repre- sent the essence of international business, a roman- tic view of how mercantile exchanges occurred in the past to play against the realities of today. It is not without reason that China has called its new inter- national trade program, the Belt and Road Initiative, the “New Silk Road.” It has become of interest to us again in the late 20th and early 21st centuries because it seems to reinforce the value that we have given to global capitalism and international mercantile exchanges. The whole notion of the Silk Road rests on the pos- itive effects of openness: openness of borders for exchanges, openness of cultural institutions to out- side ideas, and openness of societies to foreigners. The periods of greatest prosperity for the cultures that formed in the regions through which the Silk Roads passed were those when trade was most extensive, and peoples were willing to engage one another. The Silk Road celebrates multiculturalism and the richness that are to be gained through the peaceful mixing of peoples. The term “Silk Road” (or die Seidenstraße in the original German), used to describe the caravan routes that allowed for the commercial activities that joined together China and the Mediterranean worlds in the millennia before the formation of the early modern world in the 16th century CE, was coined by the German geographer Baron (Freiherr) Ferdi- nand von Richthofen (1833–1905). He was a great traveler, and from 1868 to 1872, he made several scientific expeditions to various parts of China and began the serious study of China’s western region (Xinjiang) by European scholars. In his wake were to come other foreign expeditions led by European, Japanese, and American scholar-adventurers who initiated the archaeological study of the Silk Road that continues to this day. Comparative philologi- cal, historical, and literary studies of ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Chinese texts had been pursued since the 18th century in Europe and had already made clear that connections between China, India, and the Mediterranean world had existed in antiq- uity and the early medieval periods. The active interest on the part of Western schol- ars in the cultural development of ancient Central Asia and the Silk Road waned after the Russian Revolution closed easy access to the Soviet Central Asian Republics and the political turmoil in China from the 1920s until the Chinese revolution of 1948, and the subsequent closure of China to most West- ern scholarship made it impossible to conduct work in Xinjiang. However, Soviet and Chinese investi- gators continued to conduct archaeological work in the region and publish the results in their respective professional journals. This scholarship was difficult to obtain in the West and so went largely ignored. The fall of the Soviet Union followed by the inde- pendence of the Central Asian republics and the opening of China to Western scholars in the 1970s INTRODUCTION: WHAT WAS THE WORLD OF THE ANCIENT SILK ROAD?