British Museum Lectures - Sue Brunning on Silk Roads
Monday 13th January 2025
Pilrig St. Paul's Church, 1B Pilrig St, Edinburgh EH6 5AH
6.30pm
7pm
The British Museum comes to Edinburgh!
Exploring the movement of people, objects and ideas that shaped cultures and histories, curator Sue Brunning challenges the modern popular concept of the ‘Silk Road’. This event is hosted to celebrate the new major exhibition, Silk Roads, which opens at the British Museum on 26 September 2024.
Silk Roads
The term ‘Silk Road’ conjures a range of romantic images. Camel caravans crossing desert dunes. Merchants trading silk and spices. Far-flung commerce between ‘East’ and ‘West’. The reality was far richer. Focusing on a defining period between 500 and 1000 CE, this beautifully illustrated book reimagines the Silk Roads as a web of interlocking networks linking Asia, Africa and Europe, from Japan to Ireland, from the Arctic to Madagascar.
Ambitious in its scope and vast in its geographical range, this publication is the first in the Museum’s history to have a multi-curatorial approach, featuring chapters written by expert curators Sue Brunning, Luk Yu-ping and Elisabeth R. O’Connell, along with external Silk Roads scholar Tim Williams and including dazzling objects from around the world.
It tells a remarkable story of people, objects and ideas flowing in all directions, through the traces these journeys left behind – including ceramics from Tang China recovered from a shipwreck in the Java Sea, sword-fittings set with Indian garnets buried in England, and a selection of letters and legal texts from a synagogue in Cairo revealing a Jewish community’s links from India to al-Andalus.
Woven throughout, encounters with various peoples active on the Silk Roads, from seafarers to Sogdians, Aksumites and Vikings, reveal the human stories, innovations and transfers of knowledge that emerged, shaping cultures and histories across continents centuries before the formation of today’s globalised world.
About Sue Brunning
Sue Brunning is Curator, European Early Medieval Collections in the Department of Britain, Europe and Prehistory at the British Museum and co-curator of Silk Roads, an exhibition opening in September 2024.