British Museum Lectures - Sue Brunning on Silk Roads

The British Museum is coming to St Andrews!

We are welcoming Sue Brunning, curator at the British Museum and co-curator of Silk Roads, to St Andrews to explore the fascinating history behind the world's most famous trading route. This event celebrates the new major exhibition, Silk Roads, which opens at the British Museum on 26 September 2024.

Silk Roads

A richly illustrated publication that explores the networks of contacts and exchanges spanning Afro-Eurasia from 500 to 1000 ce, highlighting how the movement of people, objects and ideas shaped cultures and histories. 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. 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.

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.