Along The Silk Road Views
Needless to say I was less then thrilled when I received a CD of harp and flute music in the mail, and under most circumstances I would have simply ignored the disc and gone about my business. However, a quick scan of both the press release accompanying the disc, and the disc itself, made it clear harpist Tomoko Sugawara was cut from an entirely different bolt of cloth than the perpetrators of the crimes described above, and her forthcoming disc, Along The Silk Road, being released on March 11, 2010 on the Motema label, offered the promise of something different and exciting.
First of all there was the instrument she was playing on the disc, a type of harp which was first known to be played in 1900BC in Mesopotamia. The kugo, or angular harp, is not only one of the earliest examples of a plucked string instrument, it was also one of the more enduring ones as it was in use up until 1700AD in some Islamic countries. Even more fascinating is the fact it was in common usage along the length of the Silk Road hmdash; the historic trading route that connected the Far East with the Near East and could be found in China, Korea, and Japan as well as Egypt and Muslim-occupied Spain. However the advent of the frame harp, the instrument most of us visualize when we think of a harp, in Europe around 800AD marked the beginning of the end for the kugo, and it had passed out of use in the Far East by 1100AD and gradually vanished entirely.
The goal of these pages is to provide historical and cultural information and, where available, a generous photographic record regarding some of the important Silk Road urban centers and their buildings. While the history of the Silk Road is very much a history of interaction between nomadic and sedentary cultures, much of the economic and cultural development people normally think of in connection with the Silk Road is that in urban settings. Given constraints of what is freely available to us for visual material, in many cases the pages will focus on a single architectural complex or even a single famous building. However, the choices here are not arbitrary, since we feel those which we illustrate are important examples of the cultural diversity which was the Silk Road. It is important to remember that the Silk Road is not just China and Central Asia but extends to the Mediterranean and to the Indian Ocean. Hence the inclusion of locales such as Delhi, Ephesus and Istanbul.
In many cases, the sets of photographs will, at least initially, be accompanied by only minimal descriptive text. However, we feel that many educational purposes can be served by providing even just good photos: there will be rich resources here for the art historian and for those interested in design. For teaching about the Silk Road, it makes sense to include material with a contemporary focus (for example, the bazaar at Kashgar), since often the contemporary culture encourages exploration of the past. As time permits, we will revise the pages and add text. To the best of our knowledge, many of the photo sets will provide the most complete visual documentation of individual sites available anywhere on the Web. We will be adding maps and links to other sources for the history and culture of the featured cities. One of our goals is to create some interactive maps as access points to the resources on these pages.
Along The Silk Road Images
