Silk Road or Paper Road?Jonathan M. BloomBoston College

Well over a century ago, theAustrian geologist and explorerFerdinand von Richthofen (1833-1905) coined the term Seiden-strasse, “Silk Road (or Route)” torefer to the network of land routesthat linked China and Europe fromthe 3rd century BCE to the 15thcentury CE. Silk, which was tradedwith the West from the later partof the Zhou period (ca. 1050-256BCE) was only one of the manycommodities traded along theseroutes, for jade had been broughtto China from Central Asia as earlyas the Shang period (ca. 1600 toca. 1050 BCE), and Mediterraneanglassware reached China duringthe Qin period (221-206 BCE)[Sørensen and Marshak 1996].Traders brought exquisite Chineseceramics to Iraq in the ninthcentury, when it was ruled by theAbbasid dynasty (749-1258), andIslamic underglaze-painted waresas well as Iranian cobalt weretaken to China, where theyinspired the development of thatquintessentially Chinese ceramictechnique of blue-and-whiteporcelain [Carswell 1985]. Perhapsthe most important product carriedalong this trade network, however,was paper, a now-ubiquitousmaterial which has had a fargreater impact on the course ofhuman civilization than silk, jadeor glass ever had.

Paper, which is a mat ofcellulose fibers that have beenbeaten in water and collected ona screen and dried, was inventedin southeastern China in thecenturies before Christ [Tsien1985; Bloom 2001]. Originallyused as a wrapping material, paperbegan to be used as a writingmaterial around the time of Christ,when it was discovered that thisrelatively inexpensive, strong andflexible material provided an idealreplacement for the narrow

bamboo strips ortablets that hadbeen used for writing[Figs. 1, 2] and thesilk textiles that hadbeen used for largerimages, such as maps anddrawings. Although the Chineseinitially made paper from refusefibers, they soon found that they

could also make it from the innerbark of several woody shrubs, suchas bamboo, paper-mulberry, andrattan that grew well in moist andhumid southeastern China, andfrom then on waste fibers were notnormally used in China forpapermaking.

Buddhist monks and mis-sionaries, who began to use thismedium for copying sutras andother Buddhist writings, carriedpaper and papermaking from theland of its origin to Korea, Japanand Central Asia, where theystopped on the way to India, theland of Buddhism’s birth. The aridCentral Asian climate was quitedifferent from that of subtropicalsoutheastern China, andpapermakers were forced to finddifferent materials with which tomake their product. It seems likelythat Central Asian papermakers

were the first to discover (orrediscover) that waste fromtextiles that were themselvesmade from plant fibers, including

linen and cotton but excluding wooland silk (which were animal fibersimpossible to use in papermaking),could also make good paper[Hoernle 1903]. Indeed, it wasoften easier to make paper frompreviously processed fibersbecause the fibers required lessbeating. It is likely that at arelatively early date Buddisttravelers also brought paper andknowledge of papermaking toIndia, but unlike elsewhere,papermaking did not take hold inIndia for another millennium[Soteriou 1999].

Paper was unknown in WesternAsia and the Mediterranean worldbefore the coming of Islam, whenthe media traditionally used forwriting there were papyrus andparchment. Papyrus, which hadbeen used in Egypt from at least3000 BCE, is made from a plant

Fig. 1. Han period bamboo woodslip found nearDunhuang, Dunhuang Museum. Photograph © DanielC. Waugh 1998.

Fig. 2. Land-purchase document in Kharosthi script written on a wooden tablet,found at Niya by Aurel Stein, BL Or.8211/1494 (N.xv.11.a). Photograph © TheBritish Library, used with permission. All rights reserved. See Silk Road Exhi-bition online at <http://idp.bl.uk/education/silk_road/SR/kroraina/krorainia_fs.htm>, item 76.

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that flourishes along the banks ofthe Nile. The stalks of the plantwere cut into lengths, the lengthswere cut into strips, and the stripslaid side-by-side in twoperpendicular layers, held togetherby the gummy sap exuded by theplant [Fig. 3]. Individual sheetswere joined together in rolls, whichthe Egyptians used right to left andthe Greeks, who imported thematerial, used from left to right.The Greeks called papyrus khartes,a word that has been transformedto paper-related terms in manymodern languages, including carta(Italian for paper) and our owncard and chart. The Romans calledthe plant by the Latin termpapyrus, which has also beentransformed into many otherpaper-related terms, such as paper(English), papier (French andGerman), and papel (Spanish).The Greek word for a papyrus roll,biblios, has given rise to wordsfrom Bible to bibliography, whilethe Latin term for this same thing,

volumen, has evolved into wordssuch as volume and volute (onaccount of its shape). Pagina,the Latin term for a column oftext on a papyrus roll, hasevolved into our word “page,”and liber, originally the Latinword for bark, became thegeneric Latin word for book.Although the most common formof the book was the papyrus roll,sometime in the centuries after

Christ a new form of book, withseparate folded leaves sewntogether on one side, emerged.This was known as a codex, fromthe Latin term for a block of wood.

Parchment, which takes itname from the city of Pergamonin western Anatolia, was the otherwriting support used widely inAntiquity [Fig. 4]. Made from theskin of an animal which had beensoaked in lime, scraped of its fleshand hair, stretched on a frame anddried, parchment had long beenused by the ancient Hebrews forcopying their scriptures, the Torah.The sheets, made from ritually-slaughtered animals, were sewntogether to form long rolls on whichthe text was written. Since ananimal had to be killed to make asheet of parchment, it was alwaysmuch more expensive thanpapyrus, but it could be madeanywhere (papyrus could only beproduced in Egypt). Furthermore,parchment was more durable than

papyrus in a wider variety ofenvironments; it was especiallystrong when used in the codexformat, for the repeated foldingand exposed edges it demandedweakened papyrus sheets.

The origins of the codex aremuch debated, and it remainsunclear whether the triumph of thecodex format in the Mediterraneanworld was directly related to thespread of Christianity [Roberts andSkeat 1983]. For about athousand years writing-tablets ofwood with a thin overlay of waxhad been used for note-taking,composition, and temporarywritings, and these tablets wereoften made in hinged pairs or sets,essentially precursors to theparchment codex. Parchmentcodices allowed both sides of thewriting surface to be used(impossible on a scroll) and madeit much easier to refer to aparticular passage in the text,because the reader did not haveto “scroll through” the entire workto find what he or she was lookingfor. By the time of the revelationof Islam, the codex format wasfirmly established in western Asiaand the Mediterranean world asthe preferred format for books,particularly the Christian Bible,with the notable exception of theHebrew scriptures, whichcontinued to be copied onparchment rolls, and diplomatic

Fig. 3. Draft of a petition to the katholicosby Aurelios Ammon, Scholastikos, fl. 348CE. Duke Papyrus Archive,P.Duk.inv.18R, online at <http://scr iptorium.l ib.duke.edu/papyrus/records/18r.html>. Photograph © RareBook, Manuscript and Special CollectionsLibrary, Duke University Libraries, usedwith permission. All rights reserved.

Fig. 4. Letter on parchment from king of Kroraina to local governor in Niya,3-4 century CE. BL Or.8211/1553 (N.xv.88). Photograph © The BritishLibrary, used with permission. All rights reserved. See online Silk RoadExhibition <http://idp.bl.uk/education/silk_road/SR/kroraina/krorainia_fs.htm>, item 141.

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documents, which continued to becopied on vertical-format papyrusscrolls.

The first copies of the entiretext of the Quran, which Muslimsbelieve is God’s revelation toMuhammad, were transcribed onparchment codices, althoughpapyrus, which was still producedin Egypt (conquered by Muslimarmies in 641), continued to beused for bills, letters and records[Khan 1993]. Muslims visuallydifferentiated copies of theirscriptures from the Christian Bibleby generally using a horizontal(“landscape”) format [Fig. 5].When Muslim armies conqueredCentral Asia in the late seventh andearly eighth centuries, theyencountered paper for the firsttime. It is often said that Muslimarmies captured Chinesepapermakers following the battleof Talas in 751, but this anecdoteis without factual basis and paperhad been known—and made—inCentral Asia for centuries. Forexample, archaeologists dis-covered a mailbag containingletters written on paper andaddressed to a merchant inSamarqand in the fourth century[Fig. 6] [Sims-Williams 1987].Devastich, lord of Panjikent inSogdia (now Tajikistan) until hiscapture by the Arabs in 722, leftan archive of 76 writings inSogdian, Arabic and Chinese on

leather, wood and paper, whichSoviet scholars discovered at theremote site of Kala-i Mug [Zeymal’1996]. A few decades later in 762the new Abbasid dynastytransferred the capital of theIslamic empire from Damascus inSyria to Baghdad in Iraq; this neweastern focus, combined with thegovernment bureaucracy’s soaringdemand for records, led to theintroduction and quick diffusion ofpaper in the Islamic lands.

Papermaking was begun inBaghdad itself by the late 8thcentury. The city boasted a Suqal-warraqin (Stationers’ Market), astreet whose two sides were linedwith more than one hundred shopsfor paper- and booksellers. FromIraq, papermaking was carried toSyria, then Egypt, across NorthAfrica to Morocco and eventuallyto Spain, where its use there is firstrecorded by a tenth-centurytraveler. The first sheets of “Arab”paper appear in Spanish Christianmanuscripts of the late tenthcentury, where the sheets weresubstituted for the typical, butmore expensive, parchment.Eventually other Europeanslearned of papermaking from theMuslims of Spain, particularly asChristians began to occupy largerportions of the Iberian peninsulaand needed materials on which torecord deeds and titles. Similarlyin Sicily and Italy, merchants and

notaries began to use paper fromthe late eleventh and twelfthcenturies, although papermakingwas not introduced, perhaps fromSpain or from somewhere in theArab world, until the thirteenth.Once the Italians learned the artof papermaking, they quicklysuperseded their masters,producing large quantities of finepaper more cheaply than anyoneelse, and they began exporting itto North African and West Asianmarkets.

Few, if any, early Islamicwritings on paper survive in theiroriginal format, although many ofthe texts written on them wererecopied and preserved over thecenturies. Excavations in Egyptshow that paper increasinglyreplaced papyrus over the courseof the ninth and tenth centuries;by the middle of the tenth centurypapyrus was hardly used at all.Meanwhile, paper spurred a burst

Fig. 5. Quran on parchment, 8/9th century CE. National Museum, New Delhi59.187. Photograph © Daniel C. Waugh 2001.

Fig. 6. Sogdian Ancient Letter No. 2,ca. 313 CE, found by Aurel Stein atWatch Tower T.XII.a on the DunhuangLimes. BL Or.8212/95 R. Photograph© The British Library, used with per-mission. All rights reserved. NicholasSims-Williams’ translation of the let-ter is online at <http://depts.washington.edu/uwch/silkroad/texts/sogdlet.html>.

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of extraordinary literary creativitythroughout the Muslim lands. Theincreased numbers of texts knownfrom the late eighth and ninthcenturies in Iraq testifies to avibrant literary culture in the majorcities of the Abbasid realm. As isto be expected, most of thepreserved writings from this periodconcern the religious sciences andauxiliary disciplines such as thehistory of the Prophet and earlyIslam, the grammar and vocab-ulary of the Arabic language, andpre-Islamic Arabic poetry, whichhelped scholars understand thecontext for the revelation of theQuran. But new “secular” subjectsincreasingly find place in Arabicliterature of the ninth century,including works on geography,astronomy, medicine, mathe-matics, and literature. Indeed, theearliest known manuscript versionof the popular tales we now knowas the Arabian Nights was copiedin ninth-century Egypt or Syria, atime when other, new types ofreally popular literature were alsoinexpensively copied on paper[Abbott 1938; Rice 1959].

Such texts indicate howwidespread paper became in thisperiod. It was used not only byMuslims but also by Christians andJews. For example, the oldestmanuscript on “Arab” paper isbelieved to be a copy of theDoctrina Patrum, produced atDamascus ca. 800 [Perria 1983-1984]. Hundreds of thousands ofdocuments dating from the ninthto the thirteenth century that werediscovered in the nineteenthcentury in the geniza or storeroomof the Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairodocument the growing use ofpaper among the merchantcommunities of the Mediterraneanlands for letters, contracts,inventories, and deeds [Goitein1967-1994].

The Cordoban library of theneo-Umayyad caliph al-Hakam IIwas reputed to contain some400,000 volumes, many of whichmust have been copied on paper.Similar libraries are reported inmedieval Cairo and Shiraz [Eche

1967]. The extraordinary numbersof volumes in them, even ifexaggerated by a factor of ten ormore, testify to the flowering ofwritten culture in the Islamic landsduring the medieval period thatwas made possible by the spreadof paper and papermaking. InChristian Europe, by contrast,manuscript books were rare andcostly. The library of a monasteryin eleventh-century Constan-tinople, for example, had onlytwelve books, of which eight werecopied on paper, while the libraryof the Sorbonne in 1338, said tobe the finest l ibrary inChristendom, had only 338 booksfor consultation chained to readingdesks and another 1728 booksavailable for loan, although 300 ofthem were listed as lost [Bloom2001, p. 117].

The oldest known completeArabic book copied on paper,dating from 848, was recentlydiscovered in a l ibrary inAlexandria, Egypt; the second-oldest fragment is a well-knownmanuscript dating from 866 inLeiden University Library aboutunusual terms in the traditions ofthe Prophet. These twomanuscripts are valued for theirprecise dates, but thousands ofsimilar manuscripts must havebeen produced. NeverthelessMuslims must have initially viewed

paper with some suspicion,because manuscripts of the Qurancontinued to be copied onparchment well into the tenthcentury. The oldest dated copy ofthe Quran transcribed on paperwas produced, presumably in Iran,in 971-72 by the calligrapher Aliibn Shadhan al-Razi, whose nameindicates that he came from Rayy,a city located near modern Tehran.These first Quran manuscripts onpaper were copied in scripts unlikethe stately “kufic” scriptstraditionally used for copying theQuran on parchment and more likethe cursive scripts used bycontemporary scribes for copyingliterary works on paper. In time itbecame common to copy theQuran on paper, except in Moroccoand Spain, where parchmentcontinued to be used for severalmore centuries. Over the followingcenturies, calligraphers continuedto develop new and more fluidscripts to copy the Quran and othertexts on paper, therebytransforming the art of writing inthe Islamic lands [Fig. 7] [Blair2006].

In the thirteenth century theMongol conquests in Central andWestern Asia once againencouraged trade and com-munication along the routes linkingChina to the West, and during theensuing Pax Mongolica men,

Fig. 7. Manuscript of the Quran on paper, Iran, Shiraz ca. 1560-1575. Museumof Islamic Art, Berlin, MIK I.142/68, open to the end of Sura 113 and beginningof Sura 114. Photograph © Daniel C. Waugh 2004.

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materials, and ideas moved backand forth with relative freedom. Atthis time papermakers in theIslamic lands, particularly in Iranand Iraq developed techniques formaking larger and finer sheets ofpaper which were used not onlyas supports for magnificentmanuscripts but also as fordrawings that served as inter-mediaries between designers andcraftsmen. It is tempting indeedto think that the increased east-west communication, documentedin a wide range of media andtechniques, led to these technicaland conceptual developments inthe Islamic lands, but the questionis not yet settled [Bloom, in press].Certain techniques, such as the useof pricked drawings and of griddedplans and drawings, can be shown

to have traveled across Eurasiafrom east to west, but the evidenceis moot for perhaps the mostimportant technique in this regard:printing, particularly withmoveable type. This techniqueemerged in fifteenth-centuryEurope seemingly from nowhere,although printing had been usedin China since the 8th century [Fig.8], and printing with moveabletype had been used there since theeleventh. As the use of printing inthe Islamic lands before thesixteenth century was restricted toa very few situations, none of theminvolving the production of books,it is virtually impossible to hypo-thesize any connection—astempting as it might be—betweenthe development of printing inChina and in Europe.

W h e nE u r o p e a n seventually beganto investigate thehistory of paper,they were initiallyconfused becauseall the wordsdealing withpaper came fromGreek and Latinwords for papy-rus, and theythought thatpaper mustsomehow havebeen derivedfrom papyrus.The first Euro-peans to en-counter Chineseand Japanesepapers in thesixteenth centuryimagined thatEast Asians hadsomehow learnedto make paperfrom the ancientE g y p t i a n s .Eventually thematter wascleared up, butthe pivotal role ofthe Islamic landsin the trans-mission of paper-making from Asia

to Europe was forgotten. VonRichthofen was surely correct thatthe trade routes linking China toWest Asia and the Mediterraneanworld played a crucial role inhuman history, but he was wrongto think that silk was the mostimportant good traded along thoseroutes. This brief investigation intothe history of one of the mostimportant, but least appreciated,materials carried across Eurasiasuggests that it might be time tomodify his original idea to reflectthe relative importance of thegoods and ideas exchanged alonethese routes. In that case, thenetwork would be more accuratelyknown as the Paper Route.

About the Author

Jonathan Bloom shares theNorma Jean CalderwoodProfessorship of Islamic and AsianArt at Boston College with his wifeSheila Blair. His many publicationsinclude Paper before Print (2001),Early Islamic Art and Architecture(2002) and the forthcoming Artsof the City Victorious: The Art andArchitecture of the Fatimids.Among the books he has co-authored with Professor Blair areIslam: A Thousand Years of Faithand Power (2000) and The Art andArchitecture of Islam: 1250-1800,a volume in the Pelican History ofArt which appeared to rave reviewsin 1994. He may be reached at<jonathan.bloom@bc.edu>.

References

Abbott 1938Nabia Abbott. “A Ninth-CenturyFragment of the ‘Thousand Nights’:New Light on the Early History ofthe Arabian Nights.” Journal ofNear Eastern Studies, 8/3 (1938):129–64.

Blair 2006Sheila S. Blair. Islamic Calligraphy.Edinburgh: Edinburgh UniversityPress, 2006.

Bloom, in pressJonathan M. Bloom. “Paper: TheTransformative Medium in IlkhanidArt and Architecture.” In Beyond

Fig. 8. Manuscripts and prints obtained by Aurel Stein fromthe “Library Cave,” no. 17 of the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang.At the bottom is the earliest complete printed book, a copyof the Diamond Sutra dated 868 CE (BL Or.8210/p.2).Photograph © The British Library, used with permission.All rights reserved.

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the Legacy of Genghis Khan. Ed.Linda Komaroff. Leiden: E. J. Brill,in press.

Bloom 2001Jonathan M. Bloom. Paper BeforePrint: The History and Impact ofPaper in the Islamic World. NewHaven: Yale University Press,2001.

Carswell 1985John Carswell. Blue and White:Chinese Porcelain and Its Impacton the Western World. ExhibitionCatalogue. Chicago: The David andAlfred Smart Gallery, University ofChicago, 1985. See also his Blue& White: Chinese Porcelain aroundthe World (Chicago: Art MediaResources, 2000).

Eche 1967Youssef Eche. Les bibliothèquesarabes publiques et semi-publiques en Mésopotamie, enSyrie et en Égypte au moyen age.Damascus: Institut français deDamas, 1967.

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Goitein 1967-1994S. D. Goitein. A MediterraneanSociety. Berkeley and Los Angeles:University of California Press,1967–94.

Hoernle 1903A. F. Rudolf Hoernle. “Who Was theInventor of Rag-Paper?” Journal ofthe Royal Asiatic Society, 43(1903): 663–84.

Khan 1993Geoffrey Khan. Bills, Letters andDeeds: Arabic Papyri of the 7thto 11th Centuries. Edited by JulianRaby. The Nasser D. Khali l iCollection of Islamic Art. London:The Nour Foundation in associationwith Azimuth Editions and OxfordUniversity Press, 1993.

Perria 1983-1984L. Perria. “Il Vat. Gr. 2200. Notecodicologiche e paleografiche.”Revista di Studi Byzantini eneoellenici, n.s., 20–21 (1983–84): 25–68.

Rice 1959D. S. Rice. “The Oldest IllustratedArabic Manuscript.” Bulletin of theSchool of Oriental and AfricanStudies, 22 (1959): 207–20.

Roberts and Skeat 1983Colin H. Roberts and T. C. Skeat.The Birth of the Codex. London:Oxford University Press for theBritish Academy, 1983.

Sims-Williams 1987N[icholas] Sims-Williams. “AncientLetters.” Encyclopaedia Iranica. Ed.Ehsan Yarshater. Vol. 2. London;New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul,1987, pp. 7-9.

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Sørensen and Marshak 1996Henrik H. Sørensen and B[oris]Marshak. “Silk Route.” TheDictionary of Art. Ed. Jane Turner.Vol. 28. New York: Grove, 1996,pp. 718-723.

Soteriou 1999Alexandra Soteriou. Gift ofConquerors: Hand Papermaking inIndia. Middletown, NJ: Grantha,1999.

Tsien 1985Tsien Tsuen-hsuin. Paper andPrinting. Science and Civilisation inChina. Ed. Joseph Needham. Vol.5, pt. 1. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1985.

Zeymal’ 1996T. I. Zeymal’. “Kala-i Mug.” TheDictionary of Art. Ed. Jane Turner.Vol. 17. New York: Grove, 1996,p. 735.

Northwestern and Central Iran