Every place on the map, written out: 11 milestones on the road, 7 stories and 8 queens with the ingredient each one points to.
Milestones on the road
c. 2500 BCE, The Indus Valley: India was trading before the road had a name
Around 2500 BCE, bead makers in the cities of the Indus Valley, at Harappa and at the port of Lothal in Gujarat, etched fine white lines into red carnelian. Some of those beads were buried with the royal dead at Ur, in Iraq, more than 2,000 km away. Clay tablets from Mesopotamia speak of a distant land called Meluhha that sent carnelian, ivory and fine wood by sea. Most historians believe Meluhha was the Indus Valley.
Source: Royal Cemetery at Ur, Penn Museum and British Museum · J. M. Kenoyer, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization, 1998
c. 518 BCE, Persia and the Indus: India paid Persia in gold
Around 518 BCE, the Persian king Darius took the lands along the Indus into his empire. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the Indians paid him more tribute than any other people: 360 talents of gold dust every year. Darius also built a royal road across Persia, about 2,500 km long, with 111 rest stops, and traders used it for centuries after.
Source: Herodotus, Histories 3.94 and 5.52
c. 250 BCE, Mauryan India: An emperor who planted trees for travellers
Emperor Ashoka ruled most of India around 250 BCE and had his orders carved into rocks and pillars across the land, at Kandahar even in Greek and Aramaic. One tells his officials to plant banyan trees for shade and dig wells along the roads, and to grow medicinal herbs for people and for animals. His envoys carried the Buddha's teaching as far as Sri Lanka and the Greek kingdoms of the west.
Source: Rock Edicts II and XIII · Pillar Edict VII · Kandahar Bilingual Inscription
138 BCE, Han China to Bactria: The man who opened the road found India already there
In 138 BCE, the Chinese emperor sent an envoy named Zhang Qian west. He was captured, held for ten years, escaped and kept going. In Bactria, in today's Afghanistan, he was astonished to find bamboo canes and cloth from south-west China on sale. The merchants told him they had bought them in Shendu, a hot country to the south-east where people rode elephants into battle. Shendu was India. Its traders had got there first.
Source: Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian, chapter 123
c. 100 CE, Gandhara and Mathura: The Buddha is given a face
For centuries the Buddha was shown only through symbols: a footprint, a tree, an empty seat. Around the first century CE, sculptors in Gandhara and in Mathura began to carve him as a man. Gandhara's artists had learned from Greek sculpture, which is why so many early Buddhas wear wavy hair and softly draped robes. Monks and merchants then carried the image over the mountains into China.
Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gandhara · Victoria and Albert Museum, the Buddha image
401 CE, Kucha to Chang'an: A monk with an Indian father taught China to read the sutras
Kumarajiva was born in Kucha, an oasis on the northern road, to a local princess and a father who had come from India. He grew up fluent in Sanskrit and the languages of the road, and in 401 he was brought to Chang'an. There he and his team translated the Buddhist texts into a Chinese so clear and so beautiful that his versions of the Lotus Sutra and the Diamond Sutra are the ones still read in China, Korea and Japan.
Source: Huijiao, Biographies of Eminent Monks · Encyclopaedia Britannica, Kumarajiva
c. 570 CE, India to Persia: The fables and the game Persia took home
In the 500s, the Persian king Khosrow I sent his physician Burzoy to India. He came home with the Panchatantra, the animal fables of Vishnu Sharma, and put them into Persian. As Kalila and Dimna they passed into Arabic, Hebrew, Latin and most of Europe's languages, and the French poet La Fontaine thanked the Indian sage Pilpay for some of his best fables. The Persian epic Shahnameh adds that an Indian king sent Khosrow a new game of war, played on a board. It was chess.
Source: Ibn al-Muqaffa, Kalila wa Dimna, c. 750 · Ferdowsi, Shahnameh · La Fontaine, Fables, second collection, 1678
c. 773 CE, Ujjain to Baghdad: Why India's numbers are called Arabic
Around 773, an Indian astronomer arrived at the court of the Caliph al-Mansur in Baghdad with a Sanskrit book of astronomy. Scholars there translated it, and with it came India's nine digits and the zero. Around 825, al-Khwarizmi wrote a book on calculating with the Indian numerals. Europe learned them from Arabic books, and so it still calls them Arabic numerals. Every price, phone number and date you write is Indian.
Source: al-Qifti, History of Learned Men, citing Ibn al-Adami · al-Khwarizmi, On Calculation with Hindu Numerals, c. 825
c. 1100, South India to Damascus: The steel behind the Damascus sword
Smiths in south India made a very pure steel by melting iron with plant matter in small sealed clay pots. Europeans later called it wootz, from ukku, the word for steel in Kannada and Telugu. Cakes of it were shipped west and forged in Persia and Syria into the rippled blades the West still calls Damascus steel.
Source: C. S. Smith, A History of Metallography, 1960 · Oxford English Dictionary, wootz
1498, Calicut, Kerala: Europe arrives, fifteen centuries late
In 1498, Vasco da Gama sailed from Portugal around Africa and dropped anchor near Calicut. Indian, Arab and Chinese ships had been crossing these waters on the monsoon for some 1,500 years. Once Europe could sail straight to India, the long overland caravans slowly faded, and the sea became the road.
Source: Roteiro of the first voyage of Vasco da Gama, 1498
1877, Berlin: Nobody on the road ever called it the Silk Road
The name is only 150 years old. A German geographer, Ferdinand von Richthofen, coined Seidenstraße in 1877. To the people who walked it and sailed it, from Gujarat to Samarkand, it was simply the way to the next oasis, the next market and the next well.
Source: Ferdinand von Richthofen, China, volume 1, 1877
Stories from the road
Rome paid for Kerala's pepper in gold
Muziris, Kerala · 1st century CE
Every summer, ships from Roman Egypt rode the monsoon straight across the Arabian Sea to the Kerala coast, about forty days on open water. They came for black pepper from the Western Ghats and paid in gold. A Tamil poem of the time pictures the fine ships of the Yavanas, the westerners, arriving at Muziris with gold and sailing home with pepper.
In Rome, Pliny the Elder grumbled that India, China and Arabia were draining the empire of 100 million sesterces a year. Roman gold coins still turn up in the soil of Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
Source: Akananuru 149 · Pliny, Natural History 6.104 and 12.84 · Periplus of the Erythraean Sea
Kanan and Catan were here
Berenike, Egypt · 1st century CE
At Berenike, a Roman port on the Red Sea coast of Egypt, archaeologists found pieces of pottery with names scratched into them in Tamil-Brahmi, the early script of Tamil: Kanan, and Catan. Tamil sailors and merchants lived and worked there, two thousand years ago, as far from home as Egypt.
In the courtyard of the port's temple lay a large storage jar made in India. It still held 7.5 kg of black peppercorns.
Source: Steven Sidebotham, Berenike and the Ancient Maritime Spice Route, 2011 · Iravatham Mahadevan, Early Tamil Epigraphy, 2003
A letter that never arrived
Near Dunhuang · c. 313 CE
In 1907, the explorer Aurel Stein found a lost mailbag in an old watchtower near Dunhuang. It held letters from Sogdian merchants, folded and addressed, that had never been delivered.
One is from a woman named Miwnay. Her husband had left her stranded in Dunhuang with their daughter. She wrote that she would rather have married a dog or a pig. Seventeen centuries later, you can still feel how angry she was.
Source: The Sogdian Ancient Letters, British Library · translated by Nicholas Sims-Williams
The university the world walked to
Nalanda, Bihar · 7th century
The Chinese monk Xuanzang walked from Chang'an to India to study, and stayed at Nalanda, in Bihar, for about five years around 637. He wrote of thousands of students and teachers, libraries in tall buildings, and debates that ran from morning until night.
He carried 657 books home to China. Nalanda taught for some seven hundred years, until it was burned around 1193. Its ruins are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Source: Xuanzang, Great Tang Records on the Western Regions, 646 · Huili, Life of Xuanzang · UNESCO, Nalanda Mahavihara
Shampoo is an Indian word
Brighton, England · 1814
In 1814, Sake Dean Mahomed, a man from Patna, opened a bath house on the seafront at Brighton. He offered champi, the Indian head and body massage, which the English wrote down as shampooing. King George IV made him his shampooing surgeon.
The word stayed, moved from the massage to the soap, and is now printed on hair wash all over the world. It comes from champo, press, in Hindi.
Source: Michael H. Fisher, The First Indian Author in English, 1996 · Oxford English Dictionary, shampoo
The musicians India lent to Persia
Persia · 5th century CE
The Persian poet Ferdowsi tells how King Bahram Gur, around 420, found his people had no music to lighten their evenings, and asked an Indian king to send him players. Ten thousand arrived, the story says, with their lutes and their families, and they never went home.
It is a legend, with a strange echo. Geneticists have traced the Romani people of Europe to north-west India, where their ancestors set out about 1,500 years ago.
Source: Ferdowsi, Shahnameh · Mendizabal et al., Current Biology 22, 2012
Candy is a Sanskrit word
Gupta India · c. 350 CE
India was the first place to turn cane juice into crystals of sugar, in the Gupta age. The Sanskrit for those crystals was khanda, and it travelled through Persian and Arabic to become candy. Sharkara, Sanskrit for grit and for sugar, became the word sugar.
When Alexander's army reached the Indus, his admiral Nearchus wrote of a reed that makes honey without any bees.
Source: Strabo, Geography 15.1.20, citing Nearchus · Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 1985
Queens and their rituals
Queen Atossa
Persia · c. 550 to 475 BCE, Persepolis
Atossa was the daughter of Cyrus the Great, wife of King Darius and mother of Xerxes. Herodotus wrote that she held such sway at court that she helped choose the next king. Her husband's empire reached the Indus, and India paid it more gold than any other province.
Nobody recorded Atossa's own routine. But the Greek writer Xenophon described the court her family came from: kings and nobles lined their eyes, coloured their cheeks and wore false hair. Persians loved perfume, and burned fragrant resins in their palaces.
Her ingredient: Galbanum (Ferula gummosa), a resin from the hills of Iran.
Galbanum is a sticky resin that seeps from the stem of a giant fennel plant that grows wild in Iran. It smells fresh and green, like cut stems. The Bible lists it as one of four ingredients in a holy incense, and the Persian physician Ibn Sina used it in remedies for the skin.
Source: Herodotus, Histories 3.94 and 7.3 · Xenophon, Cyropaedia 1.3.2
Queen Karuvaki
Mauryan India · 3rd century BCE, Kaushambi
Karuvaki was a queen of Emperor Ashoka, who ruled most of India in the 3rd century BCE. She is the only one of his queens named in his inscriptions. A carving on a pillar, now at Prayagraj, records her gifts to the public: mango groves, gardens and rest houses.
We don't know Karuvaki's own routine. But Megasthenes, a Greek ambassador at the Mauryan court, noticed that Indians lived simply and still loved fine things: robes worked with gold, flowered muslin and jewels.
Her ingredient: Moringa (Moringa oleifera), a tree from the foothills of the Himalaya.
Moringa is a fast-growing tree from the foothills of the Himalaya, and almost every part of it is useful. Its leaves are rich in antioxidants that help protect skin. Its crushed seeds can even pull dirt out of muddy water. Ayurveda has known it as shigru for about 2,000 years.
Source: Queen's Edict, Allahabad pillar · Megasthenes, quoted by Strabo, Geography 15.1
Queen Shirin
Persia · died c. 628 CE, Qasr-e Shirin
Shirin was the wife of Khosrow II, one of the last great kings of ancient Persia. Centuries later, the poet Nizami turned their love story into one of the most famous poems in the Persian language, and it was sung and painted from Istanbul to Delhi. A town on the border of Iran and Iraq still carries her name.
In the poem, Khosrow first sees Shirin bathing alone in a mountain spring, her long hair spread over the water. For hundreds of years afterwards, painters in Persia and in Mughal India loved painting that scene.
Her ingredient: Rosehip (Rosa canina), the fruit of the wild rose.
A rosehip is the small fruit a wild rose leaves behind after its petals fall. The oil pressed from its seeds is rich in linoleic and alpha-linolenic acid. These are essential fatty acids, which means your body cannot make them, and your skin uses them to stay soft and protected.
Source: Nizami Ganjavi, Khosrow and Shirin, c. 1180
Empress Wu Zetian
China · 624 to 705 CE, Luoyang
Wu Zetian is the only woman in over 2,000 years of Chinese history to rule as emperor in her own name. She took the throne in 690 and ruled from Luoyang for fifteen years. In 695 she came out to the city gate herself to welcome the monk Yijing home from India, where he had studied at Nalanda, with some 400 Sanskrit texts.
A Chinese medical book from 752, the Waitai Miyao, includes a face powder said to be hers. It was made from motherwort, a herb, burned to ash and refined until it was fine and white. Later stories add that she finished with a dusting of pearl powder.
Her ingredient: Pearl powder (Ground nacre), the shining inner layer of shells.
Pearl powder is ground from nacre, the shiny layer inside shells. Nacre is built from extremely thin layers of mineral, each about half a micron thick. Light bouncing between those layers is what makes pearls glow, and it gives skin a soft, luminous look.
Source: Wang Tao, Waitai Miyao, 752 · Zanning, Song Biographies of Eminent Monks, on Yijing
Empress Saray Mulk Khanum
Samarkand · c. 1343 to 1408, Samarkand
Saray Mulk Khanum was the chief wife of Timur, the conqueror who ruled from Samarkand. She came from the family of Genghis Khan, and marrying her gave Timur royal standing. The great mosque of Samarkand, Bibi Khanym, carries her popular name. It was raised with craftsmen and ninety-five elephants that Timur brought back from India.
In 1404, an ambassador from Spain, Ruy González de Clavijo, met her at court. He wrote that her face was painted white to protect it from the sun, under a thin veil and a tall headdress topped with white feathers. That white paint was probably lead, which we now know is toxic.
Her ingredient: Silk protein (from the cocoon of Bombyx mori), from the cocoon of the silkworm.
Silk is almost pure protein. Each cocoon is a single unbroken thread that can be close to a kilometre long. When silk protein is broken down into tiny pieces, it clings to each strand of hair and leaves it smoother, softer and easier to manage.
Source: Ruy González de Clavijo, Embassy to Tamerlane, 1403 to 1406 · Sharaf al-Din Yazdi, Zafarnama
Queen Gawhar Shad
Herat · c. 1378 to 1457, Herat
Gawhar Shad was a Timurid queen, married to Shah Rukh, who ruled from Herat in today's Afghanistan. She spent her fortune on beautiful buildings, and her mosque at Mashhad, finished in 1418, is still in use. Her family's line would later rule India as the Mughals, and the painting of her Herat shaped their court.
Under her patronage, Herat became famous for painting, poetry and gardens. Paintings from her court show women with very long hair, braided and worn under jewelled caps and light veils.
Her ingredient: Oshaq (Dorema ammoniacum), a gum from a desert plant of Iran and Central Asia.
Oshaq, also called gum ammoniac, comes from a tall desert plant that grows in Iran and Central Asia. When the stem is pierced, it releases a milky sap that dries into pale drops of resin. Persian and Unani physicians, in Iran and in India, have used it for centuries.
Source: Goharshad Mosque, Mashhad, dedication of 1418 · The Met, painting from Herat
Empress Nur Jahan
Mughal India · 1577 to 1645, Agra
Nur Jahan was the most powerful woman in Mughal history. Her husband, Emperor Jahangir, shared power with her. Coins were minted with her name on them, and she signed imperial orders with her own seal.
Her mother, Asmat Begam, is credited with inventing attar of roses, a perfume oil made from rose petals. Jahangir wrote that a single drop on the palm could fill a whole room with its scent. The attar makers of Kannauj still distil flowers in copper pots today.
Her ingredient: Manjistha (Rubia cordifolia), the red root of Indian madder.
Manjistha is the root of Indian madder, a climbing plant whose red roots once dyed the cottons India sent across the world. Charaka lists it among his ten varnya herbs, the ones that bring out the skin's natural colour, and it has been used for about 2,000 years to help skin look clearer and more even.
Source: Jahangir, Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, translated by Rogers and Beveridge
Empress Dowager Cixi
Qing China · 1835 to 1908, Beijing
Empress Dowager Cixi ran the Qing court in China for almost fifty years, from 1861 until she died in 1908. In 1903 she had herself photographed, and decided exactly how the world would see her.
The story goes that Cixi ate snow mushroom, cooked slowly into a sweet soup, to keep her skin soft and bright. It is a legend rather than a record, but snow mushroom soup is still a favourite in China today.
Her ingredient: Snow mushroom (Tremella fuciformis), a jelly-like fungus.
Snow mushroom is a translucent, jelly-like fungus that grows on fallen trees. It can hold up to 500 times its own weight in water. On skin, it forms a light, breathable film that helps hold that moisture in.
Source: Photographs by Yu Xunling, Freer and Sackler Archives, Smithsonian
