ly mentioned in inscriptions from Palmyra as the destination of the Palmyrene caravans. With the diversion of trade to this new center, the increasing importance of the more purely Parthian Ctesiphon across the river, and the destruction wrought by successive Roman invasions, the decline of the old royal city of Seleucia grew progressively more rapid in the second century after Christ.
The most important of the early trade routes was the great road which led to the Land of the Two Rivers across the Iranian plateau from the borders of China. Chinese traders met the westerners[1] at a place called the "Stone Tower," tentatively identified as Tashkurgan on the upper Yarkand River.[2] When the road reached Bactria, the presence of the Kushans forced a wide detour southward through Arachosia and Aria. From Rhages (Rayy) the road led west ward to Ecbatana (Hamadan).[3] From Ecbatana, however, goods continued to pass to Syria via the Fertile Crescent or across the desert via Dura-Euro-
- ↑ The Seres of Pliny Hist. nat. vi. 54 ff., Amm. Marcel. xxiii. 6. 14, and classical literature in general are not the Chinese but these intermediaries. B. Laufer, Sino-Iranica (Chicago: Field Museum, 1919), p. 538, emphatically denies a connection between the Greek sēr (pl., sēres), the Mongolian širgek, and the Manchu sirge, originally proposed by J. Klaproth, "Conjecture sur l'origine du nom de la soie chez les anciens," JA, II (1823), 243–45, and J. P. Abel-Rémusat, ibid., 245–47, and accepted by many including Schoff, Periplus, p. 266. But cf. now PW, art. "Seres."
- ↑ Charlesworth, Trade-Routes and Com. of Rom. Emp., 103.
- ↑ Isid. Char. Mans. Parth. passim. Cf. Pliny Hist. nat. vi. 46 ff. An interesting novel on the silk trade of this period is S. Merwin's Silk (New York, 1923).
