Paul Cobb

The Silk Roads exhibition runs at the British Museum until 25th February 2025. Stunning and thought-provoking, its central theme is rather than a single route from east to west along which goods such as silk were traded (and the term ‘silk road’ was not coined until the 19th century), there was a web of interlocking networks that spanned Asia, Africa and Europe, conveying a multitude of objects and materials, people and ideas. Silk Roads focuses on about AD 500 to 1000, a time that witnessed significant leaps in connectivity and the rise of universal religions that linked communities across continents.

Visiting before Christmas, Silk Roads resonated strongly with me and the themes in The Book and the Knife novel series, such as the transmission of knowledge, the great culture of Moorish Spain, the fabulous handiwork of jewellery makers in Anglo-Saxon England … and paper!

Knowledge in many fields 

In Thegn of Berewic when Felip, the monk who has travelled in Moorish Spain, describes the book in the title of my series to Duke William’s forest warden Gilbert, he talks of the knowledge it contains ‘… of astronomy, optics, mathematics, medicine… so far beyond what we have…’ The book stands for the knowledge of the Islamic scholars such as Alhacen who made huge advances in science. Positioned between east and west, Persia and the Islamic caliphates were able to make use of developments spreading from countries such as China, as well as building on texts from the Greeks and Romans lost to the Christian world. Also, their tolerance of other faiths and belief that searching for truth and knowledge brought them closer to God made places such as Moorish Spain powerhouses of learning. Among the Silk Roads exhibits are books on astronomy, medicine and algebra by scholars working between the 8th and 11th centuries. 


The Book of the Fixed Stars by the Persian astronomer al-Sufi (AD 903-986)


Book of the Characteristics of Animals has text attributed to the Syrian-Persian Ibn Bakhtishu' (d. 1058) 


Book of Algebra by the Muslim mathematician al-Khwarizimi (about AD 780-850) 

The riches of al-Andalus 

Felip describes Southern Spain or al-Andalus as it was known to its Moorish rulers to Gilbert as a land of fabulous cities, streets with running water, and great libraries. As Silk Roads says, ‘from their vibrant capital Cordoba, al-Andalus’s rulers nurtured a cosmopolitan court culture. Arts and learning flourished, nurtured by the region’s unique fusion of cultures, faiths and peoples.’ It is into this civilisation, far in advance of places like England or Normandy at the time, that Samra is born, an astronomer and healer in whom Alhacen finds an equal. Irrigation techniques and the astrolabe are two examples of the technology of al-Andalus highlighted in the exhibition; one as advanced on land as the other was at sea.   




Jewellery – the riches of Anglo-Saxon England 

One product that travelled from the east along trade routes was the gemstones used in Anglo-Saxon England to craft jewellery of outstanding beauty and intricacy. New research is revealing the epic journeys made by some of the gems adorning gold jewellery found inside the famous ship burial at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, which held many objects made using a metalworking technique known as garnet cloisonné. This involves the setting of garnets, as well as glass and other materials, into gold cells or 'cloisons' of different shapes and sizes, to form glittering, mosaic-like surfaces. By the time the Sutton Hoo metalworkers were crafting their pieces in the late AD 500s–early 600s, cloisonné and the use of garnets had a long history, and current thinking points towards the Black Sea, Caucasus or West Asia sometime around the early AD 200s for its origins. New research carried out for Silk Roads, assisted by a fuller geological reference library alongside archaeological and historical sources, has helped researchers to identify six geographical groupings of garnets used in early medieval metalwork. The deposits span an astonishing area from Scotland to Sri Lanka. This remarkable metalwork therefore embodies the extraordinary reach of networks that were active around the time the Sutton Hoo ship was buried.

Shoulder clasp and sword-scabbard button Mound 1 Sutton Hoo burial 

Paper – transmitting the word 

Here is Felip is talking to Gilbert again in Thegn of Berewic;

‘The Great Library at Cordoba once had over four hundred thousand books, Gilbert, with nearly fifty volumes to catalogue them all. Imagine! A whole building, with row on row of shelves, as high as the ceiling. Between the rows of shelves, scholars sat reading at tables, or gathered outside to debate what they had read. The head librarian to Caliph Al-Hakam, who founded it, used to send his deputy, a woman called Labna, to the bookstalls and merchants of Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad in search of new acquisitions. Toledo, where I lived and worked, has several libraries, linked to its centres of faith and learning.’

Gilbert was shaking his head.

‘Four hundred thousand? Where would you get enough calf-, goat- or sheepskin to make the parchment for that many books?’

Felip smiled. ‘Not parchment; paper. Only paper can produce that many books quickly and cheaply…’

The Silk Roads exhibition describes how the introduction of paper making technology from Tang China into the Abbasid caliphate centred on Baghdad facilitated the transmission of secular knowledge and ideas, as well as of the Islamic faith. Works in Greek, Sanskrit and Persian were translated into Arabic. A new type of paper Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, lighter and smaller in size, emerged by the 900s. So while the libraries of Christian Europe still groaned under the weight of books laboriously made from parchment – needing hundreds of animal skins – in places such as al-Andalus numbers of books could be made quickly from paper, copied and moved. 

Now, imagine if the book in The Book and the Knife could be copied like that… 


Parts of the Qur'an written in kufic script (top) possibly Egypt AD 800s
Qur'an written in naskh script (bottom) probably Iraq or Iran 1036 

Happy New Year!