Modern historians are now pretty sure there never was a "Silk Road"
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/jsb5my/comme...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road#Name;_and_contested_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/jsb5my/comme...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road#Name;_and_contested_...
1. It implies a singular road connecting end to end, when the reality is that there's was a vast network of routes across both land and sea.
2. It implies that the routes existed primarily to transport silk. They carried a lot of things and silk probably wasn't the original or most significant good transported.
The article discusses both of these aspects, albeit imperfectly.
The idea of a very lucrative direct connection between China and the Mediterranean is bunk, but the connectivity, people and goods movement was there for a long, long time, on and off.
Silk is still traded. There is still commerce between China and Iran. Perhaps the whole world and all the infrastructure are part of the silk road!