Ancient

Not one road but a shifting web of paths stretching roughly 6,400 kilometers from Chang'an, modern Xian, through the oasis towns o...

Amber, fossilized resin prized for ornament and credited with healing powers, washed up along the Baltic and North Sea coasts and ...

Running up to 3,000 kilometers from the frankincense groves of Dhofar and Hadramawt, in modern Yemen and Oman, through the Hejaz t...

Built or organized under Darius I in the 5th century BCE, the road ran about 2,700 kilometers from the Aegean coast of Asia Minor ...

Each sailing season a state-supervised fleet ran from Alexandria to Puteoli and later Ostia, riding the Etesian winds in roughly t...

Bronze needs copper plus tin, and tin was scarce. The richest western source was Cornwall and Devon in Britain, moved overland thr...

From roughly the 2nd millennium BCE, herders and traders moved metals, horses, wool and grain along the grass belt from the Altai ...

Monsoon sailing, mastered in the Indian Ocean by the 1st century CE, allowed predictable annual voyages, and ports such as Guangzh...

Pepper from the Malabar coast, cinnamon from Sri Lanka and cloves, nutmeg and mace from the Maluku islands reached the Mediterrane...

Sections date to the 5th century BCE, but the Sui dynasty completed the through route in the 7th century CE with massive corvee la...

The Nile's current runs north while prevailing winds blow south, giving boats a free ride each way, an accident of geography that ...

The camel, adopted across the Sahara in the first centuries CE, made desert crossing routine. Salt from Taghaza and Bilma moved so...

The name is a modern scholarly label taken from a Latin phrase in the Vulgate, but the road itself was among the oldest strategic ...

Running along the high ground east of the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea, the route linked Egypt and Arabia with Syria through the...

Mesopotamian texts of the later third millennium BC speak of ships from Meluhha, widely identified with the Indus region, docking ...

Long before Rome was an empire, salt pans near the mouth of the Tiber supplied a commodity that every farming people needed for pr...