Routes of Knowledge

Which way did each road run?

The two roads run against each other. The alphabet set out from Sinai and the Levant around 1850 BC, by the dating most specialists accept. One branch went west to Greece and Rome; another went east through the Persian empire and Central Asia to the Mongols. Paper set out from China. A palace official presented an improved paper to the emperor in 105, and by about 313 merchants were writing on it at the Chinese frontier. From there it went west, to Baghdad, Egypt, Spain and at last England.

They also moved at different speeds. Paper crossed from China to England in about fourteen hundred years, carried along one road by merchants, officials and craftsmen. The alphabet took longer and spread wider: about thirteen centuries from Sinai to Rome, and some three thousand years to reach the Mongols. Each people that took it changed it, so on the map it looks less like a road than a tree.

Where did the two roads meet?

In six places, from the Chinese frontier to Spain.

Dunhuang, around 313. Sogdian merchants living in China wrote letters home on paper, in an alphabet descended from Aramaic. The Sogdians had both things at once: paper, which came from China and which they would carry west, and an alphabet, which came from the west and which they would hand on east. The alphabet did not reach China, though. The letters were written by foreigners, and Chinese writing did not change.

The Library Cave at Dunhuang, sealed around 1000. Cave 17 of the Mogao caves, near the town, held manuscripts, mostly on paper, in more than twenty languages and scripts. Sogdian, Old Uyghur and a Hebrew prayer leaf are written in descendants of Aramaic. Tibetan, Khotanese and Sanskrit use scripts of the Indian Brahmi family, whose link to Aramaic is still argued. And there is Chinese. Three kinds of writing share one material.

Samarkand and Sogdiana. This was the home of the Sogdian alphabet, and one of the letters lost near Dunhuang was addressed to Samarkand. When an Arab army took a mountain fortress near Panjakent in 722, its ruler left an archive behind, much of it in Sogdian script and some of it on paper. After the Arab conquest, Samarkand’s famous paper carried Arabic letters.

Baghdad, around 800. Paper entered the caliph’s offices in the Arabic script, which descends from Aramaic through the Nabataean letters of Hegra. From Baghdad to Xàtiva, the paper of one road was written mainly in an alphabet from the other.

Fustat. The Cairo Geniza, in the old city, kept centuries of Jewish writings, mostly from the 10th to the 13th century and many of them on paper. They are in Hebrew letters, whose square script is another descendant of Aramaic.

Al-Andalus, 11th and 12th centuries. The Missal of Silos, a Latin book for the Mass, is usually counted as the oldest surviving European book written partly on paper, probably paper made in Muslim Spain. In 1154 an Arab geographer praised the paper of Xàtiva, and its papermakers kept working after a Christian king of Aragon took the town in 1244. Here the Latin alphabet, the western line of the old road, first met paper in Europe. Fabriano, Nuremberg and Hertford follow from this meeting.

Why do the roads never meet at the start?

Because they begin in different worlds. Luoyang, where paper’s road starts, wrote in Chinese characters, which are not an alphabet. The first letters were carved in Sinai long before paper existed. Each road needed the other to be well on its way before they could cross.

Follow each one on its own page: the Road of Paper, from a Chinese court to an English mill, and the Road of the Alphabet, from the turquoise mines of Sinai to the Mongolian steppe.