Special Silk Road Issue of Expedition Magazine
Travel the silk road with the Penn Museum in this special expanded edition of Expedition magazine. This issue was created to compliment Secrets of the Silk Road, a significant new exhibition that opens on February 5 and runs through June 5, 2011. Penn Museum is the only East Coast venue for this remarkable collection of artifacts from East Central Asia. The Museum also has many excit- ing programs planned for the duration of the exhibition including lectures, fam- ily days, special weekend programs, and a major scholarly symposium.
What follows is a collection of articles by experts in the field of Central Asian archaeology, art history, and linguistics. In our first feature article, “The Silk Roads in History,” Dan Waugh provides an overview of the famous trade routes that made up the legendary Silk Road, and the traders who traveled these routes. This is followed by Victor Mair’s fascinating look at some of the most note- worthy mummies discovered in the Tarim Basin, including those you will see in Secrets of the Silk Road. We then move to an article by Angela Sheng on the well-preserved textiles in the exhibition; Angela’s analysis reveals the cultural exchanges that took place among various groups that lived in this region. Our fourth article, by J.P. Mallory, discusses the linguistic complexity of the Tarim Basin; where did the people who lived there come from, and what languages might they have spoken? 