Runciman’s great insight was that the real heirs of Roman civilisation were not the crude chain-mailed knights of the rural west, but instead the sophisticated Byzantines of Constantinople and the cultivated Arabs of Damascus, both of whom had preserved the Hellenised urban tradition of antiquity long after it was destroyed in Europe: “Our civilisation,” he wrote, “has grown … out of the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident.”
Mavi Boncuk | 
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World is a 2015 non-fiction book written by Peter Frankopan, a historian at the University of Oxford. . In The Silk Roads, Frankopan attempts nothing less than a major reassessment of world history, in which the usual occidental characters are not centre stage.
"(Peter Frankopan) throws his net wider still, showing how the belt of territory between China and Constantinople was for much of history the centre of the world, and a place from which we drew so much of what has come to be regarded as “western civilisation”.
Traditionally, of course, it is a part of the world that rarely figures in Eurocentric histories: who, for example, now remembers those Turkish converts to Judaism, the Khazars, who dominated the trade and culture of the steppes from the 8th to the 10th century, when they were finally and savagely wiped out by the Rus Vikings, who after spilling “rivers of blood” and plundering the Khazar capital Atil were “gorged on loot and worn out with raiding”? Equally, how many of us recall the legendary greatness of the Seljuk sultans of Merv? The ruins of their once magnificent capital lie now amid the camel-coloured wastes of Turkmenistan: a scatter of mud walls, a few ambiguous foundations, the odd cracked dome of a mud-brick Sufi tomb forgotten on the outer edge of a polluted and provincial post-Soviet town. On one side a forest of smokestacks belches fumes into the desert; on the other a spread of barren collective farms extend towards the encroaching dunes: “If you meet a viper and a Mervi,” advises a local proverb, “kill the Mervi first, and the viper afterwards.”
Yet in the 10th century, while Europe was paralysed by Viking raids, Merv was a flourishing Silk Route capital, and the second city of Islam, trumped only by Baghdad with its 100 million citizens. It grew fabulously rich on the profits of the China trade and the tribute of an empire that extended southwards from Afghanistan to Egypt and the gates of Byzantium. Along with its great sister cities – Tashkent, Bukhara and Samarkand – Merv developed a complex culture, fostered in universities, and produced such genii as al-Biruni, who first computed the radius of the earth, the lyric poet Rudaki, and the great Ibn Sina – known in the west as Avicenna – who wrote 242 books of stupefying variety and whose Canon of Medicine became a textbook in the hospitals of Christian Europe for over 500 years."
The Guardian's review of the book in 2015 was positive: "The Silk Roads is full of intriguing insights and some fascinating details". Frankopan points out the role in history of mainly European personalities, without mentioning figures such as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk or Ho Chi Minh.
"(Peter Frankopan) throws his net wider still, showing how the belt of territory between China and Constantinople was for much of history the centre of the world, and a place from which we drew so much of what has come to be regarded as “western civilisation”.
Traditionally, of course, it is a part of the world that rarely figures in Eurocentric histories: who, for example, now remembers those Turkish converts to Judaism, the Khazars, who dominated the trade and culture of the steppes from the 8th to the 10th century, when they were finally and savagely wiped out by the Rus Vikings, who after spilling “rivers of blood” and plundering the Khazar capital Atil were “gorged on loot and worn out with raiding”? Equally, how many of us recall the legendary greatness of the Seljuk sultans of Merv? The ruins of their once magnificent capital lie now amid the camel-coloured wastes of Turkmenistan: a scatter of mud walls, a few ambiguous foundations, the odd cracked dome of a mud-brick Sufi tomb forgotten on the outer edge of a polluted and provincial post-Soviet town. On one side a forest of smokestacks belches fumes into the desert; on the other a spread of barren collective farms extend towards the encroaching dunes: “If you meet a viper and a Mervi,” advises a local proverb, “kill the Mervi first, and the viper afterwards.”
Yet in the 10th century, while Europe was paralysed by Viking raids, Merv was a flourishing Silk Route capital, and the second city of Islam, trumped only by Baghdad with its 100 million citizens. It grew fabulously rich on the profits of the China trade and the tribute of an empire that extended southwards from Afghanistan to Egypt and the gates of Byzantium. Along with its great sister cities – Tashkent, Bukhara and Samarkand – Merv developed a complex culture, fostered in universities, and produced such genii as al-Biruni, who first computed the radius of the earth, the lyric poet Rudaki, and the great Ibn Sina – known in the west as Avicenna – who wrote 242 books of stupefying variety and whose Canon of Medicine became a textbook in the hospitals of Christian Europe for over 500 years."
The Guardian's review of the book in 2015 was positive: "The Silk Roads is full of intriguing insights and some fascinating details". Frankopan points out the role in history of mainly European personalities, without mentioning figures such as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk or Ho Chi Minh.
- Publisher : Vintage; Reprint edition (March 7, 2017)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 672 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1101912375
- ISBN-13 : 978-1101912379
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