Beyond Scrolls and Codices: The Diversity of Stories, Languages and Scripts Along the Silk Roads

This paper is intended to act as an introduction to this volume and to place books, languages, scripts and stories – and the ideas they convey – in the role of Silk Road travellers. They should be considered alongside the people – merchants, soldiers, diplomats, monks, princesses, slaves – and their goods, skills, and ideas. This is uncontentious and some scholars have already worked on specific scripts and languages, looking at their transmission and adaptation as they travelled between peoples. Many of the papers in this volume cover translations of religious texts in the later period. Several concern the translation between two literary languages of empires, Latin and Chinese. But while there is considerable scholarship on the other languages of the Roman empire and the varieties of Latin written and spoken throughout it, there is a noticeable paucity of papers of the languages of China and the use of Literary Sinitic as the official language of the empires of China. I discuss this briefly at the conclusion of this paper.