The sciences of alchemy, chemistry and medicine originated in China, Egypt, and India, but all underwent important developments in Islamic Asian countries and in Tibet and Mongolia throughout the Middle Ages.  Natural deposits of metals in Central Asia encouraged alchemy and experimentation with metallurgic materials, as witnessed by the large number of Arabic treatises dealing with science.  Tibet and Mongolia also made a large contribution to the study of pharmacology and pharmaceutics, with influences from India combining with those of east and west

Global Textile Encounters is a fascinating journey into the textiles and clothing cultures of China, India and Europe. The common thread is how fashions and traditions have travelled through space and time. In this richly illustrated anthology, with its 242 images, written both by textile researchers and practitioners as well as scholars from other fields across the globe, we hear of various types of encounters that bring to life a world of interactions and consequences as colourful as the textiles themselves.

The Silk Roads provided considerable opportunities to enrich exchanges regarding tradtional sports including martial art forms such as Chinse WuShu. On the Silk Roads, nomadic skills such as archery and horse riding hybridised with farming culture to form a number of martial arts styles which were spread as people travelled these routes, sometimes protected by martial arts practitioners. A numbe of hybrid martial arts were formed through the organic combination of different elements from Silk Roads regions.

Fortresses of the Silk Roads, From the Hindu Kush to the Mediterranean is a new book authored by Jean-Claude Voisin after many years of academic research, journal articles and published books on fortifications across the Silk Roads, such as in Lebanon and Afghanistan.

Religions of the Silk Road traces the spread of religions and cultures along the trans-Eurasian trade routes over a period of more than two millennia.  Indian, Iranian, Semitic, and Mediterranean ideas all followed the same trajectory through Central Asia to China and beyond, picking up additional elements and sometimes being radically transformed along the way.  This age-old pattern shows how the transmission of culture and the development of economic networks have always been inextricably linked, laying a precedent for the globalizing trends

For more than 1500 years, across more than 4000 miles, the Silk Roads connected East and West. These overland trails and sea lanes carried not only silks, but also cotton textiles, dyes, horses, incense, spices, gems, glass, and ceramics along with religious ideas, governing customs, and technology. For this book, Xinru Liu has assembled primary sources from ancient China, India, Central Asia, Rome and the Mediterranean, and the Islamic world, many of them difficult to access and some translated into English for the first time.

The Silk Road, which linked imperial Rome and distant China, was once the greatest thoroughfare on earth. Along it traveled precious cargoes of silk, gold and ivory, as well as revolutionary new ideas. In time it began to decline. The traffic slowed, the merchants left and finally its towns vanished beneath the desert sands to be forgotten for a thousand years; however, legends grew up of lost cities filled with treasures and guarded by demons.

Ibn Battutah was just 21 when he set out in 1325 from his native Tangier on a pilgrimage to Mecca. He did not return to Morocco for another 29 years, traveling instead through more than 40 countries on the modern map, covering 75,000 miles and getting as far north as the Volga, as far east as China, and as far south as Tanzania. He wrote of his travels, and comes across as a superb ethnographer, biographer, anecdotal historian, and occasional botanist and gastronome.

In this second edition, Susan Whitfield expands her rich and varied portrait of life along the great pre-modern trade routes of Eurasia. This new edition is updated to support further understanding of themes relevant to global and comparative history and remains the only history of the Silk Road to reconstruct the route through the personal experiences of travelers.