Why the high walls at Ganish?
The medieval village, a remote and minor outpost on the Silk Road, once was ringed by imposing, 25-foot ramparts of timber and stone. A remnant still remains. So does a watchtower with firing slits, one of several that once guarded Ganish’s perimeter. So does its main gate, built of thick planks. It was always locked at sunset.
For two years I have walked the faded caravan trails that formed one of the world’s pioneering experiments in globalization: the Silk Road. Its forgotten byways are littered with old fortified settlements. Khiva, Bukhara, and Samarkand—all gloried trading oases of Uzbekistan—were once walled strongholds. Caravanserais dot the steppes in Kazakhstan, their mighty turrets collapsed into rubble. Parapets. Gates. Palisades. Moats. It is an irony of human relations, of human history. Even along memory’s golden corridor of cultural exchange, of openness, of free movement, we hunkered behind ramparts, barricades, battlements.
Video by Naveed Khan and Paul Salopek
The Silk Road trafficked more than luxury goods: silk, gold, porcelain, spices. It connected a hundred million lives across the Old World. It was a conduit for transformative ideas, for novel technologies. Greek philosophy seeped east, helping to foster an Islamic Golden Age of art and science. Eastern breakthroughs such as paper, forged steel, and high mathematics trickled west, helping to ignite the European Renaissance. Trade among civilizations broadened the human imagination. It cracked open the world.
Yet others things traveled the Silk Road too. Nomad raiders. Wars. The ancient highways of commerce funneled the Mongol hordes. Then came the plague. Business wealth stoked polarization, dynastic struggles. Walls rose around minds as well as cities. Slowly, or almost overnight, the great multiethnic trading kingdoms of Asia devolved into paranoia, intolerance, tyranny, darkness.
Outside Ganish village, a large boulder field is inscribed with the messages of bygone travelers. There are Stone Age carvings of ibex. There are texts chiseled in the forgotten scripts of vanished empires—Khoroshthi, Brahmi, Proto-Sorada, Sorada, Sogdian.
I place my palm on the relic walls of Ganish.
What to keep? What to trade away?
