Antioch and the Silk Road

Antioch, on the Orontes River in what is now southeastern Turkey, was for nearly a thousand years the principal eastern market of the Roman, Byzantine, and early Islamic Mediterranean. Founded in 300 BCE by one of Alexander the Great’s generals, Seleucus I Nicator, the city served successively as the western capital of the Seleucid Empire, a major city of the Roman and Byzantine empires, and one of the principal markets of the early Islamic world after the Arab conquest of 637 CE. The urban system of which the city was a part is treated in the article on Silk Road cities, and Antioch’s position in the wider geography of trade is mapped in the article on the routes of the Silk Road. What strikes me on rereading my own notes is how many of the surviving Silk Road-period sources for the western end of the network actually come from Antioch or its hinterland.

The Hellenistic and Roman city

Antioch was founded as one of the several successor capitals of Alexander the Great’s empire and grew rapidly into one of the largest cities of the Hellenistic world. By the first century CE it was the third-largest city of the Roman Empire after Rome and Alexandria — a ranking that, in my experience, modern readers routinely underestimate, because they tend to think of “the Roman world” as Italy and the western provinces. The Roman city was a major centre of administration, of craft production, and of long-distance trade.

Antioch’s commercial importance derived from its position at the western end of the overland routes from Mesopotamia, at the eastern end of the Mediterranean sea routes, and on the principal overland route from the Syrian interior to the Levantine coast. The city was a major market for goods arriving by caravan from the east and by sea from Egypt, Italy, and the western Mediterranean. Three transport systems, all meeting in the same agora — it is the kind of geographical accident that creates a great city.

Antioch and the Roman silk trade

The city played a central role in the Roman silk trade described in the article on the Roman Empire and the Silk Road. By the first century CE, Chinese silk was reaching Antioch in substantial quantities, much of it transshipped through the Sasanian Empire and reworked in Antioch’s own workshops. Antioch’s textile workshops developed a flourishing industry in the finishing, dyeing, and re-embroidery of imported silks. The Roman emperor Commodus (r. 180–192 CE) reportedly prohibited the wearing of pure silk in the provinces, a sign both of the social reach of the trade and of the imperial anxiety that it produced — and the conventional view that this was a moralising measure understates the real motive, which I take to be balance-of-payments panic.

Antioch is, today, a small Turkish city of perhaps 220,000 people; in the Roman period it was, briefly, one of the largest in the world.

Antioch’s great bazaar, attested by Roman, Byzantine, and Arab sources, was one of the busiest commercial districts of the pre-modern world. The bazaar was a covered market, organised by trade, with separate sections for textiles, jewellery, metalwork, perfumes, and food. It was destroyed several times — by the earthquakes of 526 and 588, by the Persian sack of 540, and by the Arab conquest of 637 — but was rebuilt on each occasion. The earthquakes, by the way, were the worst of the disasters; the Persian sack at least left the merchants alive to start over.

A personal note

The modern city of Antakya (the post-1920s name of Antioch) preserves very little of its Silk Road character. The great bazaar is gone, the Roman and Byzantine walls are mostly gone, and the archaeological museum is small. A reader expecting to walk through a living medieval city will be disappointed. What Antioch has is its location — still the natural crossing point between Anatolia and the Levant — and the famous cave churches carved into the cliffs above the Orontes.

Further reading

• Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford, 2012).
• Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road, 2nd ed. (2015).
• The relevant Oxford Handbook or Cambridge History chapter for the region or period.

Related pages

See also The great cities of the Silk Road, The routes and geography of the Silk Road, and The Roman Empire and the Silk Road.