Place · caravan route terminus · Turkey

Antioch

Function

Travel & migration

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

36.202, 36.160

Worth knowing

Silk reached Rome through here at a price Pliny found scandalous and the Senate repeatedly tried to legislate against, on the ground that it left the wearer effectively naked. Nobody in Antioch knew where it came from; the Romans thought it grew on trees.

Connections (3)

• Trade routePalmyra

  Palmyra's caravans crossed the Syrian desert to the Euphrates and their goods went on to Antioch for shipment across the Mediterranean — the last two stages of the overland route. Palmyrene inscriptions record the tariff on every commodity that passed and name the merchants who financed the convoys, several of whom had agents at the Gulf ports and one of whom left his name in a cave on Socotra on the India run.

• Trade routeRome

  Antioch was where the overland route met the sea and where Rome's eastern luxury trade was assembled. Pliny's complaint that India, China and Arabia drained a hundred million sesterces a year from the empire is about goods that passed through this city, and the Senate legislated repeatedly against silk on the ground that it left the wearer effectively naked. Nobody in either city knew where it came from.

• Court associationBindusāra

  Athenaeus preserves a letter in which Bindusara, whom the Greeks called Amitrochates, asks Antiochus I of Syria for sweet wine, dried figs and a Greek philosopher; Antiochus sent the wine and the figs and replied that Greek law did not permit the sale of philosophers. Antiochus's ambassador Deimachus was resident at Pataliputra, as Megasthenes had been under Chandragupta.

On these journeys

• The Silk Road — Antioch to Chang’an, through India

Sources

Wikipedia, “Antioch”. Aurel Stein’s reports; Susan Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road; the International Dunhuang Project.

• Wikipedia — Antioch