Religions of the Silk Road : Overland Trade and Cultural Exchange

Foltz, who holds a PhD in history from Harvard and has taught at Brown, Columbia, and Gettysburgh College, looks behind the romantic notions of the colonial era and tells the story of how cultural traditions, especially in the form of religious ideas, accompanied merchants and their goods along the overland Asian trade routes in pre-modern times. In telling how Hebraic and Iranian religious ideas and practices traveled eastward (to be followed later by the great missionary traditions of Buddhism, Christianity, Manichaeism, and Islam), he reveals how the silk Road was a formative and transformative rite of passage. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)