The Silk Road & Iran

Look at any physical map of Eurasia and the reason is obvious: between the Tian Shan and Pamir mountains in the east and the Mediterranean coast in the west, the Iranian plateau is the only continuous land that a loaded camel can cross. From the second century BCE, when Chinese envoys first reached Parthian Iran, until the 15th century, when ocean shipping made the overland route obsolete, every Silk Road merchant had to deal with an Iranian power.

"The land of Anxi [Parthia] is several thousand li in extent. Its people till the soil and have walled cities. Their trade is by silver coins... Their merchants travel by land and by sea to every neighbouring country."

Iranians were not just gatekeepers; they were participants. Sogdian Iranians from Samarkand and Bukhara were the road's principal long-distance merchants for a thousand years — their language, written in an Aramaic-derived script, became the Silk Road lingua franca and travelled with their colonies as far as the Tang capital Chang'an.

In 2023 UNESCO inscribed 54 Iranian caravanserais as a serial World Heritage Site — the densest surviving network of Silk Road infrastructure anywhere on earth. Built roughly one day's camel-march apart, the caravanserais offered merchants secure lodging, water from a qanat, stabling and protection from bandits. The Safavid shahs of the 17th century built or rebuilt nearly a thousand of them across their realm.