The modem term 'Silk Road' was coined to describe a compendium of 'global trade routes', along which distant Empires conducted trade, diplomatic and cultural exchange over millennia. Essentially the ‘Silk Road' brought cultures of the Mediterranean (Byzantine and Islamic), the Near East and China into indirect/direct contacts with each other. Many cultural artifacts travelled along the 'Silk Road’, the related sea route to India, and the extended land routes to the Latin West. Important as objects of trade, diplomacy and cultural exchange along these 'Silk Road' routes were the many types of light and easily transportable silk textiles produced across cultures. This paper aims to explore a selection of these silks as they were mutually exchanged between cultures of the extended 'Silk Road' in order to seek out the cultural messages they expressed. Towards this end the paper investigates the influences of institutional/non-institutional power systems and socio-economic forces across cultures, on the production, design, technical structure, marketing and exchange of the silks. The paper seeks to use the tangible evidence of surviving and documented silks across cultures to ask about the ‘intangible’ aspects of silk exchange along the extended 'Silk Road'. The paper poses
the question:

What were the cultural messages embodied in the 'tangible' silks and how far did they reflect the existence of an 'intangible' 'silk-centred common mentality' across cultures?

The paper selects three forms of silk exchange, which existed across cultures:
1. Courtly ‘silk gift exchange' (as mirror of power relations across cultures)
2. Mercantile silk-trade exchange (as reflection of 'socio/economic' demand and of technical cross influences), and
3. ‘Nomadic’ silk gift exchange (as reflection of the relationship of 'peripheral' to 'centralised' cross-cultural demand for the silks) Examples of silks that crossed cultures will be drawn from: selected extant silks, which survive in Latin Church treasuries and from amongst excavated silks of the Caucusus and Southern Ukraine, as well as from documented silks involved in the practice of cross-cultural courtly 'silk gift exchange'.
The paper illustrates how imported silks in the Western Church treasuries provide a glimpse of the allure of the 'extended Silk Road' silks in the Latin world. The paper indicates how cross-cultural, courtly ‘silk gift exchange' confirms that 'adoption/ appropriation, adaptation, hybridisation, and integration' did occur when the silks crossed cultures, but that their uses yet remained remarkably similar across cultural divides. The practice of 'courtly silk gift exchange' evidently transcended civilisations and cultures from the period of late Antiquity onwards. The paper similarly illustrates
that ‘trade silks' across cultures served very similar human needs East and West.
The paper concludes with the observation that 'extended Silk Road' silks as objects of one culture acting as cultural artifacts in another culture, can affect 'mentalities' (concepts and norms) across cultures. This occurs at the point where mutual influences, parallels and overlaps occur, whilst some differences may still remain. Engagement with the silks in very similar ways suggests that a continuum of interpretation existed between and across cultures, in a manner suggestive of the existence of a common,
extended 'Silk Road mentality'. However, inevitably the silk artifacts also were subject to distinct and particular cultural interpretations across cultures and to individualised traditions of making'.