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| Format: | Recurso digital |
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Zenodo
2026
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| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20369726 |
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Table of Contents:
- <p class="MsoNormal">The Silk Road — conventionally dated to 114 BCE — is widely understood as the origin point of sustained Eurasian long-distance trade. This paper challenges that framing. Drawing on the Deep Symbolic Systems Model (DSSM), archaeological evidence, and convergent genomic data from the companion paper (Vondoom, 2026c), it argues that the Silk Road did not create the infrastructure of Eurasian exchange: it inherited it. The Indus Valley Civilization (IVC, c. 7000–1900 BCE) had already established, maintained, and symbolically encoded a trade network spanning the Iranian Plateau, the Persian Gulf, Mesopotamia, and Central Asia — a network that Possehl (2007) designates the Middle Asian Interaction Sphere (MAIS). The MAIS's overland nodes — specifically the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC, c. 2400–1700 BCE) — are geographically identical to the later Silk Road corridors. IVC seals, standardized weights, and etched carnelian beads recovered at Ur, Susa, Nippur, Gonur Depe, and Shahr-i-Sokhta constitute material proof that a functioning, symbolically sophisticated interregional exchange system was operational by 2500 BCE — two thousand years before the Silk Road's formal recognition. The Rakhigarhi genome (Narasimhan et al., 2019; Shinde et al., 2019) confirms that IVC people were physically present as resident agents at BMAC sites during this period, and that their 25% frequency at those sites indicates multigenerational communities capable of transmitting the IVC symbolic system without institutional support from the heartland. Under DSSM, this network constituted a distributed symbolic infrastructure — an error-correcting system that maintained cognitive coherence across vast territories through embodied knowledge, not centralized authority. The implications extend beyond trade history: the same geographic corridors that carried lapis lazuli from Badakhshan to Ur in 2500 BCE carried silk from China westward in 100 BCE. The geographic logic was never altered. Only the name changed.</p>