Because the book condenses so much information into so few pages, undergraduates who lack a background in Near, Central, and East Asian history might get lost it the multitude of Asian, Turkic, Persian and Islamic terms and names rapidly introduced. The book highlights linkages among the various peoples who inhabited this region until 1500 and overall provides a good, brief account of the history and interactions of Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, Nestorian Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and Muslims. He defines the Silk Road as not one road but rather a network of many roads from East to West, with "spurs" dipping into the Indian subcontinent, southern Iran, and the northern Eurasian steppe. He attempts, fortunately, to investigate this immense body of material thematically: "Taking as its theme the specific example of the spread of religious ideas, this book tells the story of how religions accompanied merchants and their goods along the overland Asian trade routes of pre-modern times" (7). In this short world history monograph, Richard Foltz uses the Silk Road as the geographic construct in which to examine "the movement and transformation" of all the religions that inhabited this vast region for some two thousand years. Foltz, Richard C., Religions of the Silk Road: Overland Trade and Cultural Exchange from Antiquity to the Fifteenth Century (St.
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