About The Great Silk Road The Great Silk Road (Route) is one of the most significant achievements in the history of world civilizations. The widespread network of caravan ways crossed Europe and Asia from the Mediterranean coast to China, and served as important means of business relations and cultural exchanges between East and West in the ancient time and Middle Ages . The longest part of the Silk Road lays across the territory of Central Asia and Kazakhstan. Caravans laden with silk from China, spices and precious stones from India, silver goods from Iran , Byzantine cloths, Turkic slaves, Afraiabian ceramics and many other goods, moved through the Kara-Kum and Kyzyl-Kum deserts, the boundless steppes of Sary-Arka; passed over the ridges of the Pamirs and Tien-Shan, the Altai and the Karatau Mountains; crossed the rivers Murgab and Amu Darya, Syr Darya and Djaik. On the way of caravans there were rich settlements and towns - Merv and Bukhara, Samarkand and Urgench, Otrar and Shimkent, Taraz and Balasagun, Sauran and Talgar. The question when this highway began to function still has different answers. Considering separate sections of the Silk Road the beginning of the contacts and exchanges goes back to the third-second millennia B.C. and it lived to see the XVIth century of this era. The trade towns located along the Silk Road saw numerous devastating wars, destructions, fires, famine and plague. Some of them fell into oblivion leaving nameless ruins for their descendants, others not once perished in fire but revived again to amaze the world with their riches, the blue of the cupolas and the tracery terracotta lace-like ornamentation of mausoleums and mosques. For centuries crowds of people speaking diverse languages filled bazaars, long caravans moved along dusty roads carrying precious gems and silks, spices and dyes, gold and silver, exotic birds and animals to sell them to Europeans. Yet the Silk Road was to become not only the trade route, but it was there to bring two different civilizations into contact - those of the East and the West with their specific cultural traditions, religious beliefs, scientific and technical achievements.