At points in the British Museum’s deeply atmospheric new exhibition, Silk Roads, you can hear in the background the steady clip-clop of hooves. It is the rhythm of trade carried on camel- and horse-back, day in and day out for centuries, from one end of the Eurasian continent to the other. Combined with the sight of stunning mountain peaks, paths and riverways alongside vast expanses of blue sky, all projected onto the walls of this darkened exhibition space, those sounds carry a gently reassuring message: across long centuries of intermittent warfare, and of the rise and fall of peoples and empires too numerous for mere mortals to recall all their names, one of the few constants has been the steady movement of goods and art objects across terrain stretching from Japan in the east all the way to Ireland in the far west.

One of the first things you learn as you enter the exhibition is that to visualise all this in terms of a single roadway would be entirely wrong. Across the period covered here, running from AD 500 to around 1000, a whole network of routes criss-crossed this giant continent. Some ran over both land and sea. Most traders would have travelled only a fraction of the length of any given route, participating in a relay whose grand scale few of them could fully have appreciated. And although silk was undoubtedly one of the most important commodities, much more besides found itself loaded onto the backs of pack-animals and sent off on truly epic journeys.

The details of how the treasures on display here once travelled, departure points and destinations, are for the most part obscure. And yet this only adds to their mystique. How, you find yourself wondering, did a statuette of a Buddha seated in the lotus position – the first item in the exhibition, and one of its highlights – find its way to Helgö in Sweden? Who carved that gentle, knowing smile? And what did those in Sweden who encountered it all those centuries ago make of it?

Buddhist ideas and artefacts loom large early on in the exhibition. Traders, monks, pilgrims and scholars were active in helping to spread Buddhism from its base in what is now northern India to regions including China, Korea and Japan. Quite why that was the case is not addressed: the emphasis here is less on exploring the demand for various goods than on tracing the contours of the trade itself. The layout is simple and intuitive. We journey from east to west, with the names of major regions and waystations hanging in capital letters over our heads, from Chang’an to Samarkand.

Our point of embarkation is Japan in the Nara period (710 – 784). This was a time when an early Japanese state and capital city were being fashioned based on Chinese inspiration. Alongside the expected evidence of Chinese influence, on display here are blue glass beads that were crafted using materials from Asia and the Sasanian Empire (in Mesopotamia and Iran), and which somehow found their way across to Japan by c. AD 500. From the Korean kingdom of Silla, around the same time, we find a glass cup which must have made a similarly remarkable journey. Its design is Roman and it was likely produced in Egypt – almost 6,000  miles west of the Korean peninsula.

Alongside well-travelled objects are locally-produced ones that reflect well-travelled ideas. The most striking of these is an earthenware figurine of a Korean official with a rather beguiling smile, dressed in the costume of a Chinese Tang-dynasty bureaucrat. Both his clothes and the use to which such figurines are thought to have been put, as burial objects intended to serve the deceased in the afterlife, reveal the pervasive influence in the Korean kingdoms of Chinese political and religious ideas.

In China itself, among the figurines made for inclusion at burial sites, was the great hero of the silk roads: the Bactrian camel, affectionately known as the ‘ship of the desert’. The example on display here, from the tomb of an eighth-century Chinese general, was made in glazed ceramic and features a camel laden with coiled silk raising its head to the sky – issuing a grunt of protest, perhaps, at the placing on its back of yet another heavy burden. A darker reminder that the silk roads were not a happy innovation for all concerned comes in the form of a figurine of a ‘Kunlun slave,’ of the sort who were captured in South-East Asia and then sold in markets in China.

Music, too, travelled the silk roads. A particularly lovely ceramic figurine shows a female musician from Tang-dynasty China sitting down and playing a lute. This piece likely formed part of an ensemble, representing a courtly musical culture that owed much of its instrumentation – lute included – to imports from India and central Asia. Alongside music went games: on display here is a set of seven intricately-carved ivory chess pieces excavated in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. They date back to AD 700, around two centuries after what is thought to have been the game’s invention in India. What we are seeing here, then, may be evidence of chess’s journey west, from the subcontinent via central Asia and the Islamic world into Europe.

In keeping with the exhibition’s emphasis on connection rather than conflict, little is said about the violent means by which some ideas were spread across the Eurasian continent, from the expansion of Islam to the consolidation of Christian Europe. The focus instead is on the way that Islamic culture flowed through the silk roads: geometrical designs favoured by Islamic artists alongside algebra, astronomy and the Arabic language – this last found on a serving dish exhibited here, bearing blessings and exhortations to eat.

Reaching the final leg of our journey we pass through the Byzantine Empire and Ostrogothic Italy until we reach a monastery in chilly northern England. We find a casket made from whalebone whose design reflects the intimately connected world that Silk Roads seeks to reveal. One of the panels features Romulus and Remus, legendary founders of Rome. Another shows a Roman army attacking Jerusalem in AD 70. On a third, we encounter the northern European story of Weland the Smith. The casket’s inscription hints at journeys running even further westwards or perhaps northwards into the sea, commemorating the whale from whose body this extraordinary work of art was made.

It is possible, of course, to overdo the ideologically appealing notion of an interconnected world running far back into the past. For most Japanese of this long period, China was pretty much the limit of their horizons. The story of the Eurasian continent is also one of missed opportunities, perhaps the best-known of them being the way that, in the era immediately before the one covered by this exhibition, the Chinese and Roman empires seem to have passed one another by like ships in the night. Rome and India exchanged goods and ideas, but the Romans only ever had the faintest sense of faraway ‘Thina’ and, likewise, the Chinese of a far western region that they called ‘Daqin’ – ‘Great China’.

Still, the romance of this journey really draws you in, thanks in no small part to an exhibition concept that prizes quality and a sense of space over packing objects in or loading visitors up with context like Bactrian camels with bales of silk. At journey’s end we find that beautiful casket alongside a screen showing an endless expanse of ocean. It is an inspired finish, suggesting at once the culmination of a voyage of almost unfathomable duration and richness and the possibility that somewhere out beyond the waves there may lie yet more enticing goods, ideas and customers, just waiting to be encountered.

Silk Roads is at the British Museum until 23 February 2025.