Silk, Salt and Saddlebags

The ancient trade routes, one caravan stop at a time

Selin Aydin2 episodes2 min of audio177 playsEpisodic

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S1 · E2Sep 19, 20260:52111 plays Preview

Salt Going South, Gold Coming North

For a thousand years camel caravans carried salt from the Sahara's mines to Timbuktu and returned with gold. Selin follows the Azalai route and the traders who still walk it.

S1 · E1Jul 4, 20260:5366 plays Members

The Sogdians Who Ran the Middle of the Road

Between China and Persia, a people with no empire controlled the richest stretch of the Silk Road for five centuries. Selin reads their letters, found in a watchtower, to find out how.

About the show

Selin Aydin grew up in Bursa, where the silk trade never quite stopped, and she has spent her career tracing the roads that carried goods across continents long before anyone called it globalisation. Silk, Salt and Saddlebags is a narrated history series, released fortnightly, with each episode of around forty minutes following a single route, cargo or caravanserai: the Sogdian merchants who ran the middle of the Silk Road, the salt caravans crossing the Sahara to Timbuktu, the amber road from the Baltic to Rome, the incense trail from Dhofar to Petra, the tea and horse road through Yunnan. Selin reads the merchants' own letters and contracts where they survive, visits the ruins where she can, and explains the money, the risks and the politics in plain language. It is a show for listeners who like their history grounded in real objects and real places, and who want to understand why a coin from Samarkand turns up in a grave in Sweden.

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