What caused the change?
Labs / History
Silk Road Relay
No single caravan crossed the whole Silk Road — the same bale passed hand to hand through oasis and steppe cities, and every middleman added transport, a markup, and the cost of what raiders stole. Click cities to choose the route and watch a bale worth 50 denarii in China arrive in Rome worth many times more.
Labs / History / Silk Road Relay
Silk Road Relay
No single caravan crossed the whole Silk Road — the same bale passed hand to hand through oasis and steppe cities, and every middleman added transport, a markup, and the cost of what raiders stole. Click cities to choose the route and watch a bale worth 50 denarii in China arrive in Rome worth many times more.
Why it matters
Why explore this?
History is about change over time and the choices that shape it. This model helps you compare causes, consequences, and patterns without treating the past as a list of dates.
Explore
Try the model
at caravan 50 dRome price 0 dmarkup 0×lost 0%
Investigate
Questions to test
Predict first, try it in the model, then use what you observe to answer.
What to try
- The steppe road is shorter but wide open — does routing through it make Rome cheaper, or just lose more goods?
- Push every merchant's markup to 60%. How many hands does it take to turn 50 denarii into a fortune?
- Switch off bandit raids. How much of the final price was really just insurance against theft?
- Close the passes with raiders still active. Which route survives, and what does that do to the price in Rome?
- If silk in Rome cost roughly its weight in gold, which mattered more: the distance, the middlemen, or the danger?
Explain
Make sense of what happened
Build an explanation with a cause, a change, and a consequence. Then identify evidence from the model and one limitation of what the model can show.
Check
Before you leave
Who or what was affected?
What can this model not tell us?
If you can answer all three using evidence from the model, you understand the main idea. If not, return to Explore and change one setting at a time.