markets and returned eastward laden with trade goods from Europe. Much of the Silk Road still exists and can be visited, albeit the parts in Syria and Iraq might be politically unwise to explore just at the moment.

Our 73-page atlas follows the route from west to east, starting in ancient Tyre (now Sour, in southern Lebanon) and in Samandag in Turkey, heading eastward through Syria and Iraq (with a two-page inset map of Damascus and a six-page spread for fabled Baghdad) before heading north of the Kavir Desert to Tehran (another four-page spread) and eastward into Afghanistan to follow either the northern or southern routes through modern-day Samarkand and Tashkent (more insets) before moving on to the Urumqi region of far-western China and eventually ending at Xi´an.

The atlas is fully indexed and can be used east to west as easily as west to east. Various scales.