The introduction of sericulture to Byzantium marks a pivotal chapter in the global dissemination of silk production techniques. The available historical sources suggest that during the reign of Justinian I (circa mid-sixth century), certain silkworm raisers from outside Byzantium brought silkworm eggs and sericultural technology into the empire. The explanatory model adopted in existing scholarship depicts this transmission as a singular, one-off event, after which sericulture was successfully established in Byzantium. However, this model fails to capture the complexities involved in technological transfer and has become increasingly incompatible with the accumulating historical facts about the Byzantine silk industry. This paper aims to revisit the journey of sericulture by adopting the lens of appropriation, acknowledging the modifications the technology underwent during its transmission. It explores how each locale along its transmission route across Eurasia adapted the technology to fit its unique context. In this vein, the paper presents a reconstruction that integrates the transregional progression from China via intermediaries to Byzantium and the temporal evolution of sericultural technology at each stop of transmission. It concludes with a revised model to interpret the transmission of sericulture into Byzantium.

One of the most impressive archives for the history of pharmaceuticals and chemistry, the Nobile Collegio Chimico Farmaceutico, sits on the Roman Forum behind the pillars of the ancient Antoninus and Faustina Temple. This space has been linked to Rome’s pharmacists since 1429. Looking out over a partially understood but mostly buried past in the ancient Roman forum, the Nobile Collegio models the preservation of a tradition that preserved the use and enchantment of ancient medicaments. In the Eternal City, seat of the global ambitions of the Catholic church and site of persistent searches for universal knowledge, “whatever you need, you shall find, be it grown on earth or living in the depths of the sea,” or so claimed Francisco Delicado’s 1532 novella La Lozana Andaluza. Despite examples of exotic plants and remedies brought to and sold in Rome, an examination Nobile Collegio documents – including 31 printed medical price lists (1609–1803), manuscript apothecary inventories, and editions of the official reference pharmacopeia Antidotarium Romanum (Latin, 1585; Italian, 1619–1678) – reveals standardization and continuity with limited change. Like the rest of the West, Roman medicine remained strikingly Galenic throughout the early modern period. Whether in the black or official market of medical substances, the information technologies of pharmacopeia and expert circles who knew about them transformed exotic substances—mastic gum, mallow root, Indies wood—into standardized, reliable health technologies. Imported from the Mediterranean, the Americas, the Levant, and Asia, these simples were codified in pharmacopeias, which acted as lexicons that made remedies routine.

The Polyglot Medicine Knowledge Graph 2.0 interconnects drug names across thirteen different Asian languages. Through unifying their associated botanical names, culled from dozens of dictionaries, to modern scientific botany with Kew Gardens, the tool makes it much easier to trace parallel drug names in contemporaneous sources across the region.
Digitally linking drug names from Chinese, Malay, Arab, Hindu, Sanskrit and other languages provides new types of reference data for the history of medical exchange and new forms of historical argumentation. Digital maps display ancient pharmacopoeic geography; links to modern biodiversity maps their current and historical propagation. Further links extend to databases on the drugs’ molecular contents and pharmacodynamic potential defined in modern biomedical terms. These enriched sources provide a wider philological resource to make and assess early historical arguments, whether from natural geography to biological responses to the drugs to charting linguistic parallels as these materials entered new Sprachbunde.
Combined with textual corpora that span millenia, we can observe the large-scale patterns of the movement of these materia across language, space, genre and time. Drugs from South East Asia migrated into China through East and South East Asian trade networks long they attracted colonial attentions of Europe. Drugs from South Asia migrated into China along Buddhist trade networks, bringing with them the tastes and scents of Arab worlds and the Hindu Kush. Drugs from Europe migrated into the Arab world and vice versa.

Premodern Chinese pharmacy incorporated a large number of medicines with distant origins thanks to the vibrant circulation of goods across Afro-Eurasia. Among them, aromatics (xiang) figured prominently, including saffron from Kashmir, camphor from Sumatra, sandalwood from southern India, and frankincense from the Arabian and Somali Peninsula. How did these fragrant imports foster the creation of new olfactory knowledge in the medical culture of China? This paper seeks to address this question by examining the period from the 10th to 14th century (Song and Yuan periods) when a rich variety of aromatics were introduced into Chinese society by merchants, diplomats, and monks via the maritime passages. Importantly, physicians and scholars were keenly aware of the aromas emitted by these imported goods and provided varied explanations of how they may contribute to healing. They also engaged in lively debates on both the benefits and dangers of these new drugs given many of them were believed to be hot and dry materials that could easily harm the body. By examining both the conceptions and uses of these aromatics in Song and Yuan China with attention to the role of smell in healing, this paper reveals the dynamic process of producing new olfactory knowledge and sensorial experience upon cross-cultural exchange.