The Silk Roads Forum explores fundamental questions pertaining to long-term cross-cultural interactions in the premodern world and their impact on its history – from the Bronze Age to the early modern period (3500 BC–1750 AD). The forum’s disciplinary and intellectual diversity, alongside its broad chronological and regional scope – spanning the Eurasian continent in its entirety, from China and Southeast Asia in the east, through Central Asia and the Islamic world, to Europe in the west (with Africa also taken into account) – serve as a basis for fruitful discussions and the development of new perspectives on the mechanisms by which people, artifacts, knowledge, goods, and ideas circulate between localities and cultures, on the motivations for such contacts, and on their effects on the history of the continent.

 

The forum is a space for brainstorming, the exchange of views, and the development of ideas for future research by group members, whether collaboratively or independently. It examines the particular manifestations – as shaped by specific historical and geographical contexts – of the phenomena and issues under discussion, identifying parallels that transcend cultural, chronological, and geographical divides.

 

 The forum is led by Prof. Michal Biran ,member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and Prof. Gideon Shelach-Lavi, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Participants in the 2026 Forum