I also show Han China, both the Eastern and Western Han dynasties you can see on this timeline as well, and in India, I show the Maurya Dynasty on the timeline. I don't depict it here on the map, but on the map, I show the Kushan Empire, and I also show it on the timeline. Now, the reason why I wanted to pick these empires at this specific time in the world is to highlight the fact that they weren't operating in complete isolation. In fact, as we get to the second and first century BCE, especially as we get into the Common Era, we start seeing a significant amount of trade and interaction between these empires, not to say that there wasn't trade and interaction before that time, but it started to get accelerated, and to a large degree, it got accelerated because you had these contiguous empires that at least within their borders were able to provide some level of stability for someone to travel across roads or travel across borders, and so you start to see the emergence of these trading networks. In red, you see trading roads or paths in red, and in blue, you see those paths by sea, and this isn't even comprehensive, and even what I showed on the empires, there were many other smaller kingdoms that also existed in the world that I just don't have depicted here, but what this contiguous block of empires allowed is for the trade of goods and ideas, and sometimes collectively, the routes that were used for this trade is referred to as the Silk Road or the Silk Roads, or really, you could say the Silk Routes, and so it's a collective number of paths that people used to trade things. Now, why call it silk? Well, it all boils down to silk being a major commodity of trade at this time period, so if you wanna think about the different things that were traded around the world, this is just a sample of it.