Before the Silk Road: The Indus Valley Civilization and the Deep Origins of Eurasian Trade Infrastructure

Archaeological evidence challenges the conventional narrative that the Silk Road (114 BCE) was the origin of Eurasian long-distance trade, revealing instead that the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC, c. 7000–1900 BCE) established and maintained a sophisticated trade network—dubbed the Middle Asian Interaction Sphere (MAIS)—by 2500 BCE. This network, spanning the Iranian Plateau, Persian Gulf, Mesopotamia, and Central Asia, predates the Silk Road by two millennia and shares identical geographic corridors. Material proof includes IVC seals, standardized weights, and carnelian beads found across key sites like Ur, Susa, and Shahr-i-Sokhta, alongside genomic data confirming multigenerational IVC communities in Bactria–Margiana (BMAC). The study leverages the Deep Symbolic Systems Model (DSSM) to argue that this network functioned as a distributed symbolic infrastructure, maintaining cognitive coherence without centralized authority. These findings reshape our understanding of Eurasian trade's deep origins.

Vondoom, A. (2026). Before the Silk Road: The Indus Valley Civilization and the Deep Origins of Eurasian Trade Infrastructure. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.20369725