Shadow on the Silk Road

The world-famous Hungarian–British archaeologist Aurel Stein was just visiting the Tarim basin on his second major expedition to the Inner Asian section of the Silk Road in 1907, when he became a witness to a rare astronomical phenomenon, a total solar eclipse. He also captured his impressions in his work entitled Ruins of Desert Cathay, also published in Hungarian. At the same moment, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky, a pioneer in color photography, as a member of a Russian scientific expedition was trying to take the world’s first color photograph of a total solar eclipse on a snowcapped hillside in Russian Turkestan (today Uzbekistan), in the middle of a snowstorm. In a special way, the lives of the Hungarian archaeologist and the Russian photographer of the Silk Road were intertwined for a moment. In my paper I take a look at this special moment from an astronomical, geographical, and historical perspective as well.

Keywords: Sir Aurel Stein, Mikhailovich Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, Silk Road, solar eclipse