Glass

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Roman, Byzantine and Sasanian glass vessels moving eastward, the clearest counter-flow to silk. Glass was made in China but Mediterranean and Persian glass was prized as an import, and cut and moulded vessels appear in Han-period, Northern Wei and Tang tombs. The Shosoin repository at Nara, sealed in the eighth century, still holds Sasanian cut glass that reached Japan by these routes. Roman Syria, around Antioch and the Levantine coast, was among the principal production regions. Glass is useful evidence precisely because it is fragile and datable by style: where it turns up, something carried it carefully. A traded commodity, not a place.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.