The 'Silk Road' is a myth: Trade with the East went by sea and India was at its heart

In the course of his review of William Dalrymple's The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World in the London Review of Books last month, Ferdinand Mount quotes a passage from a book by Warwick Ball:

The existence of the ‘Silk Road’ is not based on a single shred of historical or material evidence. There was never any such ‘road’ or even a route in the organisational sense, there was no free movement of goods between China and the West until the Mongol Empire in the Middle Ages, silk was by no means the main commodity in trade with the East and there is not a single ancient historical record, neither Chinese nor classical, that even hints at the existence of such a road. The arrival of silk in the West was more the result of a series of accidents than organised trade. 

Chinese monopoly and protectionism of sericulture is largely myth. Despite technology existing in ancient China far in advance of anything in the West, most of it did not reach the West until the Middle Ages (usually via the Mongols) when much of it was already up to a thousand years old. 

Both ancient Rome and China had only the haziest notions of each other’s existence and even less interest, and the little relationship that did exist between East and West in the broadest sense was usually one-sided, with the stimulus coming mainly from the Chinese. The greatest value of the Silk Road to history is as a lesson – and an important one at that – at how quickly and how thoroughly a myth can become enshrined as unquestioned academic fact.

That is from Ball's Rome in the East, which was published in 1999. William Dalrymple, according to Mount, takes a similar view:

He identifies the sea-lanes rather than the overland tracks as the ‘golden road’ that created the wealth of the ancient world, and places India, rather than China, at the heart of the story.