It is particularly important because it covers a part of the world where history is not always clear – either because the historical record is incomplete or is contested.
Silk Road numismatics includes all coinage traditions from East Asia to Europe, from earliest times.
They relate to both the Attic standard of ancient Greek coinage and to the wuzhu system of the Han dynasty, and name the local kings of Khotan, for whom there is no indigenous historical record.
The Hirayama Trainee Curatorship in Silk Road Numismatics was established in the early 1990s, as "a five-year project to enable young scholars at the beginning of their careers, to come to the British Museum for a full academic year to develop their knowledge of Silk Road coins.
Coins were not the only form of money on the Silk Road, as recent studies on textiles have shown.