With mixed emotions, Alison Meltzer explained the origins of the Afghan garments she loaned the Mariposa Museum for its “Along the Silk Road” exhibit. In an interview earlier this month, she described how the traditional clothing had brought to mind the exchange student who, instead of returning home to Afghanistan, vanished last spring in a bid for residency in Canada.

These gifts from Afghanistan are among the hundreds of artifacts, each with its own story to tell, in the new exhibit representing the Silk Road, which stretches more than 5,000 miles from the Mediterranean through the Middle East to Asia and saw its heyday between 600 and 1200 A.D.

“The Silk Road wasn’t one road, it was a network of trade routes,” Mariposa’s Executive Director David Blair said on Sept. 9. “Global trade is nothing new.”

At the center of this network — which still lingers in the trade of natural gas and oil as opposed to the all-important silks, spices and porcelain of yesteryear — is the still mysterious Middle East.

“This area is incredibly relevant to us today, yet relatively unknown and not understood,” Blair noted. “The Silk Route is still alive — not quite in the same way.”

The 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorists attacks did not enter into the planning of this exhibit, which opened on Sept. 2 and runs through Jan. 16, but it was good timing for it, he said.

“This is a kind of linking of very different places,” he noted. “I don’t usually think of these places together.”

Technology may have changed the way goods and information are exchanged, but the interconnectedness of this part of the world is centuries old.

“This wasn’t just a route for stuff. All the world’s religions were moving along this route,” he said, including Buddhism, Christianity, Taoism and Islam, all of which took foothold in various parts of the world.

Strong central authority from the Byzantine Empire and later under Mongolia’s Genghis Khan allowed the route to prosper, and with it came a flowering of musical and theatrical entertainment to help pass the long nights en route.

“It was never exactly safe, but there was enough central authority to make it worth the trip,” Blair noted. Eventually, sea routes came to dominate world trade as central authority along the Silk Road gave way.

Silk from China was the foremost commodity traded, second only to carpets from Persia and Afghanistan, according to Terry Reeves, education director at the Mariposa.

The “jelak” Roheed Hameed of Afghanistan gave to his host family would have been made in silk long ago, Hameed explained in an email to his host mother, Alison Meltzer of Wilton, on July 20. (More about Hameed’s experiences as an exchange student in a story on page 1.)

“It goes back to the ancient Arabic people,” Meltzer said about the jelak, now worn by highly regarded Afghan men, ages 45 and older. Usually, the male head of the family would wear a jelak at ceremonial family gatherings, she added.

“Very ancient way of life,” she said about the Afghan culture. “I got really fascinated.”

When Meltzer learned the Mariposa was calling for artifacts from Afghanistan for its Silk Road exhibit, she said she saw it as an opportunity to go on sharing what Hameed had imparted to her and other members of the community about his culture.

Other residents of the Monadnock region have also dug up their treasures from the Silk Road, some of them collected during visits to its numerous countries.

Videographer and anthropologist Caitlin Mullin of Hancock left a wide band of woven fabric from Asia in the care of the Mariposa; it was put to use in constructing a small-scale yurt or ger, a Mongolian family hut, for the exhibit.

“Ger is a structure of nomadic, pastoral people of northern and central Asia,” Blair said. “It’s collapsible and light.”

Reeves made the Mariposa’s ger to be accessible for children and adults to crawl inside, Blair said.

Anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson of Hancock lent the exhibit an 18th-century Persian prayer book. A child’s vest from Turkmenistan is among the items Jean Rosenthal of Harrisville picked up during travels in the late-1980s.

In addition to the stories behind them, which some of the lenders will talk about in programs at the Mariposa this fall, the artifacts in the exhibit will be brought to life with interactive demonstrations, traditional dance performances, films and lectures. Boston College Professor of Fine Arts Jonathan Bloom will talk about “Art and Architecture Along the Silk Road,” Friday at 7 p.m.

This article appears in the Sept. 22 issue of the Ledger-Transcript.