Commerce, Culture, and Community in a Red Sea Port in the Thirteenth Century PDF Download

Author: Li Guo
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004137475
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This is a study and edition of the Arabic documents uncovered in Quseir, Upper Egypt. These documents shed light on the Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade in the thirteenth century. They also reveal aspects of the everyday life, popular culture, and linguistic features of the communities involved.

Author: Reuven Amitai
Publisher: V&R Unipress
ISBN: 3847004115
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 537

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Book Description
The Mamluk Sultanate represents an extremely interesting case study to examine social, economic and cultural developments in the transition into the rapidly changing modern world. On the one hand, it is the heir of a political and military tradition that goes back hundreds of years, and brought this to a high pitch that enabled astounding victories over serious external threats. On the other hand, as time went on, it was increasingly confronted with "modern" problems that would necessitate fundamental changes in its structure and content. The Mamluk period was one of great religious and social change, and in many ways the modern demographic map was established at this time. This volume shows that the situation of the Mamluk Sultanate was far from that of decadence, and until the end it was a vibrant society (although not without tensions and increasing problems) that did its best to adapt and compete in a rapidly changing world.

Author: Alexis Wick
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520285913
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
The Red Sea has, from time immemorial, been one of the worldÕs most navigated spaces, in the pursuit of trade, pilgrimage and conquest. Yet this multidimensional history remains largely unrevealed by its successive protagonists. Intrigued by the absence of a holistic portrayal of this body of water and inspired by Fernand BraudelÕs famous work on the Mediterranean, this book brings alive a dynamic Red Sea world across time, revealing the particular features of a unique historical actor. In capturing this heretofore lost space, it also presents a critical, conceptual history of the sea, leading the reader into the heart of Eurocentrism. The Sea, it is shown, is a vital element of the modern philosophy of history. Alexis Wick is not satisfied with this inclusion of the Red Sea into history and attendant critique of Eurocentrism. Contrapuntally, he explores how the world and the sea were imagined differently before imperial European hegemony. Searching for the lost space of Ottoman visions of the sea, The Red Sea makes a deeper argument about the discipline of history and the historianÕs craft.

Author: David Abulafia
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199934983
Category : Navigation
Languages : en
Pages : 1115

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Book Description
"David Abulafia's new book guides readers along the world's greatest bodies of water to reveal their primary role in human history. The main protagonists are the three major oceans-the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian-which together comprise the majority of the earth's water and cover over half of its surface. Over time, as passage through them gradually extended and expanded, linking first islands and then continents, maritime networks developed, evolving from local exploration to lines of regional communication and commerce and eventually to major arteries. These waterways carried goods, plants, livestock, and of course people-free and enslaved-across vast expanses, transforming and ultimately linking irrevocably the economies and cultures of Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas"--

Author: charles le qusene
Publisher: American Univ in Cairo Press
ISBN: 9789774160097
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
This volume presents the results of recent archaeological and historical studies of the Ottoman fort of Quseir, which was Upper Egypt's only direct outlet to the Red Sea at that time. Illustrated with over 100 maps, drawings, and photos, this groundbreaking study examines a key example of Ottoman-era material culture in Egypt--a topic largely overlooked by archaeologists. With contributions from seven historians and archaeologists, Quseir traces the development and history of an important Ottoman fortress, built near an abandoned medieval port. Its establishment was part of a constant struggle by the Ottoman state to maintain control of the desert and the routes across it. Studies of the archaeological remains from the fort reveal the presence of reused stones from a Greco-Roman temple and emphasize its key role as a regional grain entrepôt and port of embarkation for Muslim pilgrims on the way to Mecca. Quseir is a portrait of a place at the boundary of two powerful cultural and economic systems. While serving as an outlet for the pilgrims and produce of Upper Egypt, Quseir also played a role in the distinctive maritime culture of the Red Sea. This study also reveals in detail for the first time the story of the struggle between the British and French for control of Quseir during the Napoleonic occupation of 1798-1801. Drawing on recent archaeological investigations and new archival research, Quseir offers important new scholarship on a key Ottoman site. American Research Center in Egypt Conservation Series 2

Author: Efraim Lev
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004235639
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
The manuscripts of the Cairo Genizah are a unique source for medieval medical history. In Medical Prescriptions in the Cambridge Genizah Collections, Lev and Chipman offer an insight into the everyday practical medicine of medieval Egypt, which reflects medical practice in the Eastern Mediterranean as a whole, by analysing thirty selected prescriptions from the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection (Cambridge University Library). The prescriptions, which are in Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic, are transcribed and translated, with accompanying commentaries, photographs and glossaries. Introductory chapters discuss the theoretical background of the prescriptions and the practical medicine of the Cairo Genizah, while the conclusion considers their significance for the study of the medieval medical tradition.

Author: Leigh Chipman
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004176063
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
This is the first detailed analysis of an immensely popular 13th c. Arabic guide for pharmacists, from a time in which Jewish physicians and pharmacists worked alongside Muslim and Christian practioners. "Minh j al-dukk n" ("How to manage a pharmacy"), by Ab l-Mun al-K h n al- A r (fl. 1260) is the first attempt to explore the full spectrum of pharmacy in the medieval Arabic world: identification of the materia medica and methods of preparation; pharmacy's place within the sciences and particularly its relationship with medicine; the social position of the pharmacist and his role in the marketplace and the hospital; the economics of pharmacy; legal aspects of pharmacy; and the image of the pharmacist in literature and drama. The result is a full and nuanced picture of a section of society usually invisible.

Author: Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477328777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
"This book connects histories from shifting viewpoints around the Western Indian Ocean showing the complexity of a dynamic oceanic system both before and after the arrival of Europeans"--

Author: Shelomo Dov Goitein
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004154728
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 949

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Book Description
The annotated and translated letters of 11th-12th century traders of the Jewish Indian Ocean, found in the Cairo Geniza, provide fascinating information on commerce between the Far East, Yemen and the Mediterranean, medieval material, social, and spiritual civilization among Jews and Arabs, and Judeo-Arabic.

Author: I-Chun Wang
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443837245
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Throughout history cities have been locations of human encounter. Equally they have been contexts for the trade of goods and services, for the evolution of various forms of urban space, and for the production, development, and enrichment of culture and technology. Many cities grew up along shorelines, which themselves constitute some of the globe’s most important cultural boundaries. For above all else, it is water that has separated but also connected different communities, races, religions and nations, down through recorded time. With the rapid advance in technologies of communication, encounters between cultures have multiplied at a rate that no individual can follow or control. The present book constitutes a space of “memory” in its own right, one of its chief raisons d’être being that a group of diverse scholars herein maps certain key encounters between peoples, past as well as present, and the urgent issues generated in consequence. No one person could have traced such diversity and made sense of it, whereas a scholarly grouping of persons reporting on phenomena from around the world, such as is provided here, offers its readers a vision of global change and development. With the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a new set of mega-cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America has emerged to challenge the primacy of European and North American metropolitan centres. This expanded landscape is here interpreted with special attention, as already mentioned, to cities located at coastlines, hence (generally speaking) more exposed to globalizing trends. Migrants, exiles and refugees, ethnic and racial minorities, as well as alternative or countercultural groupings continue to complicate the ways in which cities articulate their now pluralized identities, in terms of (and by means of) literature, history, architecture, social events, and other forms of artistic and cultural production. The international scholars whose work is assembled in these pages are well placed to engage with the intersecting themes and issues of the volume. Contributors have mapped different examples from Homeric narrative, through Renaissance drama and its representation of crossways of culture such as Rhodes and Malta, to an earlier time in the development of a New World city such as Boston: others look at the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ complexity of great world cities and of oceanic migration or trade between them. Shanghai, Singapore, London, Detroit, Shantou, Macau, and Saigon are some that are dealt with in detail. Emphasis falls on both the historical reality of those contexts as well as how they have been culturally represented.