Moving in the Margins: Desert Travel and Power in Medieval Central Asia PDF Download

Author: Paul D. Wordsworth
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004710280
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
Central Asia has been perceived as a landscape of connections, of Silk Roads; an endless plain across which waves of conquerors swiftly rode on horseback. In reality the region is highly fragmented and difficult to traverse, and overcoming these obstacles led to routes becoming associated with epic travel and high-value trade. Put simply, the inhabitants of these lands became experts in the art of travelling the margins. This volume seeks to unravel some of the myths of long-distance roads in Central Asia, using a desert case-study to put forward a new hypothesis for how medieval landscapes were controlled and manipulated.

Author: Rocco Rante
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110331705
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
The modern sense of “Greater Khorasan” today corresponds to a territory which not only comprises the region in the east of Iran but also, beyond Iranian frontiers, a part of Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. In the past this entity was simply defined as Khorasan. In the Sassanid era Khorasan defined the “Eastern lands”. In the Islamic era this term was again taken up in the same sense it previously enjoyed. The Arab sources of the first centuries all mention the eastern regions under the same toponym, Khorasan. Khorasan was the gateway used by Alexander the Great to go into Bactria and India and, inversely, that through which the Seljuks and Mongols entered Iran. In a diachronic context Khorasan was a transit zone, a passage, a crossroads, which, above all in the medieval period, saw the creation of different commercial routes leading to the north, towards India, to the west and into China. In this framework, archaeological researches will be the guiding principle which will help us to take stock of a material culture which, as its history, is very diversified. They also offer valuable elements on commercial links between the principal towns of Khorasan. This book will provide the opportunity to better know the most recent elements of the principal constitutive sites of this geographical and political entity.

Author: Robert Haug
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 178831722X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Transoxania, Khurasan, and ?ukharistan – which comprise large parts of today's Central Asia – have long been an important frontier zone. In the late antique and early medieval periods, the region was both an eastern political boundary for Persian and Islamic empires and a cultural border separating communities of sedentary farmers from pastoral-nomads. Given its peripheral location, the history of the 'eastern frontier' in this period has often been shown through the lens of expanding empires. However, in this book, Robert Haug argues for a pre-modern Central Asia with a discrete identity, a region that is not just a transitory space or the far-flung corner of empires, but its own historical entity. From this locally specific perspective, the book takes the reader on a 900-year tour of the area, from Sasanian control, through the Umayyads and Abbasids, to the quasi-independent dynasties of the Tahirids and the Samanids. Drawing on an impressive array of literary, numismatic and archaeological sources, Haug reveals the unique and varied challenges the eastern frontier presented to imperial powers that strove to integrate the area into their greater systems. This is essential reading for all scholars working on early Islamic, Iranian and Central Asian history, as well as those with an interest in the dynamics of frontier regions.

Author: Rocco Rante
Publisher: Oxbow Books Limited
ISBN: 9781842174944
Category : Excavations
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Nishapur in eastern Iran was an important Silk Road city, its position providing links to central Asia and China, Afghanistan and India, the Persian Gulf and the west. Despite previous excavations there are many unresolved questions surrounding the site; when was the city founded? Is Nishapur a Sasanian city? Was it founded by the Sasanian king Shapur I or II? The question of chronology of occupation and the ceramic sequence is also problematic particularly for late antiquity and the medieval period, as well as a complete topography of the site. The Irano-French archaeological mission at Nishapur (2004 to 2007) (CNRS-MAEE-Musée du Louvre) focused on the Qohandez, or citadel, the oldest part of Nishapur. Excavations were conducted in different areas of the mound, in order to address these questions. After an introduction to the site and the former American and Iranian excavations, this book presents the stratigraphy and the pottery of the site. The difficulties involved in establishing a precise history of the site, as well as the complexities of studying the pottery led to a program of analysis undertaken by the Research Centre of French Museums (C2RMF). Chemical and petrographic analysis, thermoluminescence (TL) dating and archaeomagnetism analysis as support to the TL results were done. A pottery database has been created regrouping the stratigraphical and laboratory analyses data, in order to manage and present an organised corpus of 1000 samples. The combination of the data from the stratigraphical and laboratory analyses gives an accurate and completely new chronology of the site. Moreover, the study also brought to light a new typological sequence of the ceramic, as well as new data about the pottery production at Nishapur.

Author: A.C.S. Peacock
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857729462
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 535

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Book Description
A.C.S. Peacock is Lecturer in Middle Eastern History at the University of St Andrews, and holds a PhD in Oriental Studies from Pembroke College, Cambridge. He is the author of Early Seljuq History: A New Interpretation (2010), and is the co-editor of The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (I.B.Tauris, 2012) and Ferdowsi, the Mongols and the History of Iran: Art, Literature and Culture from Early Islam to Qajar Persia (I.B.Tauris, 2013).D.G. Tor is Assistant Professor of Medieval Middle Eastern History at the University of Notre Dame, and holds a PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University. She is the author of The Great Selkuq Sultanate and the Formation of Islamic Civilization: A Thematic History (forthcoming) and Violent Order: Religious Warfare, Chivalry and the 'Ayyar Phenomenon in the Medieval Islamic World (2007).

Author: James Howard-Johnston
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198841612
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The eleventh century saw both the heyday of Byzantium and its almost immediate subsequent decline following serious military defeats and heavy territorial losses. The papers in this volume view the social order as a prime determinant of change, tracking it through archaeological and documentary evidence to deepen our understanding of the period.

Author: A. C. S Peacock
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748698078
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
The first English language general history of the Great Seljuk Empire outlines its chronological history and will explores its religious and institutional history.

Author: Rocco Rante
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004693998
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
The Oasis of Bukhara, Volume 3: Material Culture, Socio-territorial Features, Archaeozoology and Archaeometry, focuses on the study of material culture (pottery and glass), as well as on the archaeoscience activities that took place during the archaeological mission MAFOUB (2009-2023). The topics in this third, concluding volume concern environmental aspects, preliminary results on archaeozoology, the reconstruction of the evolution of the fauna over nineteen centuries, and politico-territorial aspects. It completes the urban and demographic framework that was presented in the previous two volumes. Contributors: Anne Bouquillon, Jacopo Bruno, Yvan Coquinot, Delphine Decruyenaere, Christel Doublet, Ayano Endo, Nathalie Gandolfo, Takako Hosokawa, Marjan Mashkour, Djamal Mirzaakhmedov, Andrey Omelchenko, Elisa Porto, Silvia Pozzi, Gabriele Puschnigg, Rocco Rante, Pascale Richardin, Yoko Shindo, Toshiyasu Shinmen, Tamako Takeda, Manon Vuillien, Antoine Zink The volume is co-published by Brill, Leiden, and the Louvre Museum, Paris.

Author: Rocco Rante
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004280707
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
This book offers a new history of the ancient city of Rayy. Based on the results of the latest excavations on the Citadel and the Shahrestan (the political and administrative nucleus of the city in all periods), the study of historical and geographical texts and on surveys carried out between 2005 and 2007 by the author and the Iranian archaeologist, Ghadir Afround, the complete occupation sequence of the city, from its foundation in the Iron Age and the Parthian reconstructions (2nd to 1st centuries BC), up to the Mongol invasions and rapid depopulation in the 13th century CE, comes to light.

Author: Julie Hill
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1467086460
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In Revisiting the Silk Road , experienced author and traveller Julie Hill takes us on a spellbinding journey into the heart of a little known but volatile region, stretching from Western China to the shores of the oil-rich Caspian Sea and beyond to the Black Sea. Hers is not only a series of journeys overland or a march through ancient history, but an informed and contemporary view of life in both the liveliest cities and the farthest-flung outposts of what once was the worlds stoutest and longest economic artery. Julie Hills journey focuses on bazaars as a recurrent motifbazaars being the economic, social, and cultural centers of the Silk Roadand radiates from these bazaars to the life around them. Because she speaks their languageliterally and culturallyJulie is often welcomed by her hosts not as a customer or a trader but as a confessor and a friend, and she vindicates their trust by bringing their stories to life. In Iran, the author hears the predicament of women crying for freedom, frustrated by the deteriorating economy and the conservatives stranglehold on power. While inescapably exotic in its subjects and imagery, the book is also a penetrating report on the effects of the recent geopolitical upheavals that have coursed through the regionseen not from the distance of spy satellites or high government places but on the ground, often literally on the street or in the homes of ordinary folk. The realities of todays Silk Road are far more complex than often understood, and this book provides an absorbing and authoritative guide to any reader in search of both a magical adventure and a hard-nosed investigation into one of the worlds most important and dynamic regions.