FROM THE DISHWARE STORE Etienne.
Central Asia 300-850: Roads and Kingdoms.
The Beautiful Letters
Regular price
€35,00
| N° d'inventaire | 30377 |
| Format | 16 x 24 |
| Détails | 648 p., paperback. |
| Publication | Paris, 2024 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782251455211 |
Central Asia formed the heart of medieval Eurasian trade, what is called, not entirely wrongly, the "Silk Road." Caravans and conquerors, monks and artists, all passed through Samarkand, Dunhuang, or Bactra, on their way from China to Byzantium or from Iran and India to the steppe. This was the era of the first globalization, a thousand years before European expansion. But this history is in tatters, and at the height of these contacts, from the Huns' journey in the fourth century CE to the end of the Tibetan Empire and Islamization in the ninth century, no work, in any language, had ever attempted to follow all the threads and patiently reweave the motifs.
Nomadic migrations and Buddhist art, large-scale trade and state organization, Chinese colonization and Arab conquest, climate history, irrigation and demography, the birth of Persian and archaic globalization, and many other themes: this synthesis offers multiple axes of interpretation that it intersects and ties into a complex but clear fabric. Playing with numerous maps and illustrations, it reconstructs an immense missing piece at the center of the puzzle of the medieval history of the Old World. It is the product of twenty years of research, and uses the most recent work, scholarly studies on Arabic, Chinese, Iranian or Turkish texts, new manuscript discoveries or even results of the many archaeological excavations that have developed since the end of the USSR and the economic opening of China. All the disciplines and instruments of the historian are called upon to make this world intelligible and readable, while at the end, behind the scenes, another level of analysis is proposed for those who would like, like the great merchants and the pilgrim monks, to go further.
Nomadic migrations and Buddhist art, large-scale trade and state organization, Chinese colonization and Arab conquest, climate history, irrigation and demography, the birth of Persian and archaic globalization, and many other themes: this synthesis offers multiple axes of interpretation that it intersects and ties into a complex but clear fabric. Playing with numerous maps and illustrations, it reconstructs an immense missing piece at the center of the puzzle of the medieval history of the Old World. It is the product of twenty years of research, and uses the most recent work, scholarly studies on Arabic, Chinese, Iranian or Turkish texts, new manuscript discoveries or even results of the many archaeological excavations that have developed since the end of the USSR and the economic opening of China. All the disciplines and instruments of the historian are called upon to make this world intelligible and readable, while at the end, behind the scenes, another level of analysis is proposed for those who would like, like the great merchants and the pilgrim monks, to go further.
Nomadic migrations and Buddhist art, large-scale trade and state organization, Chinese colonization and Arab conquest, climate history, irrigation and demography, the birth of Persian and archaic globalization, and many other themes: this synthesis offers multiple axes of interpretation that it intersects and ties into a complex but clear fabric. Playing with numerous maps and illustrations, it reconstructs an immense missing piece at the center of the puzzle of the medieval history of the Old World. It is the product of twenty years of research, and uses the most recent work, scholarly studies on Arabic, Chinese, Iranian or Turkish texts, new manuscript discoveries or even results of the many archaeological excavations that have developed since the end of the USSR and the economic opening of China. All the disciplines and instruments of the historian are called upon to make this world intelligible and readable, while at the end, behind the scenes, another level of analysis is proposed for those who would like, like the great merchants and the pilgrim monks, to go further.