DEFINITIVE, ENGROSSING AND COMPREHENSIVE CHRONICLE ON THE WORLDS GREATEST DYNASTIES TO HAVE EVER RULED HINDUSTAN. THE BOOK HIGHLIGHTS THE SEQUENCE OF EVENTS THAT ULTIMATELY LEAD TO THE RISE OF THE TIMURIDS FROM BEING RULERS OF FERGHNA TO THE EMPERORS OF HINDUSTAN. THE STUDY LOOKS AT THE FACTORS THAT MADE THEM SUCCESSFUL AND BRINGS TO LIGHT THE PRECISE REASONS OF THEIR FALL FROM ZENITH.
Hing Hing Ming reviews some of the major episodes of the Han Dynasty, from its founding by Liu Bang to the Lü Clan Disturbance and subsequent diplomatic overtures and military campaigns against the minor Chinese kingdoms, the Mongols, and Gojoseon (the ancient Korean Kingdom).
The Suleymanname is an imperial illuminated manuscript, housed in the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul. It was commissioned by the Sultan Suleyman I, who reigned from 1520 to 1566, when the Ottoman Empire was at its zenith. This facsimile edition is printed in four colours plus gold, and in tritone.
The large ancient Egyptian Empire won by Thutmose III and his son, Amenhotep II, brought great wealth to Egypt. This legacy was squandered by the later pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty. The person chiefly responsible for its loss was Waenre Amenhotep IV, who always called himself by the name Akhanaten, being devoted to his God Aten, believing in a single God Aten, represented by the Solar Disc. His crime was to attempt to force that single God on his people and attempted to destroy their beliefs in the many Gods of Egypt worshipped for centuries by his people. An attempt that caused havoc in the Middle East. Since we now know some five hundred500 years must be deducted from the present chronology of Egypt after the thirteenth dynasty, we now know that he copied his idea from the beliefs of the Israelite people and their belief in the coming of a Messiah would bring eternal peace to the world. However, this deduction means we must re-write the history of Egypt and its relations with other countries. This book attempts to do this. Although it is written in a fictionalized form to increase your enjoyment, every event is historical accurate and did occur at that time as described. But it is also a story of the true love of their men and women. Though the morals of Egypt were very different from what we accept today, they did love each other.
Few countries of the globe present to the eye of the traveller so desolate, so forbidding an aspect as that vast and arid peninsula which, embracing an area of more than a million square miles, stretches away through twenty-four degrees of latitude, from the confines of the Syrian Desert to the shores of the Indian Ocean. Its surface, while far from possessing the monotonous character with which popular fancy is accustomed to invest it, is, for the greater part of its extent, destitute of those physical advantages which tempt either the cupidity or the enterprise of man. Its coasts are low and unhealthy. Its harbors are few and unsafe. Its mineral resources are to this day unexplored and unknown. Its impenetrable deserts, guarded by a fierce and martial population, have always set at defiance the best-matured plans of invasion and conquest. In the principality of Yemen, appropriately named The Happy, the cultivation of the soil has flourished from time immemorial, but in almost every other province the returns of agricultural labor are discouraging and unremunerative. Illimitable wastes of sand, over which sweeps the deadly blast of the simoom; mountains, bald, craggy, and volcanic, whose slopes are destitute of every trace of vegetable life; plains strewn with blocks of tufa and basalt; valleys dotted here and there with stunted shrubs, or encrusted with a saline deposit similar to that upon the shores of the Dead Sea; a soil impregnated with nitre; such are, and have been from prehistoric times, the physical features of the Arabian Peninsula. No stream worthy of the name of river, dispensing wealth and fertility in its winding course to the sea, flows through this dreary and inhospitable land. Wherever a spring was found, a permanent settlement arose, and the black tents of the Bedouin gave place to huts of sun-dried bricks, while the dignity of the sheik, who now aspired to the title of prince, was satisfied with a dwelling superior to those of his subjects only in point of size. The oasis, generally suggestive of shady groves and purling streams, is often, in reality, nothing more than the dry bed of a mountain torrent, along whose borders a little withered vegetation furnishes the hardy camel with pasture, and where a scanty supply of brackish water can, by laborious digging, be obtained. Overhead glitters a sky of brass, unflecked by a single cloud, and, morning and evening, the rays of the sun, mellowed and refracted by the vapors of the earth, clothe every elevation with scarlet, azure, and violet tints which, blended in exquisite harmony, rival the splendors of the rainbow; developing, under the effects of radiation, optical illusions and charming pictures of the mirage, attributed by superstitious ignorance to the influence of enchantment. The unbroken stillness of the Desert, the wide expanse of uninhabited territory, produce a sense of mental depression, accompanied by an apprehension of danger from the convulsions of nature and the violence of man, which no experience seems able to remove; affecting even the sturdy camel-driver, familiar with these solitudes from childhood, who shudders as he urges his string of panting beasts over the drifted sand-heaps and through the mountain fastness, the reputed haunt of evil genii and the vantage ground from whence the murderous banditti oft beset the caravan. So deeply-rooted and tenacious is this feeling that the Arab regards a journey successfully performed as just cause for congratulation, and indeed not inferior to a triumph, as is indicated by his familiar proverb, “Travel is a victory.”
The Magnificent Century, the second volume of Costain's A History of the Plantagenets, covers Henry III's long and turbulent reign, from 1216 to 1272. During his lifetime Henry was frequently unpopular, unreliable and inconsistent. Yet his reign saw spectacular advancement in the arts, sciences and theology, as well as in government. Despite all, it was truly a magnificent century. "Combines a love of the subject with factual history. . .a great story." —San Francisco Chronicle A History of the Plantagenets includes The Conquering Family, The Magnificent Century, The Three Edwards and The Last Plantagenets.
The Indus region, comprising the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent (now Pakistan), has always had its distinct identity - racially, ethnically, linguistically and culturally. In the last five thousand years, this region has been a part of India, politically, for only five hundred years. Pakistan, then, is no 'artificial' state conjured up by the disaffected Muslim elite of British India. Aitzaz Ahsan surveys the history of Indus - as he refers to this region - right from the time of the Harappan civilization to the era of the British Raj, concluding with independence and the creation of Pakistan. Ahsan's message is aimed both at Indians still nostalgic about 'undivided 'India and their Pakistani compatriots who narrowly tend to define their identity by their 'un-Indianness'.
