The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia

The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia

Author: Denis Sinor

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1990-03

Total Pages: 542

ISBN-13: 9780521243049

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This volume introduces the geographical setting of Central Asia and follows its history from the palaeolithic era to the rise of the Mongol empire in the thirteenth century. Distinguished international scholars discuss chronologically the varying historical achievements of the disparate population groups in the region.


Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia

Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia

Author: Thomas T. Allsen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-03-25

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780521602709

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In the thirteenth century, the Mongols created a vast transcontinental empire that functioned as a cultural 'clearing house' for the Old World. Under Mongol auspices various commodities, ideologies and technologies were disseminated across Eurasia. The focus of this path-breaking study is the extensive exchanges between Iran and China. The Mongol rulers of these two ancient civilizations 'shared' the cultural resources of their realms with one another. The result was a lively traffic in specialist personnel and scholarly literature between East and West. These exchanges ranged from cartography to printing, from agriculture to astronomy. The book concludes by asking why the Mongols made such heavy use of sedentary scholars and specialists in the elaboration of their court culture and why they initiated so many exchanges across Eurasia. This is a work of great erudition which crosses new scholarly boundaries in its analysis of communication and culture in the Mongol empire.


Linguistic Mysteries of Ethnonyms in Inner Asia

Linguistic Mysteries of Ethnonyms in Inner Asia

Author: Penglin Wang

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2018-03-28

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1498535283

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In Linguistic Mysteries of Ethnonyms in Inner Asia, Penglin Wang focuses on semantics as a central theme in onomastics and strives to unravel the origin and meaning of a series of influential ethnonyms such as Xianbei, Rouran, Tabγač, Tatar, Shiwei, Mongol, Merkid, Nüzhen, Jušen, and Nikan. Since much of modern research has dealt with issues of Inner Asian ethnonyms within a regional framework, Wang’s exploration of the early Indo-European and Altaic influence on the ethnonymic designations of Mongol-Tungusic and Turkic groups opens up a new horizon for transcontinental approaches, which represent an important thrust in Inner Asian and Eurasian studies. Wang has based this comprehensive study on textual, cross-linguistic, and patterned analysis of the ethnonyms found primarily in ancient Chinese sources.


Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World

Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World

Author: Victor H. Mair

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2006-05-31

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0824841670

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Do civilizations independently invent themselves or are they the result of cultural diffusion? The contributors to this volume do not attempt to provide a definitive answer to this contentious question, one of the most debated issues of the past century. Instead, they shift the focus from theory to reality by presenting empirical evidence on a wide range of cultural phenomena in history and prehistory, thereby demonstrating the processes whereby cultural traits are acquired and modified—the dynamics of transmission and transformation. The range of topics covered in this volume is of extraordinary breadth: the distribution of belt hooks and belts from the steppes to North and Central China; textile exchange in the third millennium B.C.; the spread of bronze metallurgy across Asia; the adaptation of complicated technologies by distant peoples; the mechanisms whereby bronze implements were used to convey political messages in East Asia; the ethnogenesis of the Turks; the complex interrelationships among migratory and settled peoples in western Central Asia during the Bronze Age; the origins of the enigmatic Chinese goddess known as Queen Mother of the West; an account of hunting with trained cheetahs; and the use of abundant botanical and zoological evidence to affirm that the Old World and the New World must have been in contact long before the fifteenth century. Rounding out the volume is a survey of the problem of modernocentrism.


Ethnic Groups of North, East, and Central Asia

Ethnic Groups of North, East, and Central Asia

Author: James Minahan

Publisher: ABC-CLIO

Published: 2014-02-10

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1610690176

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Sample Topics Han China (ethnic majority) Hui (Islamic ethnic minority) Japanese (ethnic majority) Kazakh Korean (ethnic majority) Miao (ethnic minoirty) Mongolia Taiwanese Tajik Uighur


The Great Dispossession

The Great Dispossession

Author: Ildikó Bellér-Hann

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2020

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 3643913672

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The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of northwest China, where the authors of this book have worked since 1986, has become increasingly unstable in recent decades. The Uyghurs are the easternmost people of the Turkic-Islamic civilizational belt that stretches across Central Eurasia. The incorporation of this population into the Chinese nation state has been fraught with difficulty. Central policies under socialism have fluctuated between generous encouragement of a distinct Uyghur identity and harsh repression justified with accusations of separatism and religious fundamentalism. Based on field research in the prefecture of Qumul in 2006-2009, this book explores how macro-level tensions are played out locally and regionally in the fields of actualized history and identity, social support and economic development, and the political regulation of socio-cultural life and religion.


The Prehistory of the Silk Road

The Prehistory of the Silk Road

Author: E. E. Kuzmina

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2015-02-23

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 0812292332

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In ancient and medieval times, the Silk Road was of great importance to the transport of peoples, goods, and ideas between the East and the West. A vast network of trade routes, it connected the diverse geographies and populations of China, the Eurasian Steppe, Central Asia, India, Western Asia, and Europe. Although its main use was for importing silk from China, traders moving in the opposite direction carried to China jewelry, glassware, and other exotic goods from the Mediterranean, jade from Khotan, and horses and furs from the nomads of the Steppe. In both directions, technology and ideologies were transmitted. The Silk Road brought together the achievements of the different peoples of Eurasia to advance the Old World as a whole. The majority of the Silk Road routes passed through the Eurasian Steppe, whose nomadic people were participants and mediators in its economic and cultural exchanges. Until now, the origins of these routes and relationships have not been examined in great detail. In The Prehistory of the Silk Road, E. E. Kuzmina, renowned Russian archaeologist, looks at the history of this crucial area before the formal establishment of Silk Road trade and diplomacy. From the late Neolithic period to the early Bronze Age, Kuzmina traces the evolution of the material culture of the Steppe and the contact between civilizations that proved critical to the development of the widespread trade that would follow, including nomadic migrations, the domestication and use of the horse and the camel, and the spread of wheeled transport. The Prehistory of the Silk Road combines detailed research in archaeology with evidence from physical anthropology, linguistics, and other fields, incorporating both primary and secondary sources from a range of languages, including a vast accumulation of Russian-language scholarship largely untapped in the West. The book is complemented by an extensive bibliography that will be of great use to scholars.


In Pursuit of Gender

In Pursuit of Gender

Author: Sarah M. Nelson

Publisher: Rowman Altamira

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 9780759100879

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Historical Evidence and Argument

Historical Evidence and Argument

Author: David Henige

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 2006-01-20

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 0299214133

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Historians know about the past because they examine the evidence. But what exactly is “evidence,” how do historians know what it means—and how can we trust them to get it right? Historian David Henige tackles such questions of historical reliability head-on in his skeptical, unsparing, and acerbically witty Historical Evidence and Argument. “Systematic doubt” is his watchword, and he practices what he preaches through a variety of insightful assessments of historical controversies—for example, over the dating of artifacts and the textual analysis of translated documents. Skepticism, Henige contends, forces us to recognize the limits of our knowledge, but is also a positive force that stimulates new scholarship to counter it.