The Mongol Empire and its Legacy /
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The Mongol empire was founded early in the 13th century by Chinggis Khan and within the span of two generations embraced most of Asia, becoming the largest land-based state in history. The united empire lasted only until around 1260, but the major successor states continued on in the Middle East, present day Russia, Central Asia and China for generations, leaving a lasting impact - much of which was far from negative - on these areas and their peoples. The papers in this volume present new perspectives on the establishment of the Mongol empire, Mongol rule in the eastern Islamic world, Central Asia and China, and the legacy of this rule. The various authors approach these subjects from the view of political, military, social, cultural and intellectual history. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004492738
9789004110489
The Revolution which toppled the Umayyads : Neither Arab nor Ἁbbāsid /
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This book re-examines the so-called Ἁbbāsid revolution, the ethnic character of whose effective constituency has been contested for over eight decades. It also brings to question the authenticity of the Ἁbbāsid dynastic claim. To establish its two theses (neither Arab nor Ἁbbāsid) this book employs, in its three parts, three distinct methodological approaches. To reconstruct the secret history of the clandestine Organization, Part One elicits a narrative through a rigorous application of the historical-critical method. Part Two subjects to close textual analysis some prime-grade literary specimen. In Part Three, a purely quantitative approach is adopted to study the demographic character of the formal structures of leadership within the Organization. History, historiography, heresiography, literature, the narrative, the textual analysis, and the quantitative approach, cannot be less inseparable.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047402084
9789004129948
Commerce, Culture, and Community in a Red Sea Port in the Thirteenth Century : The Arabic Documents from Quseir /
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This book is the first comprehensive study of the Arabic documents uncovered in Quseir, Upper Egypt, during the 1980s. The hundreds of paper fragments shed light on activities and operations of a family shipping business on the Red Sea shore in the thirteenth century. Part One is an introductory essay on historical and cultural context of these documents. The three chapters deal with, respectively, the "Sheikh's house," where the documents were found, the Red Sea commerce as reflected in the trade activities around the house, and aspects of popular culture as revealed through the texts. Part Two comprises a critical edition of eighty-four Arabic texts, the majority of which have never been published before, with translation and commentary.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047404972
9789004137479
Death Rituals, Ideology, and the Development of Early Mesopotamian Kingship : Toward a New Understanding of Iraq's Royal Cemetery of Ur /
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At the beginning of Mesopotamia's Early Dynastic period, the political landscape was dominated by temple administrators, but by the end of the period, rulers whose titles we translate as "king" assumed control. This book argues that the ritual process of mourning, burying, and venerating dead elites contributed to this change. Part one introduces the rationale for seeing rituals as a means of giving material form to ideology and, hence, structuring overall power relations. Part two presents archaeological and textual evidence for the death rituals. Part three interprets symbolic objects found in the Royal Cemetery of Ur, showing they reflect ideological doctrines promoting the office of kingship. This book will be particularly useful for scholars of Mesopotamian archaeology and history.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047416791
9789004146358
The Jews in Sicily, Volume 6 (1458-1477) /
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This volume in the series Documentary History of the Jews in Italy illustrates the history of the Jews in Sicily from 1458 to 1477. It is the sequel to the first five volumes and covers the events during the rule of King John. Although John continued the policies of his father Alphonso towards the Jews of the island, there is a distinct deterioration in their position during his times. After years of incitement by the members of the Mendicant Orders, anti-Jewish riots broke out in various parts of the Sicily. The worst of them was the massacre in Modica in 1474. During that period the Jewish minority of Sicily continued to flourish economically and socially. Nearly a thousand documents, many of them published here for the first time, record the fortunes of the Jews and their relationships with the authorities and their Christian neighbours. Much new information has come to light, and many facets of Jewish life in Sicily have been uncovered. The abundance of historical records in the archives of the Crown and of local authorities compares favourably with the relative scarcity of surviving documentation in earlier centuries. Therefore, again, many documents had to be reported in summary form. The volume is provided with additional bibliography and indexes, while the introduction has been relegated to the end of the series on the Jews of the island.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047414261
9789004140769
Die Renaissance der Städte in Nordsyrien und Nordmesopotamien : Städtische Entwicklung und wirtschaftliche Bedingungen in ar-Raqqa und Ḥ̣arrān von der Zeit der beduinischen Vorherr...
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The period between 950 and 1150 A.D. is regarded as "turning point in the history of the Islamic Culture" from the Early Islamic to the Late Medieval civilization. What led to the urban decline in between and the later recovery? Ḥ̣arrān and al-Raqqa serve as paradigma for the development in Northern Syria and Northern Mesopotamia. The collapse of the ʿAbbasid state left the region cornered between Buyids, Fatimids and Byzantines to the nomadic tribes not acquainted with urban culture. After 1086 A.D., measures undertaken by the Seljuqs in order to safeguard their hegemony led to a renaissance of cities inspite of permanent power struggles and the crusades. They based their rule on fortified places. The financing of the army led to the distribution of land as fiefs ( iqtaʿ ) and subsequently to a dislodgement of nomads and a recultivation of former agricultural land. Cash money for the treasury was generated by skimming long distance trade; this in turn required public security on the roads. An analysis of the monetary circulation according to archaeological and literal evidence serves as measure for the economic recovery. A corpus of the coin production in al-Raqqa, ḥarrān and al-Ruha'/Edessa supplements the textual sources.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004492240
9789004122741
Poetics of Islamic Historiography : Deconstructing Ṭabarī's History /
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Offering a new approach to the study of Ṭabarī's History , the most comprehensive historical work written by a classical Muslim historian, this book applies concepts developed by critical theorists and suggests a reading of historiographical material that is not primarily concerned with reconstructing the facts. The book consists of two parts. Part one exposes the assumptions involved in writing classical Islamic history, especially the mimetic aspiration of the sources and the practice that subverts it. Part two examines in detail four significant events in the history of early Islam and demonstrates how a deconstructionist reading subjects endows these with a considerably different meaning and subjects them to new light.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047405092
9789004137936
The Buwayhid Dynasty in Iraq 334H./945 to 403H./1012 : Shaping Institutions for the Future /
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A study of the development of political and social institutions in Baghdad, center of the Abbasid Caliphate, in that neglected period between Abbasid collapse and the coming of the Seljuk Turks. Three brothers, Daylemite mercenaries from the southern Caspian succeeded in establishing a dynasty that lasted nearly a century, controlling Iraq, a good part of Iran and the Gulf. The period has been labled the "Iranian intermezzo" but careful examination shows that the dynasty shaped the basic institutions to which the Seljuks would fall heir: the chief amirate, the system of army fiefs and the bureaucracy. It was a period of profound change and dislocation which fostered an open and creative cultural atmosphere. The Caliphate, bereft of power, was re-established as the center of authority and legitimation.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004492363
9789004128606
Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia : The Islamic World of Novouzensk District and the Kazakh Inner Horde, 1780-1910 /
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Russia's Muslim religious institutions on the steppe frontier, during the imperial period, are examined in detail in this book. This study is based on a Turkic manuscript history entitled the Tavarikh-i Alti Ata, compiled in 1910. It examines the mosques, madrasas, imams, mu'adhdhins, and Sufis of a single district and in adjoining regions of the Kazakh steppe, areas that were inhabited by several Muslim communities, including Tatar peasants and merchants, Bashkir and Kazakh nomads, and Muslim Cossacks. The study compares the information from the manuscript with published sources on Islamic institutions in the Volga-Ural region, using it as a case study to draw conclusions for Russia as a whole. Special emphasis is placed on the social and communal functions of these institutions for the Muslim minorities inhabiting rural Russia.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004492325
9789004119758
Papyrology and the History of Early Islamic Egypt /
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Tens of thousands of documents dating form the late Byzantine and early Islamic periods have been found in Egypt. These texts, written on papyrus and a variety of other materials, in Greek, Coptic Egyptian, and Arabic, offer a unique, but underutilized resource for the study of a society experiencing a profound transformation, this volume collects papers given at the conference "Documentary Evidence and the History of Early Islamic Egypt", including editions of previously unpublished Greek, Coptic, and Arabic documents, historical and linguistic studies which make use of documentary evidence, a discussion of the importance of Arabic literary papyri, and an introduction to papyrology and its relevance for the study of this period of Egyptian history. For more titles about Papyrology, please click here.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047405474
9789004138865
All those Nations : Cultural Encounters within and with the Near East /
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This collection of studies treats the theme of cultural (and other) confrontations between different groups (ethnic, or linguistic, or political, or religious...) within the Middle East, but also in some contributions, the types of confrontation between the West and the Middle East.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004502161
9789056930325
The Idea of Universal History in Greece : From Herodotus to the Age of Augustus /
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This is an expanded version of a lecture given in the Departments of History and Classics at Harvard in 1998. Starting from a methodological point of view, this book show the evolution of the idea of world history through the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Ctesias, Ephorus, Polybius and others up to the historians of the Augustan epoch.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004494213
9789004156463
The Ottomans and the Balkans : A Discussion of Historiography /
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This discussion of historiography concerning the Ottoman Empire should be viewed in the context of our discipline's self-examination, which certainly has been encouraged by recent conflicts in southeastern Europe and the Middle East. Our contributors analyse the fashion in which the historiographies established in various national states have viewed the Ottoman Empire and its legacy. At the same time they discuss the links of twentieth-century historiography with the rich historical tradition of the Ottoman Empire itself, both in its metropolitan and its provincial forms. The struggle against anachronisms born from the nationalist paradigm in history doubtless constitutes the most important common feature of these otherwise very diverse studies.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047400608
9789004119024
An Ottoman Mentality : The World of Evliya Çelebi (revised second edition) /
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In his huge travel account, Evliya Çelebi provides materials for getting at Ottoman perceptions of the world, not only in areas like geography, topography, administration, urban institutions, and social and economic systems, but also in such domains as religion, folklore, sexual relations, dream interpretation, and conceptions of the self. In six chapters the author examines: Evliya's treatment of Istanbul and Cairo as the two capital cities of the Ottoman world; his geographical horizons and notions of tolerance; his attitudes toward government, justice and specific Ottoman institutions; his social status as gentleman, character type as dervish, office as caller-to-prayer and avocation as traveller; his use of various narrative styles; and his relation with his audience in the two registers of persuasion and amusement. An Afterword situates Evliya in relation to other intellectual trends in the Ottoman world of the seventeenth century.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047410379
9789004152625
Ottomans, Hungarians, and Habsburgs in Central Europe : The Military Confines in the Era of Ottoman Conquest /
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The Central European military frontier in the fifteenth-seventeenth centuries hides a treasure of military history information. This collective volume provides a fascinating overview to scholars and students interested in the paradigms of the history of frontiers, of imperial structures, and of early modern state finances. The first part of the book examines the birth and development of the Hungarian and Habsburg defence systems from their origins until their dissolution in the early eighteenth century. The second part focuses on the Ottoman military establishment in Hungary. Special emphasis has been put throughout on administration, finance, manpower problems, and aspects of the military revolution in the marches. The book is unique in its complex and comparative approach; no similar effort has yet been made concerning other areas of the Ottoman Empire.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004492295
9789004119079
Josephus and Jewish History in Flavian Rome and Beyond /
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The essays in this volume focus on the relationship between Josephus' Judean and Jewish identity on the one hand, and his life and writings in the context of Flavian Rome on the other. From very different points of view the various contributions to this volume, which is the fruit of an international colloquium entitled 'Josephus between Jerusalem and Rome' held in the city of Rome in 2003, shed light on the complex cultural interplay in Josephus' writings. After examining more general historiographical and literary questions, the volume proceeds to address specific issues of Josephus' presentation of Judaism and of historical "data", inter alia about the war of 66-70 CE. A final section deals with the translation and transmission of his works.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047415527
9789004141797