Author: Magnus Marsden
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108976506
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
Small-scale traders play a crucial role in forging Asian connectivity, forming networks and informal institutions separate from those driven by nation-states, such as China's Belt and Road Initiative. This ambitious study provides a unique insight into the lives of the mobile traders from Afghanistan who traverse Eurasia. Reflecting on over a decade of intensive ethnographic fieldwork, Magnus Marsden introduces readers to a dynamic yet historically durable universe of commercial and cultural connections. Through an exploration of the traders' networks, cultural and religious identities, as well as the nodes in which they operate, Marsden emphasises their ability to navigate Eurasia's geopolitical tensions and to forge transregional routes that channel significant flows of people, resources, and ideas. Beyond the Silk Roads will interest those seeking to understand contemporary iterations of the Silk Road within the context of geopolitics in the region. This title is also available as Open Access.
Author: Kenneth Nebenzahl
Publisher: Phaidon
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 188
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Book Description
Nebenzahl documents the mapping and discovery of West Asia and the trade routes of the Silk Road. The book includes rare maps spanning 2,000 years of cartographic history.
Author: Joyce Morgan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0762787333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
When a Chinese monk broke into a hidden cave in 1900, he uncovered one of the world’s great literary secrets: a time capsule from the ancient Silk Road. Inside, scrolls were piled from floor to ceiling, undisturbed for a thousand years. The gem within was the Diamond Sutra of AD 868. This key Buddhist teaching, made 500 years before Gutenberg inked his press, is the world’s oldest printed book. The Silk Road once linked China with the Mediterranean. It conveyed merchants, pilgrims and ideas. But its cultures and oases were swallowed by shifting sands. Central to the Silk Road’s rediscovery was a man named Aurel Stein, a Hungarian-born scholar and archaeologist employed by the British service. Undaunted by the vast Gobi Desert, Stein crossed thousands of desolate miles with his fox terrier Dash. Stein met the Chinese monk and secured the Diamond Sutra and much more. The scroll’s journey—by camel through arid desert, by boat to London’s curious scholars, by train to evade the bombs of World War II—merges an explorer’s adventures, political intrigue, and continued controversy. The Diamond Sutra has inspired Jack Kerouac and the Dalai Lama. Its journey has coincided with the growing appeal of Buddhism in the West. As the Gutenberg Age cedes to the Google Age, the survival of the Silk Road’s greatest treasure is testament to the endurance of the written word.
Author: Mark Norell
Publisher: Sterling Signature
ISBN: 9781402781377
Category : Silk Road
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
An elegantly, lavishly illustrated history of the legendary Silk Road and the cultural pathway it blazed for the modern world. Spanning centuries of history, this engrossing book--created in conjunction with the world-famous American Museum of Natural History--takes an epic journey to major stops in China, Uzbekistan, Iraq, and beyond. Not only did people from many lands trade their goods along this incredible network of routes, they also exchanged their languages, religions, art, and technology in what can be seen as man's first engagement in globalization."
Author: Geordie Torr
Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
ISBN: 1398809764
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
Take an intrepid journey through the history of the Silk Roads with this brilliant reference book. Traversing snowy mountain passes, vast, forbidding deserts and stormy seas, these ancient trade routes were about much more than the movement of goods, they paved the way for an unprecedented period of cultural exchange, diplomacy and conflict creating a legacy that continues to affect global geopolitics in the 21st century. Forged over millennia through a desire for enterprise, the Silk Roads have had an profound influence on Eurasia and beyond, connecting cultures, languages, customs and religions. And with China now working to reopen this ancient trade network, the time is right to shine a new light on its history and impact. This edition has been updated with an expanded chapter on China's efforts to reopen this ancient trade network through the Belt and Road Initiative and the many impacts it has had along the way, from its ambitious infrastructure projects to new cities emerging along its route to the growth of a digital silk road, Geordie Torr examines the profound impacts of the revival of the world's greatest trading route. With helpful timelines and useful information boxes, The Silk Roads gives you everything you need to master the history of this world-changing region.
Author: Iftikhar H. Malik
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199405961
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
The Silk Road and Beyond attempts to capture lived realities across Central Asia, Iran, Turkey, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Finland, Britain, USA, Palestine, Switzerland, Finland, and the subcontinent. It also aims at initiating readers into encountering Muslim heritage across the four continents where cultures share commonalities beyond the narrowly defined premise of conflicts. This book is an effort to capture history, literature, mobility, crafts, architectural traditions, and cultural vistas by focusing on diverse Muslim individuals, communities, cities, and their edifices. It attempts to reconstruct deeper and munificent aspects of Muslim histories and lived experience that often stay ignored by the writers and travellers. Normative accounts of cities such as Bukhara, Jerusalem, Isfahan, Fes, Samarkand, Granada, Palermo, Cordova, or Konya may lifelessly posit them as sheer tourist destinations, ignoring their cultural and historical depth. Written in an autobiographical genre, this book benefits from a 40-year-long exposure and encounters with the vibrant lives across the four continents as experienced by a curious Muslim academic at different stages of his life. The reader can explore and relish these predominantly Muslim locales along with a frequent exposure to r socio-intellectual institutions in Europe and the United States.
Author: Kathryn Davis
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555978789
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 144
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Book Description
A spellbinding novel about transience and mortality, by one of the most original voices in American literature The Silk Road begins on a mat in yoga class, deep within a labyrinth on a settlement somewhere in the icy north, under the canny guidance of Jee Moon. When someone fails to arise from corpse pose, the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook remember the paths that brought them there—paths on which they still seem to be traveling. The Silk Road also begins in rivalrous skirmishing for favor, in the protected Eden of childhood, and it ends in the harrowing democracy of mortality, in sickness and loss and death. Kathryn Davis’s sleight of hand brings the past, present, and future forward into brilliant coexistence; in an endlessly shifting landscape, her characters make their way through ruptures, grief, and apocalypse, from existence to nonexistence, from embodiment to pure spirit. Since the beginning of her extraordinary career, Davis has been fascinated by journeys. Her books have been shaped around road trips, walking tours, hegiras, exiles: and now, in this triumphant novel, a pilgrimage. The Silk Road is her most explicitly allegorical novel and also her most profound vehicle; supple and mesmerizing, the journey here is not undertaken by a single protagonist but by a community of separate souls—a family, a yoga class, a generation. Its revelations are ravishing and desolating.
Author: Xinru Liu
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195338103
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 169
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Book Description
The ancient trade routes that made up the Silk Road were some of the great conduits of cultural and material exchange in world history. In this intriguing book, Xinru Liu reveals both why and how this long-distance trade in luxury goods emerged in the late third century BCE, following its story through to the Mongol conquest. Liu starts with China's desperate need for what the Chinese called "the heavenly horses" of Central Asia, and describes how the traders who brought these horses also brought other exotic products, some all the way from the Mediterranean. Likewise, the Roman Empire, as a result of its imperial ambition as well as the desire of its citizens for Chinese silk, responded with easterly explorations for trade. The book shows how the middle men, the Kushan Empire, spread Buddhism to China. Missionaries and pilgrims facilitated cave temples along the mountainous routes and monasteries in various oases and urban centers, forming the backbone of the Silk Road. The author also explains how Islamic and Mongol conquerors in turn controlled the various routes until the rise of sea travel diminished their importance.
Author: Christopher I. Beckwith
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9781400829941
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 512
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Book Description
The first complete history of Central Eurasia from ancient times to the present day, Empires of the Silk Road represents a fundamental rethinking of the origins, history, and significance of this major world region. Christopher Beckwith describes the rise and fall of the great Central Eurasian empires, including those of the Scythians, Attila the Hun, the Turks and Tibetans, and Genghis Khan and the Mongols. In addition, he explains why the heartland of Central Eurasia led the world economically, scientifically, and artistically for many centuries despite invasions by Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Chinese, and others. In retelling the story of the Old World from the perspective of Central Eurasia, Beckwith provides a new understanding of the internal and external dynamics of the Central Eurasian states and shows how their people repeatedly revolutionized Eurasian civilization. Beckwith recounts the Indo-Europeans' migration out of Central Eurasia, their mixture with local peoples, and the resulting development of the Graeco-Roman, Persian, Indian, and Chinese civilizations; he details the basis for the thriving economy of premodern Central Eurasia, the economy's disintegration following the region's partition by the Chinese and Russians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the damaging of Central Eurasian culture by Modernism; and he discusses the significance for world history of the partial reemergence of Central Eurasian nations after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Empires of the Silk Road places Central Eurasia within a world historical framework and demonstrates why the region is central to understanding the history of civilization.
Author: Md. Nazrul Islam
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811329982
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
This volume approaches China’s Belt and Road Initiative as a process of culturalization, one that started with the Silk Road and continued over the millennium. In mainstream literature, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been portrayed as the geo-economic vision and geo-political ambition of China’s current leaders, intended to shape the future of the world. However, this volume argues that although geo-politics and geo-economy may play their part, the BRI more importantly creates a venue for the meeting of cultures by promoting people-to-people interaction and exchange. This volume explores the journey from the Silk-Road to Belt-Road by analyzing topics ranging from history to religion, from language to culture, and from environment to health. As such, scholars, academics, researchers, undergraduate and graduate students from the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Business will find an alternative approach to the Belt and Road Initiative.
