The Steppe and the Sea

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Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812295900
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis The Steppe and the Sea by : Thomas T. Allsen

Download or read book The Steppe and the Sea written by Thomas T. Allsen and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-05-03 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1221, in what we now call Turkmenistan, a captive held by Mongol soldiers confessed that she had swallowed her pearls in order to safeguard them. She was immediately executed and eviscerated. On finding several pearls, Chinggis Qan (Genghis Khan) ordered that they cut open every slain person on the battlefield. Pearls, valued for aesthetic, economic, religious, and political reasons, were the ultimate luxury good of the Middle Ages, and the Chingissid imperium, the largest contiguous land empire in history, was their unmatched collector, promoter, and conveyor. Thomas T. Allsen examines the importance of pearls, as luxury good and political investment, in the Mongolian empire—from its origin in 1206, through its unprecedented expansion, to its division and decline in 1370—in order to track the varied cultural and commercial interactions between the northern steppes and the southern seas. Focusing first on the acquisition, display, redistribution, and political significance of pearls, Allsen shows how the very act of forming such a vast nomadic empire required the massive accumulation, management, and movement of prestige goods, and how this process brought into being new regimes of consumption on a continental scale. He argues that overland and seaborne trade flourished simultaneously, forming a dynamic exchange system that moved commodities from east to west and north to south, including an enormous quantity of pearls. Tracking the circulation of pearls across time, he highlights the importance of different modes of exchange—booty-taking, tributary relations, market mechanisms, and reciprocal gift-giving. He also sheds light on the ways in which Mongols' marketing strategies made use of not only myth and folklore but also maritime communications networks created by Indian-Buddhist and Muslim merchants skilled in cross-cultural commerce. In Allsen's analysis, pearls illuminate Mongolian exceptionalism in steppe history, the interconnections between overland and seaborne trade, recurrent patterns in the employment of luxury goods in the political cultures of empires, and the consequences of such goods for local and regional economies.

By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean

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Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0199689172
Total Pages : 541 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (996 download)

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Book Synopsis By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean by : Barry W. Cunliffe

Download or read book By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean written by Barry W. Cunliffe and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the peoples of Eurasia, from the birth of farming to the expansion of the Mongols in the thirteenth century. An immense historical panorama set on a huge continental stage, this is also the story of how humans first started building the global system we know today.

Warfare, State and Society on the Black Sea Steppe, 1500–1700

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134552831
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (345 download)

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Book Synopsis Warfare, State and Society on the Black Sea Steppe, 1500–1700 by : Brian Davies

Download or read book Warfare, State and Society on the Black Sea Steppe, 1500–1700 written by Brian Davies and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-04 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This crucial period in Russia's history has been neglected by historians, but Brian Davies' study provides an essential insight into the emergence of Russia as a great power.

The People of the Eurasian Steppe

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781474488068
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (88 download)

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Book Synopsis The People of the Eurasian Steppe by : Warwick Ball

Download or read book The People of the Eurasian Steppe written by Warwick Ball and published by . This book was released on 2021-10-31 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of movement across the Eurasian steppe since prehistory and its effect on Europe

The Bulgars and the Steppe Empire in the Early Middle Ages

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Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9047444523
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (474 download)

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Book Synopsis The Bulgars and the Steppe Empire in the Early Middle Ages by : Tsvetelin Stepanov

Download or read book The Bulgars and the Steppe Empire in the Early Middle Ages written by Tsvetelin Stepanov and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representing the different images, 'names', and 'faces' of the 'Other' in the Eurasian Steppes during the period between the sixth and ninth/tenth centuries, this book broadens the scholars' views on nomads' life and mentalities.

The Hungry Steppe

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Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501730452
Total Pages : 433 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis The Hungry Steppe by : Sarah Cameron

Download or read book The Hungry Steppe written by Sarah Cameron and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hungry Steppe examines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime: the Kazakh famine of 1930–33. More than 1.5 million people, a quarter of Kazakhstan's population, perished. Yet the story of this famine has remained mostly hidden from view. Sarah Cameron reveals this brutal story and its devastating consequences for Kazakh society. Through extremely violent means, the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan, a stable territory with clear boundaries that was an integral part of the Soviet economy; and it forged a new Kazakh national identity. But ultimately, Cameron finds, neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves integrated into Soviet society the way Moscow intended. The experience of the famine scarred the republic and shaped its transformation into an independent nation in 1991. Cameron examines the Kazakh famine to overturn several assumptions about violence, modernization, and nation-making under Stalin, highlighting the creation of a new Kazakh national identity and how environmental factors shaped Soviet development. Ultimately, The Hungry Steppe depicts the Soviet regime and its disastrous policies in a new and unusual light.

Taming the Wild Field

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Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501703242
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Taming the Wild Field by : Willard Sunderland

Download or read book Taming the Wild Field written by Willard Sunderland and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-10 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stretching from the tributaries of the Danube to the Urals and from the Russian forests to the Black and Caspian seas, the vast European steppe has for centuries played very different roles in the Russian imagination. To the Grand Princes of Kiev and Muscovy, it was the "wild field," a region inhabited by nomadic Turko-Mongolic peoples who repeatedly threatened the fragile Slavic settlements to the north. For the emperors and empresses of imperial Russia, it was a land of boundless economic promise and a marker of national cultural prowess. By the mid-nineteenth century the steppe, once so alien and threatening, had emerged as an essential, if complicated, symbol of Russia itself.Traversing a thousand years of the region's history, Willard Sunderland recounts the complex process of Russian expansion and colonization, stressing the way outsider settlement at once created the steppe as a region of empire and was itself constantly changing. The story is populated by a colorful array of administrators, Cossack adventurers, Orthodox missionaries, geographers, foreign entrepreneurs, peasants, and (by the late nineteenth century) tourists and conservationists. Sunderland's approach to history is comparative throughout, and his comparisons of the steppe with the North American case are especially telling.Taming the Wild Field eloquently expresses concern with the fate of the world's great grasslands, and the book ends at the beginning of the twentieth century with the initiation of a conservation movement in Russia by those appalled at the high environmental cost of expansion.

The Golden Deer of Eurasia

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Author :
Publisher : Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN 13 : 1588392058
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (883 download)

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Book Synopsis The Golden Deer of Eurasia by : Joan Aruz

Download or read book The Golden Deer of Eurasia written by Joan Aruz and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 2006 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Beyond the Steppe and the Sown

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Author :
Publisher : Brill Academic Publishers
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 544 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Beyond the Steppe and the Sown by : David L. Peterson

Download or read book Beyond the Steppe and the Sown written by David L. Peterson and published by Brill Academic Publishers. This book was released on 2006 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of articles presents a wide array of fresh new perspectives on the archaeology of Eurasia from the Copper Age to early Mediaeval times, in the Independent States of the former USSR, as well as Turkey, China and Mongolia.

The Scythians

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192551868
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (925 download)

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Book Synopsis The Scythians by : Barry Cunliffe

Download or read book The Scythians written by Barry Cunliffe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-26 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brilliant horsemen and great fighters, the Scythians were nomadic horsemen who ranged wide across the grasslands of the Asian steppe from the Altai mountains in the east to the Great Hungarian Plain in the first millennium BC. Their steppe homeland bordered on a number of sedentary states to the south - the Chinese, the Persians and the Greeks - and there were, inevitably, numerous interactions between the nomads and their neighbours. The Scythians fought the Persians on a number of occasions, in one battle killing their king and on another occasion driving the invading army of Darius the Great from the steppe. Relations with the Greeks around the shores of the Black Sea were rather different - both communities benefiting from trading with each other. This led to the development of a brilliant art style, often depicting scenes from Scythian mythology and everyday life. It is from the writings of Greeks like the historian Herodotus that we learn of Scythian life: their beliefs, their burial practices, their love of fighting, and their ambivalent attitudes to gender. It is a world that is also brilliantly illuminated by the rich material culture recovered from Scythian burials, from the graves of kings on the Pontic steppe, with their elaborate gold work and vividly coloured fabrics, to the frozen tombs of the Altai mountains, where all the organic material - wooden carvings, carpets, saddles and even tattooed human bodies - is amazingly well preserved. Barry Cunliffe here marshals this vast array of evidence - both archaeological and textual - in a masterful reconstruction of the lost world of the Scythians, allowing them to emerge in all their considerable vigour and splendour for the first time in over two millennia.

The Steppe Tradition in International Relations

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Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108368913
Total Pages : 327 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (83 download)

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Book Synopsis The Steppe Tradition in International Relations by : Iver B. Neumann

Download or read book The Steppe Tradition in International Relations written by Iver B. Neumann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-19 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neumann and Wigen counter Euro-centrism in the study of international relations by providing a full account of political organisation in the Eurasian steppe from the fourth millennium BCE up until the present day. Drawing on a wide range of archaeological and historical secondary sources, alongside social theory, they discuss the pre-history, history and effect of what they name the 'steppe tradition'. Writing from an International Relations perspective, the authors give a full treatment of the steppe tradition's role in early European state formation, as well as explaining how politics in states like Turkey and Russia can be understood as hybridising the steppe tradition with an increasingly dominant European tradition. They show how the steppe tradition's ideas of political leadership, legitimacy and concepts of succession politics can help us to understand the policies and behaviour of such leaders as Putin in Russia and Erdogan in Turkey.

Nomadic Empires

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351502921
Total Pages : 121 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (515 download)

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Book Synopsis Nomadic Empires by : Gerard Chaliand

Download or read book Nomadic Empires written by Gerard Chaliand and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Nomadic Empires sheds new light on 2,000 years of military history and geopolitics. The Mongol Empire of Genghis-Khan and his heirs, as is well known, was the greatest empire in world history. For 2,000 from the fifth century b.c. to the fifteenth century a.d., the steppe areas of Asia, from the borders of Manchuria to the Black Sea, were a ""zone of turbulence,"" threatening settled peoples from China to Russia and Hungary, including Iran, India, the Byzantine empire, and even Syria. It was a true world stage that was affected by these destructive nomads.This cogent, well-written volume examines these nomadic people, variously called Indo-Europeans, Turkic peoples, or Mongols. They did not belong to a sole nation or language, but shared a strategic culture born in the steppes: a highly mobile cavalry which did not require sophisticated logistics, and an indirect mode of combat based on surprise, mobility, and harassment. They used bows and arrows and, when they were united under the authority of a strong leader, were able to become a deadly threat to their sedentary neighbors.Chaliand addresses the subject from four perspectives. First, he examines the early nomadic populations of Eurasia, and the impact of these nomads and their complex relationships with settled peoples. Then he describes military fronts of the Altaic Nomads, detailing events from the fourth century b.c. through the twelfth century a.d., from the early Chinese front to the Indo-Iranian front, the Byzantine front, and the Russian front. Next he covers the undertakings of the great nomad conquerors that brought about the Ottoman Empire. And finally, he describes what he calls ""the revenge of the sedentary peoples, exploring Russia and China in the aftermath of the Mongols. The volume includes a chronology and an annotated bibliography. Now in paperback, this cogent, well-written volume examines these nomadic people, variously called Indo-Europeans, Turkic peoples, or "

The Horde

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 067425998X
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (742 download)

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Book Synopsis The Horde by : Marie Favereau

Download or read book The Horde written by Marie Favereau and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cundill Prize Finalist A Financial Times Book of the Year A Spectator Book of the Year A Five Books Book of the Year The Mongols are known for one thing: conquest. But in this first comprehensive history of the Horde, the western portion of the Mongol empire that arose after the death of Chinggis Khan, Marie Favereau takes us inside one of the most powerful engines of economic integration in world history to show that their accomplishments extended far beyond the battlefield. Central to the extraordinary commercial boom that brought distant civilizations in contact for the first time, the Horde had a unique political regime—a complex power-sharing arrangement between the khan and nobility—that rewarded skillful administrators and fostered a mobile, innovative economic order. From their capital on the lower Volga River, the Mongols influenced state structures in Russia and across the Islamic world, disseminated sophisticated theories about the natural world, and introduced new ideas of religious tolerance. An eloquent, ambitious, and definitive portrait of an empire that has long been too little understood, The Horde challenges our assumptions that nomads are peripheral to history and makes it clear that we live in a world shaped by Mongols. “The Mongols have been ill-served by history, the victims of an unfortunate mixture of prejudice and perplexity...The Horde flourished, in Favereau’s fresh, persuasive telling, precisely because it was not the one-trick homicidal rabble of legend.” —Wall Street Journal “Fascinating...The Mongols were a sophisticated people with an impressive talent for government and a sensitive relationship with the natural world...An impressively researched and intelligently reasoned book.” —The Times

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language

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Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400831105
Total Pages : 568 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis The Horse, the Wheel, and Language by : David W. Anthony

Download or read book The Horse, the Wheel, and Language written by David W. Anthony and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-26 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roughly half the world's population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did they manage to spread it around the globe? Until now their identity has remained a tantalizing mystery to linguists, archaeologists, and even Nazis seeking the roots of the Aryan race. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language lifts the veil that has long shrouded these original Indo-European speakers, and reveals how their domestication of horses and use of the wheel spread language and transformed civilization. Linking prehistoric archaeological remains with the development of language, David Anthony identifies the prehistoric peoples of central Eurasia's steppe grasslands as the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European, and shows how their innovative use of the ox wagon, horseback riding, and the warrior's chariot turned the Eurasian steppes into a thriving transcontinental corridor of communication, commerce, and cultural exchange. He explains how they spread their traditions and gave rise to important advances in copper mining, warfare, and patron-client political institutions, thereby ushering in an era of vibrant social change. Anthony also describes his fascinating discovery of how the wear from bits on ancient horse teeth reveals the origins of horseback riding. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language solves a puzzle that has vexed scholars for two centuries--the source of the Indo-European languages and English--and recovers a magnificent and influential civilization from the past.

Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain

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Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107068843
Total Pages : 355 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain by : David A. Bello

Download or read book Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain written by David A. Bello and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-04 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using Manchu and Chinese sources, this book explores the environmental history of Qing China's Manchurian, Inner Mongolian, and Yunnan borderlands.

Travels in the Steppes of the Caspian Sea

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 456 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (334 download)

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Book Synopsis Travels in the Steppes of the Caspian Sea by : Xavier Hommaire de Hell

Download or read book Travels in the Steppes of the Caspian Sea written by Xavier Hommaire de Hell and published by . This book was released on 1847 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change

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Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
ISBN 13 : 082484789X
Total Pages : 362 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (248 download)

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Book Synopsis Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change by : Reuven Amitai

Download or read book Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change written by Reuven Amitai and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2014-12-31 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the first millennium BCE, nomads of the Eurasian steppe have played a key role in world history and the development of adjacent sedentary regions, especially China, India, the Middle East, and Eastern and Central Europe. Although their more settled neighbors often saw them as an ongoing threat and imminent danger—“barbarians,” in fact—their impact on sedentary cultures was far more complex than the raiding, pillaging, and devastation with which they have long been associated in the popular imagination. The nomads were also facilitators and catalysts of social, demographic, economic, and cultural change, and nomadic culture had a significant influence on that of sedentary Eurasian civilizations, especially in cases when the nomads conquered and ruled over them. Not simply passive conveyors of ideas, beliefs, technologies, and physical artifacts, nomads were frequently active contributors to the process of cultural exchange and change. Their active choices and initiatives helped set the cultural and intellectual agenda of the lands they ruled and beyond. This volume brings together a distinguished group of scholars from different disciplines and cultural specializations to explore how nomads played the role of “agents of cultural change.” The beginning chapters examine this phenomenon in both east and west Asia in ancient and early medieval times, while the bulk of the book is devoted to the far flung Mongol empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This comparative approach, encompassing both a lengthy time span and a vast region, enables a clearer understanding of the key role that Eurasian pastoral nomads played in the history of the Old World. It conveys a sense of the complex and engaging cultural dynamic that existed between nomads and their agricultural and urban neighbors, and highlights the non-military impact of nomadic culture on Eurasian history. Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change illuminates and complicates nomadic roles as active promoters of cultural exchange within a vast and varied region. It makes available important original scholarship on the new turn in the study of the Mongol empire and on relations between the nomadic and sedentary worlds.