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The last decade has seen a surge of scholarly interest in these religious professionals and a good number of high quality publications. Our volume, however, with its unique intercultural character and its explicit focus on appropriation and contestation of religious expertise in the Imperial Era is substantially different. Unlike the rather narrow focus of earlier studies of civic priests, the papers presented here examine a wider range of religious professionals, their dynamic interaction with established religious authorities and institutions, and their contributions to religious innovation in the ancient Mediterranean world, from the late Hellenistic period through to Late Antiquity, from...
An exciting and richly detailed new history of the Silk Road that tells how it became more important as a route for diplomacy than for trade The King’s Road offers a new interpretation of the history of the Silk Road, emphasizing its importance as a diplomatic route, rather than a commercial one. Tracing the arduous journeys of diplomatic envoys, Xin Wen presents a rich social history of long-distance travel that played out in deserts, post stations, palaces, and polo fields. The book tells the story of the everyday lives of diplomatic travelers on the Silk Road—what they ate and drank, the gifts they carried, and the animals that accompanied them—and how they navigated a complex web o...
Chinese traders and explorers first visited the Maldives, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, in the early fourteenth century. The traveler Wang Dayuan “discovered” the island sultanate for the Chinese world, and merchants increasingly dealt in Maldivian goods such as coconuts, cowrie shells, and ambergris. Zheng He’s fifteenth-century voyages ventured to the islands, by then a trading hub, and brought their envoys to Beijing. But the Maldives faded from Chinese records by the end of the sixteenth century, after the Ming state suddenly retreated from the Indian Ocean and shifted focus to Southeast Asia. Discovered but Forgotten is a pioneering examination of China’s relations with th...
Explores the social interactions and pathways that enabled Christianity to travel across Asia and to India.
Palmyra has long attracted the attention of the world. Even before its rediscovery in the eighteenth century it had gained legendary status because of its third-century CE Queen Zenobia, who had rebelled against the Romans and expanded Palmyra's territory into that of an Empire, stretchingfrom what is modern eastern Turkey into Egypt. The city and its queen featured in European art and literature already in the century. Zenobia's Palmyra already existed as a mirage in the minds of the educated Europeans. Even though Zenobia's reign and extensive power was a fairly short interlude andthe Romans struck hard against the Palmyrenes devastating the city, this path to imperial power was one which ...
The Lived Ancient Religion project has radically changed perspectives on ancient religions and their supposedly personal or public character. This volume applies and further develops these methodological tools, new perspectives and new questions. The religious transformations of the Roman Imperial period appear in new light and more nuances by comparative confrontation and the integration of many disciplines. The contributions are written by specialists from a variety of disciplinary contexts (Jewish Studies, Theology, Classics, Early Christian Studies) dealing with the history of religion of the Mediterranean, West-Asian, and European area from the (late) Hellenistic period to the (early) Middle Ages and shaped by their intensive exchange. From the point of view of their respective fields of research, the contributors engage with discourses on agency, embodiment, appropriation and experience. They present innovative research in four fields also of theoretical debate, which are “Experiencing the Religious”, “Switching the Code”, „A Thing Called Body“ and “Commemorating the Moment”.
While globalization is a modern phenomenon, premodern people were also interconnected in early forms of globalism, sharing merchandise, technology, languages, and stories over long distances. Looking across civilizations, this volume takes a broad view of the Middle Ages in order to foster new habits of thinking and develop a multilayered, critical sense of the past. The essays in this volume reach across disciplinary lines to bring insights from music, theater, religion, ecology, museums, and the history of disease into the literature classroom. The contributors provide guidance on texts such as the Thousand and One Nights, Sunjata, Benjamin of Tudela's Book of Travels, and the Malay Annals and on topics such as hotels, maps, and camels. They propose syllabus recommendations, present numerous digital resources, and offer engaging class activities and discussion questions. Ultimately, they provide tools that will help students evaluate popular representations of the Middle Ages and engage with the dynamics of past, present, and future world relationships.
Camels are first mentioned in the Bible as the movable property of Abraham. During the early monarchy, they feature prominently as long-distance mounts for the Queen of Sheba, and almost a millennium later, the Gospels tell us about the impossibility of a camel passing through a needle’s eye. Given the limited extrabiblical evidence for camels before circa 1000 BCE, a thorough investigation of the spatio-temporal history of the camel in the ancient Near and Middle East is necessary to understand their early appearance in the Hebrew Bible. Camels in the Biblical World is a two-part study that charts the cultural trajectories of two domestic species—the two-humped or Bactrian camel (Camelu...
This collection of essays celebrates the life and work of Dr. Charles Kevin Stuart. For more than three decades, Kevin Stuart has quietly exerted considerable influence on scholarship on Tibet, China, and Mongolia, demonstrating a particular sensitivity to emic voices, facilitating collaborations between etic-emic viewpoints, but always striving to preserve and privilege the latter. It is possible when reading Kevin's writings, and the contributions gathered here, to 'center the local' by thinking within local horizons of meaning. Introduction by Benedict Copps An Introduction to Amdo Tibetan Love Songs, or La gzhas by Skal bzang nor bu A Bibliographic Note and Table on Mid-19th to Mid-20th ...
The Archaeological Gazetteer of Afghanistan: Revised Edition is the most comprehensive reference work on the archaeology and monuments of Afghanistan ever undertaken, significantly expanding on the work of the 1982 edition and cataloguing all recorded sites and monuments from the earliest times to the Timurid period.