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The essays presented in this volume, first published in 2000, describe a phenomenon so widespread in human time and space that its importance is easily overlooked. City walls shaped the history of warfare; the mobilisation of manpower and resources needed to build them favoured some kinds of polities over others; and their massive strength, appropriately ornamented, created a visual language of authority. Previous collective volumes on the subject have dealt mainly with Europe, but the historians and art historians who collaborate here follow a comparative agenda. The millennial practice of wall building that branched out from the ancient Near East into India, Europe, and North Africa shows continuities and points of contact of which the makers of urban fortifications were scarcely aware; separate traditions in China, sub-Saharan Africa, and North America illustrate universal themes of defensive strategy and the symbolism of power, each time embedded in a distinctive local context.
The author examines the evolution of state-level societies and their relationship to polities in Japan and China.
This volume summarizes the results of a research project organized at Mainz University in Germersheim, Germany. It focused on the Jewish community in Kaifeng in China (12th to 19th century). In recent years, increasing research has been done about the history and culture of the Jews in China, and in the future, more academic interest in all questions connected with it can be expected. Main topics are the perception of Chinese Judaism in European history as well as in Chinese society itself, the self-image of the descendants in Kaifeng and their present status in China, and how China deals with foreign ethnics and religions as part of its own history and identity. These topics were discussed from various interdisciplinary points of view. The authors from Australia, China, Hong Kong, Israel, Great Britain, France, and Germany are prominent sino-judaists who present their latest results of research in the light of new facts and approaches.
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Many Japanese people consider themselves to be part of an essentially unchanging and isolated ethnic unit in which the biological, linguistic, and cultural aspects of Japanese identity overlap almost completely with each other. In its examination of the processes of ethnogenesis (the formation of ethnic groups) in the Japanese Islands, Ruins of Identity offers an approach to ethnicity that differs fundamentally from that found in most Japanese scholarship and popular discourse. Following an extensive discussion of previous theories on the formation of Japanese language, race, and culture and the nationalistic ideologies that have affected research in these topics, Mark Hudson presents a mode...
The Encyclopedia of Prehistory represents also defined bya somewhatdifferent set of an attempt to provide basic information sociocultural characteristics than are eth on all archaeologically known cultures, nological cultures. Major traditions are covering the entire globe and the entire defined based on common subsistence prehistory ofhumankind. It is designed as practices, sociopolitical organization, and a tool to assist in doing comparative materialindustries,butlanguage,ideology, research on the peoples of the past. Most and kinship ties play little or no part in of the entries are written by the world's their definition because they are virtually foremost experts on the particular area...
Mark E. Byington explores the formation, history, and legacy of the ancient state of Puyŏ, which existed in central Manchuria from the third century BCE until the late fifth century CE. As the earliest archaeologically attested state to arise in northeastern Asia, Puyŏ occupies an important place in the history of that region. Nevertheless, until now its history and culture have been rarely touched upon in scholarly works in any language. The present volume, utilizing recently discovered archaeological materials from Northeast China as well as a wide variety of historical records, explores the social and political processes associated with the formation and development of the Puyŏ state, ...
Wisdom, Faith, and Service captures the essence of the institutional vocation and mission of Bushnell University from its founding in 1895. The Bushnell Saga—past, present, and future—is shaped and framed by the individual “wisdom, faith, and service sagas” of Bushnell People—women, men, professors, students, alumni, administrators, and countless friends—whose own vocational callings have contributed to and benefited from the saga of this institution. In this book, current Bushnell People reflect theologically and practically on the university’s mission and share the stories of other Bushnell People whose lives embody the high calling of wisdom, faith, and service.
Kings in All but Name illustrates how Japan was an ethnically diverse state from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, closely bound by trading ties to Korea and China. It reveals new archaeological and textual evidence proving that East Asia had integrated trading networks long before the arrival of European explorers and shows how mining techniques improved and propelled East Asian trade. The story of the Ouchi rulers contradicts the belief that this was a period of warfare and turmoil in Japan, and instead, proves that this was a stable and prosperous trading state where rituals, policies, politics, and economics were interwoven and diverse.
This interdisciplinary study examines patterns of migration, acculturation, assimilation and economic activity of successive waves of Jewish arrivals in China from approximately AD 1100 to 1949.