1. The Prehistory of the Silk Road (Encounters with Asia)
2. Alberuni's India by Al-Beruni (973-1048)(Kitab fi tahqiq ma li'l-hind or simply, Ta'riqh al-hind), early 11th century, translated by Edward C. Sachau.
Sachau E. C., trans. Alberuni's India. New Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1993.
Editions of 'Alberuni's India':
1888: Alberuni's India', transl. Dr. E.C.Sachau, 2 vols., Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. English trans, 2 vols., London 1888.
1888: Alberuni's India. Trans. Edward C. Sachau. London: Trübner, 1888.
1910: Alberuni's India, trad.ingl.di E.C.Sachau, 2 voll., Kegan Paul,Trench, Trubner & Co., Ldt., London 1910.
1958: Kitāb al-Bīrūnī fl Tahqīq Mâ li'l-Hind. Dairatu'l-Ma'arifi'l-Osmania Publications 9. Hyderabad: Osmania Oriental Publications Bureau, 1958.
1962: Alberuni's India. tr. E. C. Sachau 2 vols. Lahore: Mubarak Ali, 1962
1964: Alberuni's India. An Account of the Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Geography, Chronology, Astronomy, Customs, Laws and Astrology of India about A.D. 1030, edited with notes and indices by E.C. Sachau, Delhi 1964.
1971: Al-Beruni's India: Account Of The Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Geography, Chronology, Astronomy, Customs, Laws And Astrology Of India About AD 1030 (Hardcover) by Edward C. Sachau. Edited with introduction and notes by Ainslee T. Embree, The Norton Library, 1971. (abridged version)
1983: 1888: Taḥqīq mā l'l-Hind ("al-Bīrūnī's India") Arabic - A compendium of India's Religion and philosophy تحقيق ما للهند من مقولة معقولة في العقل أم مرذولة, ed. E. Sachau, 1887 Beirut: `Ālam al-Kutub. 2nd ed. 1404/1983.
1983: "Alberuni's India", translated by E.C. Sachau, New Delhi Reprint, 1983.
1989; AlBeruni’s India. C. E. Sachau 2 vols. in 1 Rep. Delhi: Low Price Pub. [Rep. 1910] 1989.
1992: Sachau, Edward C. ISBN: 8121505621, published 9202, english translation of 'India' by Alberuni
1993: Sachau E. C., English translation of Alberuni's India. New Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1993.
Until the 10th century, history most often meant political and military history, but this was not so with Biruni (973-1048). In his Kitab fi Tahqiq ma li'l-Hind (Researches on India), also known as Indica, he did not record political and military history in any detail, but wrote more on India's cultural, scientific, social and religious history. Biruni is now regarded as the father of Indology.
Al-Biruni learned Hindu philosophy, mathematics, geography and religion from the Pandits to whom he taught Greek and Arabic science and philosophy. He wrote about his travels through India in this his best known book which gives a graphic account of the sub-continent.
'Kitab al-Hind' "Critical study of what India says, whether accepted by reason or refused" (Arabic تحقيق ما للهند من مقولة معقولة في العقل أم مرذولة), also known as the Indica - a compendium of India's religion and philosophy which gives a detailed account of the Indian life its caste system and marriage customs,religions, languages and cultures. He then studies the Indian systems of writing and numbers and weights and measures before going on to examine the geography of the country. The book also examines Indian medicine, astronomy, astrology and the calendar.
Al-Biruni studied Indian literature in the original, translating several Sanskrit texts into Arabic. He also wrote several treatises devoted to certain aspects of Indian astronomy and mathematics which were of particular interest to him.
3.Campaigning on the Oxus and the fall of Khiva by J.A. MacGahan, correspondent of the 'New York Herald'.
Mac Gahan, J. A. Campaigning on the Oxus and the Fall of Khiva. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, 1874. [illustrated. no maps, no index.] Also published 1874 by Harper & Brothers in New York .
Januarius Aloysius MacGahan was born near New Lexington, Ohio on June 12, 1844.[2] His father was an immigrant from Ireland who had served on the Northumberland, the ship which took Napoleon into exile on St. Helena. MacGahan moved to St. Louis, where he worked briefly as a teacher and as a journalist. There he met General Philip Sheridan, a civil war hero also of Irish parentage, who convinced him to study law in Europe. He sailed to Brussels in December, 1868. , learning French and German. He ran short of money and was about to return to America in 1870 when the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Sheridan happened to be an observer with the German Army, and he used his influence to persuade the European editor of the New York Herald to hire MacGahan as a war correspondent with the French Army.
MacGahan's vivid articles from the front lines describing the stunning defeat of the French Army won him a large following, and many of his dispatches to the Herald were reprinted by European newspapers. By the age of twenty-seven, he was a celebrity. When the war ended, he interviewed French leader Léon Gambetta and Victor Hugo, and, in March 1871, he hurried to Paris and was one of the first foreign correspondents to report on the uprising of the Paris Commune. He was arrested by the French military and nearly executed, and was only rescued through the intervention of the U.S. Minister to France.
E. E. Kuzmina (Author), Victor H. Mair (Editor) Hardcover: 264 pages
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press; illustrated edition edition (November 30, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0812240413
ISBN-13: 978-0812240412
Review
"A major advance in the field of the early history and archaeology of central Asia."—Nicola Di Cosmo, Institute for Advanced Study
In ancient and medieval times, the Silk Road was of great importance to the transport of peoples, goods, and ideas between the East and the West. A vast network of trade routes, it connected the diverse geographies and populations of China, the Eurasian Steppe, Central Asia, India, Western Asia, and Europe. Although its main use was for importing silk from China, traders moving in the opposite direction carried to China jewelry, glassware, and other exotic goods from the Mediterranean, jade from Khotan, and horses and furs from the nomads of the Steppe. In both directions, technology and ideologies were transmitted. The Silk Road brought together the achievements of the different peoples of Eurasia to advance the Old World as a whole.
The majority of the Silk Road routes passed through the Eurasian Steppe, whose nomadic people were participants and mediators in its economic and cultural exchanges. Until now, the origins of these routes and relationships have not been examined in great detail. In The Prehistory of the Silk Road, E. E. Kuzmina, renowned Russian archaeologist, looks at the history of this crucial area before the formal establishment of Silk Road trade and diplomacy. From the late Neolithic period to the early Bronze Age, Kuzmina traces the evolution of the material culture of the Steppe and the contact between civilizations that proved critical to the development of the widespread trade that would follow, including nomadic migrations, the domestication and use of the horse and the camel, and the spread of wheeled transport.
The Prehistory of the Silk Road combines detailed research in archaeology with evidence from physical anthropology, linguistics, and other fields, incorporating both primary and secondary sources from a range of languages, including a vast accumulation of Russian-language scholarship largely untapped in the West. The book is complemented by an extensive bibliography that will be of great use to scholars.
Sachau E. C., trans. Alberuni's India. New Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1993.
Al-Beruni's India: Account Of The Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Geography, Chronology, Astronomy, Customs, Laws And Astrology Of India About AD 1030 (Hardcover) by Edward C. Sachau. Edited with introduction and notes by Ainslee T. Embree, The Norton Library, 1971. This is an abridged version - the complete version by Sachau spans two volumes and is really for the specialist
Editions of 'Alberuni's India':
1888: Alberuni's India', transl. Dr. E.C.Sachau, 2 vols., Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. English trans, 2 vols., London 1888.
1888: Alberuni's India. Trans. Edward C. Sachau. London: Trübner, 1888.
1910: Alberuni's India, trad.ingl.di E.C.Sachau, 2 voll., Kegan Paul,Trench, Trubner & Co., Ldt., London 1910.
1958: Kitāb al-Bīrūnī fl Tahqīq Mâ li'l-Hind. Dairatu'l-Ma'arifi'l-Osmania Publications 9. Hyderabad: Osmania Oriental Publications Bureau, 1958.
1962: Alberuni's India. tr. E. C. Sachau 2 vols. Lahore: Mubarak Ali, 1962
1964: Alberuni's India. An Account of the Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Geography, Chronology, Astronomy, Customs, Laws and Astrology of India about A.D. 1030, edited with notes and indices by E.C. Sachau, Delhi 1964.
1971: Al-Beruni's India: Account Of The Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Geography, Chronology, Astronomy, Customs, Laws And Astrology Of India About AD 1030 (Hardcover) by Edward C. Sachau. Edited with introduction and notes by Ainslee T. Embree, The Norton Library, 1971. (abridged version)
1983: 1888: Taḥqīq mā l'l-Hind ("al-Bīrūnī's India") Arabic - A compendium of India's Religion and philosophy تحقيق ما للهند من مقولة معقولة في العقل أم مرذولة, ed. E. Sachau, 1887 Beirut: `Ālam al-Kutub. 2nd ed. 1404/1983.
1983: "Alberuni's India", translated by E.C. Sachau, New Delhi Reprint, 1983.
1989; AlBeruni’s India. C. E. Sachau 2 vols. in 1 Rep. Delhi: Low Price Pub. [Rep. 1910] 1989.
1992: Sachau, Edward C. ISBN: 8121505621, published 9202, english translation of 'India' by Alberuni
1993: Sachau E. C., English translation of Alberuni's India. New Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1993.
Until the 10th century, history most often meant political and military history, but this was not so with Biruni (973-1048). In his Kitab fi Tahqiq ma li'l-Hind (Researches on India), also known as Indica, he did not record political and military history in any detail, but wrote more on India's cultural, scientific, social and religious history. Biruni is now regarded as the father of Indology.
Al-Biruni learned Hindu philosophy, mathematics, geography and religion from the Pandits to whom he taught Greek and Arabic science and philosophy. He wrote about his travels through India in this his best known book which gives a graphic account of the sub-continent.
'Kitab al-Hind' "Critical study of what India says, whether accepted by reason or refused" (Arabic تحقيق ما للهند من مقولة معقولة في العقل أم مرذولة), also known as the Indica - a compendium of India's religion and philosophy which gives a detailed account of the Indian life its caste system and marriage customs,religions, languages and cultures. He then studies the Indian systems of writing and numbers and weights and measures before going on to examine the geography of the country. The book also examines Indian medicine, astronomy, astrology and the calendar.
Al-Biruni studied Indian literature in the original, translating several Sanskrit texts into Arabic. He also wrote several treatises devoted to certain aspects of Indian astronomy and mathematics which were of particular interest to him.
3.Campaigning on the Oxus and the fall of Khiva by J.A. MacGahan, correspondent of the 'New York Herald'.
Mac Gahan, J. A. Campaigning on the Oxus and the Fall of Khiva. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, 1874. [illustrated. no maps, no index.] Also published 1874 by Harper & Brothers in New York .
Januarius Aloysius MacGahan was born near New Lexington, Ohio on June 12, 1844.[2] His father was an immigrant from Ireland who had served on the Northumberland, the ship which took Napoleon into exile on St. Helena. MacGahan moved to St. Louis, where he worked briefly as a teacher and as a journalist. There he met General Philip Sheridan, a civil war hero also of Irish parentage, who convinced him to study law in Europe. He sailed to Brussels in December, 1868. , learning French and German. He ran short of money and was about to return to America in 1870 when the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Sheridan happened to be an observer with the German Army, and he used his influence to persuade the European editor of the New York Herald to hire MacGahan as a war correspondent with the French Army.
MacGahan's vivid articles from the front lines describing the stunning defeat of the French Army won him a large following, and many of his dispatches to the Herald were reprinted by European newspapers. By the age of twenty-seven, he was a celebrity. When the war ended, he interviewed French leader Léon Gambetta and Victor Hugo, and, in March 1871, he hurried to Paris and was one of the first foreign correspondents to report on the uprising of the Paris Commune. He was arrested by the French military and nearly executed, and was only rescued through the intervention of the U.S. Minister to France.
In 1871 MacGahan was assigned as the Herald's correspondent to St. Petersburg. He learned Russian, mingled with the Russian military and nobility, covered the Russian tour of General William Tecumseh Sherman and met his future wife, Varvara Elgaina, whom he married in 1873.
He learned in 1873 that Russia was planning to invade the khanate of Khiva, in Central Asia. Defying a Russian ban of foreign correspondents crossed the Kyzyl-Kum desert on horseback and witnessed the surrender of the city of Khiva to the Russian Army. There he met a Russian Lieutenant Colonel, Mikhail Skobelev, who later became famous as Russian commander during the Russian-Turkish War of 1877–78. MacGahan described his adventures in a popular book, Campaigning on the Oxus and the fall of Khiva (1874) .U.S. diplomat Eugene Schuyler, a friend of MacGahan's, said of this exploit, "His ride across the desert was spoken of everywhere in Central Asia as by far the most wonderful thing that had ever been done there." British reporter Archibald Forbes called it "the most remarkable and daring exploit in all the annals of war correspondence."
He covered all the major battles of the Russian-Turkish War, including the siege of Pleven and Shipka Pass. He reported on the final defeat of the Turkish armies, and was present at the signing of the treaty of San Stefano, which ended the war. Shortly after MacGahan died of typhus, on June 9, 1878, 3 days short of his 34th birthday.
4. Technologies of Rule: Water, Power, and the Modernization of Central Asia, 1867-1941, by Maya Karin Peterson.
Peterson’s dissertation examines the Russian Empire and then early Soviet efforts to irrigate the Central Asian borderlands. Spanning more than seven decades and six currently independent states, the history of the irrigation projects in Central Asia is a big story to tell, and Peterson uses a dazzling array of archival materials to do so. Along the way, she addresses several important historiographical questions.
The dissertation has three sections, each pairing a chapter on the relevant political and institutional context (and environmental imaginaries) with a case study of a large irrigation project.
The first, after a genealogy of tsarist-era arguments for hydraulic engineering, focuses on the activities of Grand Duke Nikolai Konstaninovich Romanov, nephew of Tsar Alexander II, a ne’er-do-well exiled from St Petersburg who settled in Tashkent in 1881. The Grand Duke was a fascinating hybrid figure who, while acting independently from local administrators, used his allowance to support development schemes in Turkestan. Chief among these were several canals built on the Hungry Steppe (the left bank of the Syr-Darya River in contemporary Uzbekistan).
The second section is devoted to a period of increased governmental control of irrigation affairs in Turkestan, symbolized by the 1898 nationalization of the Grand Duke’s Nicholas I Canal. At this time, the hybridity of the earlier era was already fading from view; the cultivation of cotton in Turkestan and its colonization by Slavic peasants were paramount for officials like the Minister of Agriculture, Alexander Krivoshein, interested in maximizing the Russian Empire’s productive capacity. The push for more cotton, Peterson demonstrates, preceded the colonization fever; most administrators preferred local Turkestanis as cotton cultivators. Colonization, rather, was required to supply regions transitioning to cotton monoculture with grain. Both projects required the large-scale redistribution of Turkestan’s surface waters. Peterson focuses on the tsarist state’s attempt to irrigate the Chu River valley of Semirech’e, in hopes that it would become a home for grain-growing peasant settlers. Despite logistical problems and the cataclysmic 1916 Central Asian revolt, in 1917, Russians and Central Asians still shared an interest in the project and discussed ways of moving forward on it.
The last section brings the narrative of state-driven hydraulic projects forward into the Soviet era, first by discussing the multitude of planning organizations interested in irrigation and then through a case study of the Vakhsh River, in southern Tajikistan, thought promising for growing long-staple Egyptian cotton. In a thoughtful epilogue, Maya Peterson discussesthe 1939 building of the Great Fergana Canal, providing water from the Syr-Darya to cotton fields in the Uzbek and Tajik SSRs.
For the great majority, religious practice remains connected to life-cycle events and to concerns about health, well-being and prosperity. The author focuses on the elements of everyday religiosity including domestic rituals, shrine-related activities, and various forms of religious healing.
6. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. By Peter Frankopan. Bloomsbury; 656 pages;
The author, a historian at Oxford University has covered the creation of the Silk Roads and the story of long-distance trade across the Eurasian continent. In “The Silk Roads: A New History of the World” writes with clarity and memorable detail. When Cyrus the Great, creator in the sixth century BC of the Persian Empire, was killed attempting to subdue the Scythians, his head was carried about in a skin full of blood “so that the thirst for power that had inspired him could now be quenched.” The Huns, destroy of the Roman Empire, bandaged the heads of their children, applying pressure to flatten the frontal and occipital bones, so causing their heads to grow in a pointed fashion. Spending so much of their lives on horseback, when on the ground “they looked like animals standing on their hind legs”: not only was their behaviour out of the ordinary, “so was the way they looked.”
Where other histories put the Mediterranean at the centre of the story, under Mr Frankopan it is important as the western end of a transcontinental trade with Asia in silks, spices, slaves—and ideas. Here he is at his most original. Particularly striking is the rapid conversion Christianity made in the east—right into modern-day China. Asia and the Near East were noisy with religious competition (not least because new rulers and empire-builders wanted divine authority to underpin their rule). In the early seventh century Christian evangelists tried to win over Buddhists with the case that not only was Christianity compatible with Buddhism, “it was Buddhism.” Religious jostling led to borrowings—think of the halo as a common symbol in Christian, Zoroastrian, Buddhist and Hindu art. It also spurred creativity, in the form of the outpourings of devotional Buddhist art from the Bamiyan carvings in modern Afghanistan to the painted caves of Dunhuang in north-west China.
He shows that the period after the sack of Rome really was a Dark Age, he turns to pollution measured in Greenland’s polar ice-caps. They imply smelting activity returning to prehistoric levels. The author challenges received notions: the Black Death, carried into Europe in 1348 from the east was not the end of Europe, but its making. Catastrophic depopulation altered the balance of power between authority and labourers, who were now in a position to demand higher wages and more rights.
The second half of the book turns to 19th-century Western imperialism and its consequences in Asia. In the conclusion he cites that Central Asia the home of fabled entrepots like Samarkand and Bukhara is now hosting new centres such as Baku and Almaty and others showing that “new silk roads are rising again” and that the region certainly has the attention of the rising powers Russia and China.
Peterson’s dissertation examines the Russian Empire and then early Soviet efforts to irrigate the Central Asian borderlands. Spanning more than seven decades and six currently independent states, the history of the irrigation projects in Central Asia is a big story to tell, and Peterson uses a dazzling array of archival materials to do so. Along the way, she addresses several important historiographical questions.
The dissertation has three sections, each pairing a chapter on the relevant political and institutional context (and environmental imaginaries) with a case study of a large irrigation project.
The first, after a genealogy of tsarist-era arguments for hydraulic engineering, focuses on the activities of Grand Duke Nikolai Konstaninovich Romanov, nephew of Tsar Alexander II, a ne’er-do-well exiled from St Petersburg who settled in Tashkent in 1881. The Grand Duke was a fascinating hybrid figure who, while acting independently from local administrators, used his allowance to support development schemes in Turkestan. Chief among these were several canals built on the Hungry Steppe (the left bank of the Syr-Darya River in contemporary Uzbekistan).
The second section is devoted to a period of increased governmental control of irrigation affairs in Turkestan, symbolized by the 1898 nationalization of the Grand Duke’s Nicholas I Canal. At this time, the hybridity of the earlier era was already fading from view; the cultivation of cotton in Turkestan and its colonization by Slavic peasants were paramount for officials like the Minister of Agriculture, Alexander Krivoshein, interested in maximizing the Russian Empire’s productive capacity. The push for more cotton, Peterson demonstrates, preceded the colonization fever; most administrators preferred local Turkestanis as cotton cultivators. Colonization, rather, was required to supply regions transitioning to cotton monoculture with grain. Both projects required the large-scale redistribution of Turkestan’s surface waters. Peterson focuses on the tsarist state’s attempt to irrigate the Chu River valley of Semirech’e, in hopes that it would become a home for grain-growing peasant settlers. Despite logistical problems and the cataclysmic 1916 Central Asian revolt, in 1917, Russians and Central Asians still shared an interest in the project and discussed ways of moving forward on it.
The last section brings the narrative of state-driven hydraulic projects forward into the Soviet era, first by discussing the multitude of planning organizations interested in irrigation and then through a case study of the Vakhsh River, in southern Tajikistan, thought promising for growing long-staple Egyptian cotton. In a thoughtful epilogue, Maya Peterson discussesthe 1939 building of the Great Fergana Canal, providing water from the Syr-Darya to cotton fields in the Uzbek and Tajik SSRs.
5. 'Religion is not so strong Here': Muslim Religious Life in Khorezm After Socialism by Krisztina Kehl-Bodrogi, Volume 18 - Halle studies in the anthropology of Eurasia, 2008 University of Michigan ISBN 3825899098, 9783825899097 (251 pages)
This book examines religious life in the province of Khorezm in western Uzbekistan in the context of the overall political transformations, which followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union. As the title suggests, the people of Khorezm consider themselves to be less religious than their fellow countrymen. Also, there has been no sharp increase in the observance of the normative tenets of Islam since independence.
For the great majority, religious practice remains connected to life-cycle events and to concerns about health, well-being and prosperity. The author focuses on the elements of everyday religiosity including domestic rituals, shrine-related activities, and various forms of religious healing.
6. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. By Peter Frankopan. Bloomsbury; 656 pages;
The author, a historian at Oxford University has covered the creation of the Silk Roads and the story of long-distance trade across the Eurasian continent. In “The Silk Roads: A New History of the World” writes with clarity and memorable detail. When Cyrus the Great, creator in the sixth century BC of the Persian Empire, was killed attempting to subdue the Scythians, his head was carried about in a skin full of blood “so that the thirst for power that had inspired him could now be quenched.” The Huns, destroy of the Roman Empire, bandaged the heads of their children, applying pressure to flatten the frontal and occipital bones, so causing their heads to grow in a pointed fashion. Spending so much of their lives on horseback, when on the ground “they looked like animals standing on their hind legs”: not only was their behaviour out of the ordinary, “so was the way they looked.”
Where other histories put the Mediterranean at the centre of the story, under Mr Frankopan it is important as the western end of a transcontinental trade with Asia in silks, spices, slaves—and ideas. Here he is at his most original. Particularly striking is the rapid conversion Christianity made in the east—right into modern-day China. Asia and the Near East were noisy with religious competition (not least because new rulers and empire-builders wanted divine authority to underpin their rule). In the early seventh century Christian evangelists tried to win over Buddhists with the case that not only was Christianity compatible with Buddhism, “it was Buddhism.” Religious jostling led to borrowings—think of the halo as a common symbol in Christian, Zoroastrian, Buddhist and Hindu art. It also spurred creativity, in the form of the outpourings of devotional Buddhist art from the Bamiyan carvings in modern Afghanistan to the painted caves of Dunhuang in north-west China.
He shows that the period after the sack of Rome really was a Dark Age, he turns to pollution measured in Greenland’s polar ice-caps. They imply smelting activity returning to prehistoric levels. The author challenges received notions: the Black Death, carried into Europe in 1348 from the east was not the end of Europe, but its making. Catastrophic depopulation altered the balance of power between authority and labourers, who were now in a position to demand higher wages and more rights.
The second half of the book turns to 19th-century Western imperialism and its consequences in Asia. In the conclusion he cites that Central Asia the home of fabled entrepots like Samarkand and Bukhara is now hosting new centres such as Baku and Almaty and others showing that “new silk roads are rising again” and that the region certainly has the attention of the rising powers Russia and China.