Our journey toward having a true understanding of world history passes through Central Asia, the lands in-between the great civilizations of India, China and Iran. William H McNeil’s classic Rise of the West (1963) vividly illustrated the role of Central Asia as a gearbox whose spinning connected these civilizations and propelled history forward. One had to imagine these gears as some kind of Buddhist chakras. But history cannot be based only through metaphors. Someone has to do the spade work to ground the chakras in hard facts: the shards, fragments, bones and rags that archaeologists uncover.
Author: David Chaffetz
A subtle interaction between the human mind, muscle and matter produces music. Over the centuries, these interactions change, as instruments come and go out of favor and the role of music and musicians evolve. A well-documented tradition like Turkish art music (or Ottoman classic music) exhibits a bewildering variety of innovations over its 500 year history. Walter Feldman’s augmented and revised version of his 1996 work tracks these innovations and shows how this art form has both preserved its heritage and renewed it.
When Mark Twain interviewed the leader of the Mormon Church, Brigham Young, in 1861, he found the religious patriarch mightily preoccupied with the problems of equal treatment for his 56 wives. Young told Twain of gifting a handkerchief or a fan to one woman; before long, all the other wives clamored for similar attentions. Polygamy’s downside provides the starting point for the epic poem, The Theft of a Tree, composed in classical Telegu by Nandi Timmana for Krishnadeveraya, ruler of the 16th century, south Indian, Vijayanagara empire. Surely the maharaja, with three documented consorts, could relate to the problem described by Brigham Young. And surely, he would have been enchanted by the poetic treatment accorded to it by his court poet.
Anthropologist Tom Barfield’s field work in the steppes of northern Afghanistan in the 1980s inspired a lifelong curiosity for the ancient empires that once arose in this frontier region. In an earlier work, The Perilous Frontier (Wiley Blackwell, 1992), he examined the relationship between the steppe pastoralists and sedentary states, concluding that the emergence of first the Qin and then the Han empires enabled the first great steppe empire, that of the Xiongnu. In the book under review here, Barfield explores how the Xiongnu/Han dynamic more generally explains different imperial trajectories.
The history of Iran’s rich musical culture presents a paradox. On the one hand, there is a distinctive Persian style of music, different from its Arab, Turkish, Central and South Asian neighbors. It has its own modes, its own vocal styles, its favorite instruments, its own performance genres. On the other hand, for many centuries the frontiers of Iran were fluid; a series of wars and revolutions transported its cultural centers from east to west and back again. At times the royal court existed only in camps, and indeed the musicians, dancers and singers lived in tents as well. Foreign invasions and conquest of adjacent countries brought a steady supply of musicians from exogenous traditions: Indians, Georgians, Armenians. And from time to time, Islamic rigorism banned music altogether. So what is Iranian music and how did it survive over the centuries?
Genghis Khan established the greatest land empire ever known. His heirs saw to it that his accomplishments be remembered in a number of now classic works, like the Secret Histories of the Mongols, the Compendium of Histories by Rashiduddin, and Juvayni’s History of the World Conqueror. But souvenirs of Genghis Khan also survived in folk tales of the Tatar peoples, where they were transformed for cultural and political purposes, as shown in Mária Ivanics’s masterful editing of The Činggis Legend.
Swiss explorer, photographer and historian of Eurasia Christophe Baumer has produced the second volume of his History of the Caucasus, splendidly illustrated with his large format, color photographs of imposing castles, fortified villages, and majestic monasteries and mosques. It looks like a coffee table book, but the dense text speaks to a higher purpose.