Review of The Eastern Frontier by Paolo Ognibene (original) (raw)
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Review of the Eastern Frontier by Andrew Magnusson
Medieval Encounters, 2020
Robert Haug's The Eastern Frontier is a study of the eastern edges of the late Sasanian and early Islamic empires. It focuses on the three provinces that Arab-Muslim conquerors would identify as Khurasan, Transoxiana (Ma Wara 'l-Nahr in Arabic), and Tukharistan (or Bactria in present-day Afghanistan) from the third through tenth centuries. The book draws its theoretical framework from Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis. Turner, writing in the late nineteenth century, argued that the frontier defined the history of the United States. As waves of settlers pushed the nation's boundaries ever westward, the central government attempted to control them and, in the process, changed both the nature of the frontier and its relationship to the center. Consequently Haug, like Turner, argues that the frontier is not only a place but a process of becoming. Turner's thesis was once quite influential in the historiography of the American West, but it has retreated somewhat in favor of Borderlands approaches that are more sensitive to indigenous populations and hybrid cultures. Borderlands theory has slowly been gaining currency in Late Antique and Middle Eastern Studies. For example, Greg Fisher has recently used it to study Roman policies toward pre-Islamic Arabs. Haug implicitly adopts a Borderlands approach to Late Antique Central Asia. He treats the indigenous populations of the region in all their diversity (ethnic, religious, and cultural) and rejects any sense of Persian or Muslim superiority. Haug considers the perspectives of nomads as well as settled people. In this sense, The Eastern Frontier is Borderlands history. The book begins with a geographical introduction to Islamic Central Asia. Haug surveys the historiography of previous approaches to the region, centerperiphery relations, and jihad more generally. Considering these themes, Mimi Hanaoka's work on the Islamic historiography of Persian peripheries would have been a valuable addition to the bibliography. Chapter one explores the many meanings of frontier, both terminologically and theoretically. Haug conceives of Khurasan as a "shatterzone" caught between competing empires. Tukharistan, by contrast, resembles a Swiss cheese with the central government controlling islands of territory around cities. Central Asian frontiers were also places of ambition, as some medieval Muslim geographers imagined that the realm of Islam extended to the very edges of China. The maps are very useful for orienting the reader to some of the furthest-flung locales.
This volume brings together the contributions of the first and second Payravi conferences on Ancient Iranian History, held at the University of California Irvine (Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Iranian Studies), and organized by the editors of this volume. The first conference took place on March 23 rd , 2018, with the title The Iranian Plateau and its Histories. From the Beginnings to the 1 st Millennium BCE. The second was held on March 11 th-12 th , 2019, entitled The Persian-Achaemenid Empire as a 'World-System': New Approaches and Contexts. In the meantime, the third conference, Iran and the Transformation of Ancient Near Eastern History: The Seleucids (ca. 312-150 BCE), was held on February 24 th-25 th , 2020, while the fourth one dealing with the Arsacids had to be postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We very much hope that it will be possible to convene again in the first or second half of 2022. The idea of the Payravi conferences was born thanks to a generous donation by the Payravi family in memory of the late Ali-Asghar Payravi who had been an avid reader and enthusiast of the world of ancient Iranian. The aim of the conferences and the subsequent proceedings was to present a learned and critical inquiry into the history of the Iranian Plateau from its pre-dynastic period in the 2 nd millennium BCE up to the end of the Sasanian Empire in the 7 th century CE. This undertaking was to be implemented through five conferences and the publication of the respective proceedings, both organised by Touraj Daryaee and Robert Rollinger. We wish to thank the Payravi family for their support in bringing together an international group of scholars from different parts of the world to present, discuss and publish papers about the ancient Iranian World. Our sincere thanks go to a group of people without whom the implementation of the undertaking and its success would not have been possible. First, to Mrs. Parichehr Farhad (Payravi), who accepted our proposal and, along with her sister, Mrs. Parvaneh Payrovi, generously supported our idea. We also wish to thank Mr. Saeid Jalalipour, the Program Manager at the Center for Persian Studies at UC Irvine, for his logistical organization of the first three conferences.
From Persia and Beyond : a discussion of the illustrations to a
2015
THE NAME ‘PERSIA’ is a westernised version of Fars, the name of a single province within the polity known as the Persian empire. At its greatest, about 513 BCE under the Achaemenian ruler Darius, the empire extended considerably beyond this dominant province, and beyond modern Iran, to the Oxus, the Indus and into Anatolia. Though over time the memory of the Achaemenian dynasty faded in these lands, some traces of the cultural impact of the empire remained, or were reinforced or reintroduced by later conquests. In consequence, with regard to the geo-political sphere it is not easy to define what is ‘beyond’ Persia, even when referring to territory that is adjacent and related to it. In order to manage discussion of this state of affairs with regard to the cultural sphere, the academic world has devised the adjective ‘Persianate’: this describes manifestations of Persian culture that are not rooted in the heartlands.