Review Article - Di Cosmo & Maas - Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity (Iran & Caucasus 25, 2021, pp. 301-312) [first page] (original) (raw)
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Acta Archaeologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 72, 2021
Although global connectivity, the network of intercontinental, intercultural and interpersonal contacts evokes our modern world, the roots of globalisation hark back to much earlier periods. Following its application to the Age of Exploration 1 and the 13 th century, 2 one version of the world-systems theory has now made an inroad into studies on Late Antiquity as well. Enquiries into 4 th-7 th-century long-distance connectivity were formerly covered within the framework of 'Silk Road studies'. The present volume has strayed far from this path by constructing a new historical era and interpretative framework, Eurasian Late Antiquity, in which the dynamics of local histories are the stones of the broad mosaic that here replace the previous trade-centred narrative of the Silk Road. Most of the essays collected in this volume were presented at the conference 'Worlds in Motion' hosted by the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 2013. Its two internationally acclaimed editors, Nicola di Cosmo, author of several monographs on interrelations between China and Inner Asia, 3 and Michael Maas, editor of authoritative handbooks on the late antique Mediterranean, 4 both have an enormous breadth of interest, are extraordinarily widely read, and have the rare ability to synthesise large bodies of data; nevertheless, a third editor, an expert on Iran or Central Asia, would have been beneficial. The list of the volume's authors is a roll-call of the best experts on the subjects, who focus on particular themes drawn from their recently published monographs or summarise their main findings, which is the main reason that these books, reflecting the current state of research on 4 th-8 th-century Eurasian contacts, are listed for each author. As described in the Introduction (pp. 1-19), the period covered in the volume broadly spans the time between 250 and 750, which essentially corresponds to the centuries between the rise of Sasanian Empire and the formation of the Abbasid Caliphate. The geographical extent of Eurasian Late Antiquity is just as broad as its 500-year-long duration: it incorporates the Mediterranean, Iran, Central Asia, the Eurasian steppe belt and China, but does not cover Africa and India, even though all great empires of the age (the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires as well as Sui-Tang China) maintained close ties with these two areas both commercially and culturally. This shift can be ascribed to the magnetism of Silk Road's concept, 5 which in the wake of the geographically inspired description by Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833-1905) in 1877 first became a paradigm and has by now hardened into a political doctrine. Thus, in terms of its focus and methods, the notion of Eurasian Late
Incidenza dell’antico 19, 2021
In the light of both the recent (and a forthcoming) publication of landmark collective volumes which provide a thorough synthesis of decades of – still on- going – research on Central Asia from the earliest prehistory to the Umayyads, the present paper seeks to provide a concise, yet also up-to-date, overview of the main problems faced by recent scholarship while at the same time high- lighting the most promising avenues for future work.
Persia's Imperial Power in Late Antiquity
6. Sauer, E.W., Omrani Rekavandi, H., Wilkinson, T.J., Nokandeh, J., Hopper, K., Abbasi, G.A., Ainslie, R., Roustaei, K., MacDonald, E., Safari Tamak, E., Ratcliffe, J., Mahmoudi, M., Oatley, C., Ershadi, M., Usher-Wilson, L.S., Nazifi, A., Griffiths, S., Shabani, B., Parker, D., Mousavi, M., Galiatsatos, N. and Tolouei, H., with contributions by Priestman, S., Mashkour, M., Batt, C.M., Greenwood, D.P., Jansen Van Rensburg, J., Caputo, F., Radu, V., Schwenninger, J.-L., Fattahi, M., Gale, R., Poole, I., Hoffmann, B., Evershed, R. and Thomas, R. 2013. Persia’s Imperial Power in Late Antiquity: the Great Wall of Gorgān and Frontier Landscapes of Sasanian Iran. A joint fieldwork project by the Iranian Cultural Heritage, Handcraft and Tourism Organization, the Iranian Center for Archaeological Research and the Universities of Edinburgh and Durham (2005–2009). British Institute of Persian Studies Archaeological Monographs Series II, Oxford: Oxbow Books, pp. xvi + 712.
2018
We present a brief archaeological summary of the main phases of cultural<br> and social change in the Western, Central, and South Asia ca. 4000-1500 BCE<br> as a contextual framework for the findings presented in Damgaard et al.<br> 2018. We stress the role of the Caucasus as a conduit in Western Asia linking<br> the steppe and Eastern Europe with Anatolia, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. We track<br> the emergence of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) in<br> Central Asia as a cultural melting pot between the steppe and the sown<br> lands during a period of more than a millennium. And we highlight indicators<br> of cultural and commercial exchange, tracking developments in technology<br> as well as social and political organization that came about as part of<br> complex processes of interaction in a region stretching from South Asia to<br> the Mediterranean.