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Sto caricando le informazioni... ReOrienting the Sasanians : East Iran in Late Antiquitydi Khodadad Rezakhani
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While interest and research in late antiquity continues to increase, particularly in the fields of Later Roman and Sasanian history, the history of Central Asia is less understood, and there is a comparative dearth of studies on this region. To help redress this, the focus of this book is Central Asia and the Hindu Kush in late antiquity: what Rezakhani terms, ‘East Iran’. Rezakhani’s aim is to provide a political narrative and chronology of the regions in Central Asia and the Hindu Kush that make up his East Iran. The underlying argument is that Central Asia in late antiquity was not an unimportant periphery between larger and more important empires, but was politically important in its own right, particularly in the role it played in the later Islamic and medieval period.
Central Asia is commonly imagined as the marginal land on the periphery of Chinese and Middle Eastern civilisations. At best, it is understood as a series of disconnected areas that served as stop-overs along the Silk Road. However, in the mediaeval period, this region rose to prominence and importance as one of the centres of Persian-Islamic culture, from the Seljuks to the Mongols and Timur. Khodadad Rezakhani tells the back story of this rise to prominence, the story of the famed Kushans and mysterious 'Asian Huns', and their role in shaping both the Sasanian Empire and the rest of the Middle East. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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 Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni...GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)935History and Geography Ancient World Mesopotamia and Iranian Plateau to 637Classificazione LCVotoMedia: Nessun voto.Sei tu?Diventa un autore di LibraryThing. |
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In this period, the region was inhabited by societies that were literate, but did not write down historical narratives, annals, or king-lists, so its history has to be pieced together from on the one hand notices in Graeco-Roman, Chinese, and Indian histories, on the other from local coinage and inscriptions. Rezakhani attempts to - which apparently hasn't really been tried before - put together a narrative history of the whole region from the emergence of the so-called "Indo-Parthian" state in the south of the region around the birth of Christ to the completion of the Islamic conquest.
The result is inevitably incomplete and in parts conjectural, but the overall picture that emerges is that the region was mostly ruled by a succession of dynasties of northern steppe origin that adopted the local languages and much of the royal ideology of their predecessors. They fall into a number of distinct waves, starting with the Scythians or Saka before our period, followed by the Yuezhi or Tokharoi, then the so-called "Iranian Huns", who probably had little but the name in common with the better-known Huns of Europe, and the Turks. The Sasanians (also known as Sassanids), a Persian dynasty based in Iraq and western Iran, play a less central role than the title might have you think, only intermittently controlling more than the southwestern fringe of the region.
The book is short, but the dense writing style, at points tortured English, and obscure subject matter means it's not the easiest of reads. It doesn't help that Rezakhani is inconsistent in how he renders the many unfamiliar names of places and people, so the same one can appear in several different forms. In one case where he is consistent the form chosen seems perverse: he uses "Yüeh-zhi" for the Chinese name of a certain tribal confederation, apparently a mixture of pinyin Yuezhi and Wade-Giles Yüeh-chih.
That said, I'm pretty happy with it. It put together in coherent - and hopefully largely correct - form a fair bit of isolated bits of knowledge I'd assembled from various works touching on the subject.