Know the Rich Cultural Heritage of South East Asia [Bangladesh] (Archaeological treasures Book 1)

Mr. Mohammed Ali Milu

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The capital and energy spent on building, maintaining, and renewing these huge and profusely armed war fleets cannot but have laid considerable strain on the subjects of these two fast-growing powers.

This burden must have contributed to their inability to economically survive in the shipping sector. It must also have made them more vulnerable and therefore lesser rivals for rulers that grew more and more autocratic, accumulating considerable wealth but bypassing rather than penetrating the existing local economy: The multinational, and therefore complex, nature of seafaring in Southeast Asian waters must be taken into consideration when describing the maritime scene of the region and its shipbuilding traditions.

They point to the parallel existence of a shipbuilding tradition that combined characteristic Southeast Asian hull designs V-shaped hulls with true keels and stem posts, use of dowels to fasten planks, structural role of frames, double quarter rudders , together with features usually associated with Chinese shipyards use of metal nails and clamps, batten sails, single axial rudders. Such features were combined in variable proportions and ways, depending on the actual origins of the ships, their shipwrights, and shipmasters.

The evidence gathered in recent years on these ships has shown that technical borrowings or interactions took place over time, in a multinational world prone to innovation. Various factors may have come together to give birth to such a hybrid tradition. Southeast Asian techniques developed in the 1st millennium ce for high-seas navigation were most probably adapted by the Southern Chinese when they started developing their own ocean-going navy at the beginning of the 2nd millennium.

Indian Ocean ships were then present in numbers in Chinese harbors, but the only Chinese descriptions available for the 1st millennium are those of the bo of the Kunlun i. Local shipbuilders would have no doubt continued to use techniques that were peculiar to the Chinese world and would have proved their own worth for riverine or coastal navigation. But they would have also benefited from the high-seas experience of the Southeast Asian seafarers.

Further cross-influences no doubt took place when Chinese traders started sailing to and settling in Southeast Asian harbors in the early centuries of the 2nd millennium, particularly when war fleets of the Yuan attempted to conquer Java, or when Chinese seafarers were banned from building large ships in their home country and faced restrictions on commercial activities due to renewed closed-country policies in the 15th to 17th centuries.

Trading ships were then often repaired and built in Southeast Asia for Chinese merchants based in Southern China or living among the growing local communities. It is difficult to reconstruct past navigation skills used by sailors of Southeast Asia, as they would have relied on mostly immaterial practices. The only premodern evidence of navigational techniques comes from the Pacific fringes of the Austronesian world. It was gathered by scholars who experimentally re-enacted, with the help of the last generation of skilled indigenous high-seas navigators, a variety of far-reaching oceanic crossings.

In the process, they brought to light the sophisticated non-instrumental navigational techniques which allowed Austronesian speakers to progressively occupy the Pacific islands, to reach and keep contact with remote and often tiny islands thousands of miles apart, in a process that lasted well into the 1st millennium ce.

The evidence gathered after Europeans settled in Southeast Asia, starting in the early 16th century, is limited by the fact that, by then, local shipping was on the decline and long-distance oceanic sailing had largely been abandoned. Only circumstantial or fragile textual data were recorded in the first few years of Portuguese presence in the region, when the newcomers had to rely on local knowledge to sail in still-unknown waters. In such a cosmopolitan seafaring world, Southeast Asians would have shared navigation practices with their Asian counterparts, particularly with fellow Muslim navigators, as attested by the adoption of Arabic technical vocabulary into Malay.

Such maps, or the nautical instructions used by local navigators, were used by Portuguese pilots even before they had a chance to sail along some of the routes, and some were recorded in earlyth-century texts and charts, sure proof of their worthiness. Southeast Asian shippers most probably crossed the Indian Ocean by running along a parallel determined by measuring the height of a known star over the horizon , a technique well known to Pacific navigators and to other Asian navigators of the Indian Ocean.

Late 15th- and earlyth century Portuguese witnesses make it clear that memories of Indonesian exchange with Madagascar were then still vivid. Shippers of insular Southeast Asia would probably have been the only ones to sail along these southern routes. In such a context, the art of navigation would have been essentially an empirical one, comparable to that evolved by their Southeast Asian forbears when they sailed east and peopled the Pacific.

A large Bugis trader in traditional hull assembled with wooden dowels only; European rig. The large ships and trading fleets of Southeast Asian polities do more than attest to the high-level technologies developed by local shipwrights in the past two millennia. As often reaffirmed by maritime historians, ships are exceptionally complex artifacts; such large carriers echo the sophistication of the mercantile networks along which they operated.

The major role played by Southeast Asian entrepreneurs in South China Sea trade networks is profusely illustrated by recent discoveries and archaeological studies of locally built ships carrying considerable cargoes of Chinese and other exports, partly re loaded in, and destined for, Southeast Asian harbor cities. The crucial characters in such mercantile organizations were the shipmasters. The examination of this group is well advanced in Indian Ocean studies, based on abundant early historic and medieval epigraphic and literary sources. The use of Sanskrit in these inscriptions does not allow scholars to ascertain if these shipmasters were of Southeast Asian or Indian origin.

As soon as Old Malay or Old Javanese became common in inscriptions, starting in the late 7th century, a vernacular term puhawang consistently designated local shipmasters; with the arrival of Islam, the term nakhoda Arabic, ultimately from Persian , was also adopted into Austronesian languages to designate these same shipmasters. Their position in local coastal societies is well-documented, first in local epigraphy and then in Malay, Javanese, and Chinese textual sources.

As did their better-documented Indian Ocean colleagues, Southeast Asian shipmasters played a prominent part in locally and internationally run trade networks, which firmly places these characters into the mainstream of Asian global maritime history. Owners of large trading ships and investors in part of their cargoes, they were true entrepreneurs. In a region where the economy of a variety of polities was principally based on long-distance maritime trade, their role and agency was intimately associated with the state formation process. They belonged to a high-status, non-noble class; alongside the sea merchants, with whom they often found themselves associated in epigraphic and literary sources, they formed an intermediate social group that connected local political power to networks of overseas relationships and exchange, the very foundation of the merchant economy of coastal polities.

For a long time, historians discussing Southeast Asian seafaring economies offered only a partial representation of local actors. Starting in the s—in a new context where scholars of various origins and schools had contributed to the production of an autonomous history for this region of the world— dramatic progress took place in the archaeology of proto-historic and early historic coastal sites, allowing for a renewed understanding of indigenous state formation processes in coastal Southeast Asia and of the close relationship these processes had with long-distance maritime trade.

Meanwhile, maritime historians reconsidered in this new light Chinese textual sources of the 1st millennium ce and Portuguese accounts of the early 16th century, both describing large Southeast Asian ships plying Asian waters under the aegis of local rulers and shippers. As a consequence, it became possible to return a large measure of agency to those people who had built, equipped, and sailed in Asian waters such large trading ships, alongside their Arab, Persian, Indian, and, later, Chinese counterparts. The world of sea and sailing is one of orality, and rarely appears in textual sources of pre-modern Southeast Asia.

The Old Javanese literary and religious texts, which appear in the 10th century, are also particularly skimpy with regard to maritime activities. Only after the 15th century, when literary and historical texts appear in greater numbers in the harbor states that flourished all over Southeast Asia, particularly in the Malay world of Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, do ships and shippers figure prominently. Texts such as the Sejarah Melayu or the Hikayat Hang Tuah , both emerging from the Melaka scene, provide historians, if not with strict chronological or technical details, at least with indigenous narratives and rich representations of life in harbor cities and at sea.

Foreign sources—mainly written by travelers and geographers—offer an indispensable textual corpus to help scholars reconstruct the maritime history of the region.

Ships and Shipping in Southeast Asia - Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History

Chinese sources, spanning the past two millennia, are the richest, providing both technical details and precise chronologies to complement local sources. Arab and Persian texts, starting at the turn of the 2nd millennium, also provide much welcome context for the maritime historian. Dutch, British, and, later, French archival material for the following centuries can only document indigenous surviving practices in a maritime world progressively dominated by Chinese, Indian, and Western seafaring enterprises.

The stunning progress made in the archaeology of both harbor sites and shipwrecks in Southeast Asian seas has delivered in the past three decades a considerable amount of tangible records. Andaya, Barbara Watson, and Leonard Andaya. Cambridge University Press, Bellwood, Peter, and Ian C.

From Prehistory to History. Southeast Asian Warfare, — In Handbook of Oriental Studies. The Indian Ocean in the Ancient Period. Edited by Himanshu Prabha Ray, — The Prehistoric Movement of Plants and Animals. BAR International Series Krahl, Regina, John Guy, J. Keith Wilson, and Julian Raby, eds. Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Singapore: National Heritage Board, Edited by Om Prakash, — Centre for Studies in Civilizations, Oxford University Press, Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, — Variorum Collected Studies Series The Indian Ocean in Antiquity.

Kegan Paul International in association with the British Museum, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, — Yale University Press, — Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power, and Belief.

Pierre-Yves Manguin

Cornell University Press, Revire, Nicolas, and Stephen A. Essays in Art and Archaeology. River Books and the Siam Society, See the recent work by Dilys A. Irwin, and Yun K. On various approaches to the study of the Austronesian component of Malagasy culture and on trade contacts between Southeast Asia and Madagascar, see, among others: Chantal Radimilahy and Narivelo Rajaonarimanana Paris: On 20th-century survivals, see, among others: Rijksuniversiteit, proefschrift, ; George E. Collins, Makassar Sailing London: National Maritime Museum, ; and the particularly well-informed works by Nick Burningham: National Maritime Museum, For more details, see P.

Early Maritime Contacts in the Indian Ocean , eds. Hong Kong University Press, , 90—91; and P. Because the timbers of the two wrecks from the Java Sea were not well preserved, their belonging to the lashed-lug tradition rests on circumstantial but convincing evidence. See Michael Flecker and W. This practically excludes the alleged Chinese origin for the Malay word and for its postth-century offspring in European languages such as junk, junco, jonque. Most of what is written here on the 16th-century jong is summarized from articles by P.

Manguin in which references to primary sources and to further literature are given in detail: Trade, Power, and Belief , ed. Anthony Reid Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, , — Denys Lombard and Jean Aubin Paris: On the relationship between tonnages and the structure of trade, it is enlightening to refer to what Fernand Braudel has to say on the matter in his major work on the Mediterranean: Colin, , sq. On the place of small, long craft in Malay World fleets, see P. Geoff Wade and Li Tana Singapore: Nijhoff, , 39, 65, —, , , Features of the South China Sea tradition are discussed in more detail in two essays, where descriptions of relevant shipwrecks and full references to earlier research will be found: The China Factor , eds.

Geoff Wade and Sun Laichen Singapore: NUS Press, , — Australian National University Press, Yale University Press, Harley, David Woodward, Joseph E. University of Chicago Press, , —; and J. Agrupamento de Estudos de Cartografia Antiga, separata 21 ; and P.

Johns Hopkins University Press, , 2. On Indian Ocean shipmasters, see S. Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages: Shipowning Merchants in the West Coast of India ca. Jajasan Kebudajaan Sulawesi Selatan dan Tenggara, , The pioneering work is that of Ian C. Hawkins, Praus of Indonesia London: Nautical Books, ; and G. Adrian Horridge, The Prahu: Traditional Sailing Boat of Indonesia Singapore: One will nevertheless still profit from the various essays by reputed scholars in such standard works as Soedjatmoko, ed.

Cornell University Press, ; Charles D. Cowan and Oliver W. A few essays such as those by Donald K. Handbook of Oriental Studies. Motifs from All Asia. Lap Lambert Academic Publishing, Penn Arts Science Cambridge University Press Word Scientific Publishing Sussex Academic Press Buddhist Stone Sutras in China-Sichuan. The Period of Division AD. New frontiers in global archaeology: Landscape and Power in Early China. Between Rome and China: Translated by Christopher J.

Foster, Harvard University and William N. Introduction to the Tsinghua Bamboo-Strip Manuscripts. University of Cambridge Oriental Publications, No. Prehistoric Societies on the Northern Frontiers of China. Approaches to Anthropological Archaeology Series London: Asiatische Forschungen Wiesbaden: A case study of a jue-earrings workshop at the predynastic capital site, Zhouyuan, China. A Companion to Chinese Archaeology. Science and Civilisation in China. The Ancient Highlands of Southwest China: From the Bronze Age to the Han Empire. Oxford Studies in the Archaeology of Ancient States.

The power of dogu: The British Museum Globalizing the Prehistory of Japan. Language, genes and civilisation. Routledge Studies in the Early History of Asia. Coexistence and Cultural Transmission in East Asia. Left Coast Press The archaeology of Japan: Okinawa; the Rise of an Island Kingdom. Archaeological and Cultural Perspectives. An Illustrated Companion to Japanese Archaeology.

Univ of Hawaii Press Reconsidering Early Korean History through Archaeology. The Samhan Period in Korean History. The History and Archaeology of the Koguryo Kingdom. Early Korea Project Occasional Series. Archaeology and Historical Memory. Heritage Management in Korea and Japan. Trade routes and cultural spheres.

University of California Press The Origins of the Civilization of Angkor Volume 3. The Excavation of Ban Non Wat: The Fine Arts Department Are All Warriors Male?: Gender Roles on the Ancient Eurasian Steppe. Gender and archaeology series -- v. It takes a regional view across China, Korea, Japan and their peripheries that is unbounded by modern state lines. This viewpoint emphasizes how the region drew on indigenous developments and exterior stimuli to produce agricultural technologies, craft production, political systems, religious outlooks and philosophies that characterize the civilization of historic and even modern East Asia.

This book is a complete rewrite and update of The Rise of Civilization in East Asia, first published in It incorporates the many theoretical, technical and factual advances of the last two decades, including DNA, gender, and isotope studies, AMS radiocarbon dating and extensive excavation results.

Readers of that first edition will find the same structure and topic progression. While many line drawings have been retained, new colour illustrations abound. Boxes and Appendices clarify and add to the understanding of unfamiliar technologies. For those seeking more detail, the Appendices also provide case studies that take intimate looks at particular data and current research.

New Western Language Books on East Asian Archaeology

The book is suitable for general readers, East Asian historians and students, archaeology students and professionals. Recent excavations in China, the distribution of lacquer objects throughout the Eurasian region, the significance of lacquer ware in everyday life, technical aspects of lacquer production in Korea, and the appreciation of Japanese lacquer in Asia and Europe are analysed in six chapters by international experts in the field: This volume uses Bruce Trigger's article, "Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist" as a starting point to examine the complex interaction between contemporary society and archaeological practice today.

It deals with the evaluation of multiple interpretations of the past, with a focus on the concept of multivocality. According to its practitioners and adherents, archaeological multivocality gives voice to underrepresented groups and individuals by providing alternative interpretations of the past. This book uses case studies from Asia, Latin America, Europe and North America to explore the interplay between the sociopolitical context of specific national, regional or local archaeological traditions and the variety of interpretations of the past made by archaeologists and others.

A key question asked throughout the book is whether multivocality, a concept derived from postmodern theory and embedded in the political, social and intellectual traditions of Britain and North America, is welcome or applicable in other parts of the world. The diversity of topics and geographical areas covered in the chapters allows readers to understand the dynamic nature of the relationship between archaeology, sociopolitical conditions, and peoples' identities in regional and historical settings.

The volume concludes with discussions by Alison Wylie, Ian Hodder, and Bruce Trigger who revisit past research but also look forward to the future of alternate archaeologies, multivocality and multiple narratives. Archaeologies of the Medieval English Village. Archaeology in Korea after the Korean War.

A Case Study from Serbia. Marketing the Past in a Globalized World. The Case of Tiwanaku. This unique collection applies globalization concepts to the discipline of archaeology, using a wide range of global case studies from a group of international specialists. The volume spans from as early as 10, cal. BP to the modern era, analysing the relationship between material culture, complex connectivities between communities and groups, and cultural change.

Ships and Shipping in Southeast Asia

Each contributor considers globalization ideas explicitly to explore the socio-cultural connectivities of the past. In considering social practices shared between different historic groups, and also the expression of their respective identities, the papers in this volume illustrate the potential of globalization thinking to bridge the local and global in material culture analysis. Table of contents - Section 5: Globalization at the Crossroads: The original idea for developing this book as Proceedings from the Symposium on Obsidian Source Studies in Northeast Asia, held at the 70th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology , was conceived in the summer of Kuzmin and Michael D.

Blomster and Michael D. Using a mixture of historical documents, mythology, archaeological data, and ethnographic studies of contemporary shamans, she builds a case for shamans being the driving force behind the blossoming of complex societies. More interesting, shamans in East Asia are generally women, who used their access to the spirit world to take leadership roles.

This work challenges traditional interpretations growth of Asian states, which is overlaid with later Confucian notions of gender roles. Written at a level accessible for undergraduates, this concise work will be fascinating reading for those interested in East Asian archaeology, politics, and society; in gender roles, and in shamanism. Legends, Landscapes, and Skyscrapes 3. What is a Shaman? Power, Leadership, and Gender 5. Shamanism in the East Asian Neolithic 6.

Shamanism in Early Chinese States 7. Shamanism in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan 8. The study of the prehistory of East Asia is developing very rapidly. In uncovering the story of the flows of human migration that constituted the peopling of East Asia there exists widespread debate about the nature of evidence and the tools for correlating results from different disciplines. Drawing upon the latest evidence in genetics, linguistics and archaeology, this exciting new book examines the history of the peopling of East Asia, and investigates the ways in which we can detect migration, and its different markers in these fields of inquiry.

Results from different academic disciplines are compared and reinterpreted in the light of evidence from others to attempt to try and generate consensus on methodology. Past Human Migrations in East Asia presents a full picture of the latest research on the peopling of East Asia, and will be of interest to scholars of all disciplines working on the reconstruction of the peopling of East and North East Asia.

Coeval with them, especially in the later period, are other plaque series of different shapes and many of them far less ambitious. I address this as best I can in the Conclusions, realizing that for many this should be the main reason for such a study. It is likely, however, in the face of the very plentiful material, that a mainly art-historical approach may lead more readily to conclusions of social and historical significance.

This extraordinry Northern Wei late 5th c CE lacquer coffin was excavated from a tomb in northwest China. It depicts equally traditional Chinese images and images imported from the West along the Silk Road. Both are examined in detail. The foreign images are traced, often for the first time, to their points of origin in Iran, Central and South Asia, even the Mediterranean and Egypt, with surprising results. New interpretations are presented of the Mawangdui silk painting, flaming triangles, human-headed birds, pearl roundels and even half-palmettes.

Comprehensive surveys are provided of furniture of the period, sutra pillars and bronze door knockers making these volumes indispensable for students of Chinese material culture. Images on the coffin reflect Daoist, Buddhist, even Sogdian and Mesopotamian beliefs. Historians and art historians alike will find documentation of these themes from the Yellow Sea to the Mediterranean in the illustrations.

A Source Book of Ancient Chinese Bronze Inscriptions offers English translations of eighty-two of the most important bronze inscriptions, ranging in date from approximately B. The preceding introduction outlines the nature and significance of bronze inscriptions, along with summary discussions of specific issues, such as the changing ritual milieu in which bronzes were used, as well as the rhetoric and intended audience of the inscriptions cast and incised on them.

The translations are a collaborative effort involving several expert scholars who best represent the range both of the extant inscriptional literature and of the leading modern approaches to it. For each inscription, the authors offer a brief overview of the provenance and historical importance of the bronze, followed by a transcription in modern Chinese graphs, an accurate but idiomatic translation, and a list of further readings for those who wish to study the sources in more detail. This book examines the organisation of specialised salt production at Zhongba, one of the most important prehistoric sites in the Three Gorges of China's Yangzi River valley.

Flad demonstrates that salt production emerged in the second millennium BCE and developed into a large-scale, intense activity. As the intensity of this activity increased during the early Bronze Age, production became more coordinated, perhaps by an emergent elite who appear to have supported their position of authority by means of divination and the control of ritual knowledge. This study explores evidence of these changes in ceramics, the layout of space at the site and animal remains. It synthesises the data retrieved from years of excavation, showing not only the evolution of production methods, but also the emergence of social hierarchy in the Three Gorges region over two millennia.

The contents of this book are dedicated to promote the exchanges between researchers in both social and scientific fields. AD 2nd to 7th c. An enormous number of burial objects have been unearthed from ancient tombs in archaeological excavations in China. These mingqi were made in all kinds of materials and in a broad range of forms, techniques and craftsmanship. The striking realism of the pottery buildings suggests that they were modelled after actual buildings.

They bring to life courtyard houses, manors, towers, granaries and pigsty-privies, as well as cooking ranges and well pavilions. These pottery buildings, excavated across all of China, were previously little known or appreciated, but now occupy a special place in Chinese culture: They preserve knowledge of antiquity and demonstrate the architectural quality and structural variety of the period. The author identifies the typology of the pottery buildings they signify in terms of ontology and semiology, in order to provide a conceptual map for classification, and identifies building systems reflected by the mingqi to detect architectonic systems of the Han dynasty.

The third volume on the inscriptions carved in cave chapels at the Grove of the Reclining Buddha Wofoyuan in Anyue County, Sichuan, presents the earliest and central section of the precinct. As in former volumes, all engravings are fully reproduced in detailed high quality photographs of the cave walls and of ink rubbings. The texts are transcribed for the first time, with a scholarly apparatus noting textual variants and variant characters in the calligraphy.

Essays highlight the significance of particular text versions and point out unexpected insights in this treasure store of texts. An essay by Martin Bemmann is dedicated to an exquisitely carved life-prolonging banner and its ritual uses. Lothar Ledderose introduces the volume. The book is in Chinese and English throughout. Der Katalog der Sammlung Dr. Die meisten von ihnen stammen aus Nordchina und sind in ihrer Form und Dekoration bestimmt durch den Gebrauch und Geschmack der nomadischen Gesellschaften. Vor der Vereinigung Chinas unter den Quin am Ende des 3.

Diese Nomaden waren wohl organisiert, waren Experten in der Metallverarbeitung seit der Bronzezeit. Mehr als 50 wertvolle Objekte der Sammlung stammen aus dem westlichen Teil Asiens. Together, and for the first time in any language, the 24 essays gathered in these volumes provide a composite picture of the history of religion in ancient China from the emergence of writing ca.

Written by specialists in a variety of disciplines, the essays cover such subjects as divination and cosmology, exorcism and medicine, ethics and self-cultivation, mythology, taboos, sacrifice, shamanism, burial practices, iconography, and political philosophy. During it, Buddhism conquered China, Daoism grew into a mature religion with independent institutions, and, together with Confucianism, these three teachings, having each won its share of state recognition and support, formed a united front against shamanism.

While all four religions are covered, Buddhism and Daoism receive special attention in a series of parallel chapters on their pantheons, rituals, sacred geography, community organization, canon formation, impact on literature, and recent archaeological discoveries. This multi-disciplinary approach, without ignoring philosophical and theological issues, brings into sharp focus the social and historical matrices of Chinese religion.

Evidence from Jade and Stone by Jenny F. This book addresses the complex relationship between geography and political power in the context of the crisis and fall of the Western Zhou state. Drawing on the latest archaeological discoveries, the book shows how inscribed bronze vessels can be used to reveal changes in the political space of the period and explores literary and geographical evidence to produce a coherent understanding of the Bronze Age past. By taking an interdisciplinary approach which embraces archaeology, history and geography, the book thoroughly reinterprets late Western Zhou history and probes the causes of its gradual decline and eventual fall.

Supported throughout by maps created from the GIS datasets and by numerous on-site photographs, Landscape and Power in Early China gives significant insights into this important Bronze Age society. This work is a case study focusing on the long-term unique evolutionary trajectory of the prehistoric Liaoxi area, Northeast China.

The emergence and dramatic decline of the Hongshan complex societies forms the core of this interpretation. Research on household and community levels are based previously excavated typical sites. The structure of the work follows the chronology of the prehistoric cultures in Liaoxi. This book contains a key study on sericulture as well as on the conduct of the trade in silk between China and the Roman Near East using archaeological and literary evidence.

It contains a key study on sericulture as well on the conduct of the trade in silk between China and the Roman Near East using archaeological as well as literary evidence. Other topics covered include Sogdian religious art, the role of Manichaeism as a Silk Road religion par excellence, the enigmatic names for the Roman Empire in Chinese sources and a multi-lingual gazetteer of place- and ethnic names in Pre-Islamic Central Asia which will be an essential reference tool for researchers. The volume also contains an author and title index to all the Silk Road Studies volumes published up to The broad ranging theme covered by this volume should appeal to a wider public fascinated by the history of the Silk Road and wishing to be informed of the latest state of research.

Because of the centrality of the topics covered by this study, the volume could serve as a basic reading text for university courses on the history of the Silk Road. Table of Contents 1. Its Rise, Flourishing and Decay 4. The Tsinghua University bamboo-strip manuscripts are among the most extraordinary collections of ancient texts discovered in China to date. In Introduction to the Tsinghua Bamboo-Strip Manuscripts , Liu Guozhong, one of the scholars intimately involved in editing the Tsinghua strips, offers a straightforward overview to the complexities inherent in researching this collection.

Liu provides an invaluable glimpse into how these artifacts were cleaned, preserved, and prepared for publication, while also situating them within a history of similar finds. He moreover explores in detail a number of crucial questions raised by the Tsinghua strips, from the transmission of the Shangshu and the nature of the oft-neglected Yi Zhoushu , to the implications these texts have for our understanding of early Western Zhou history. From the earliest museums established by Western missionaries in order to implement religious and political power, to the role they have played in the formation of the modern Chinese state, the origin and development of museums in mainland China differ significantly from those in the West.

The occurrence of museums in mainland China in the late nineteenth century was primarily a result of internal and external conflicts, Westernization and colonialism, and as such they were never established solely for enjoyment and leisure. Using a historical and anthropological framework, this book provides a holistic and critical review on the establishment and development of museums in mainland China from to the present day, and shows how museums in China have been used by a wide range of social, political, and state actors for a number of economic, religious, political and ideological purposes.

Indeed, Tracey L-D Lu examines the key role played by museums in reinforcing social segmentation, influencing the economy, protecting cultural heritage and the construction and enhancement of ethnic identities and nationalism, and how they have throughout their history helped the powerful to govern the less powerful or the powerless. More broadly, this book provides important comparative insights on museology and heritage management, and questions who the key stakeholders are, how museums reflect broader social and cultural changes, and the relationship between museum and heritage management.

Early Chinese ceramics c. Huo Jiena, graduate of Beijing University specialized in Chinese ceramics, engaged for three years in sifting, selecting and systematically recording the approximately twelve hundred pieces in the collection.

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The result is the selection of objects, which for the first time are published in this catalogue in a coherent format. They make possible a deeper account of the growth of cities and of the spread of Chinese influence over distant areas. This book provides the first comprehensive survey of recent developments, evaluating the newly-found evidence in the light of earlier conclusions from China, Japan, Europe and America. Through cross-cultural comparisons and a close study of both the excavated and received literature, new conclusions are presented with respect to relatively understudied topics, such as gender, history of science, and modes of persuasion, while challenging the 'common wisdom' in such fields as Buddhism, Daoism and social history.

Thus the volume provides a supplement to Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of China and shows how subsequent archaeology has enriched our perception of China's history in this period. Based on archaeological field work in the Chifeng area of Inner Mongolia and on data carefully collected from Chinese archaeological publications, as well as on anthropologically-derived theories and rigorous analytical methods, the book challenges common perceptions which were based mainly on the Chinese historical records.

It demonstrates that while changes in aspects of daily life, such as subsistence strategies and political organization, were gradual; a much more dramatic change occurred in the style and quantity of symbolic expression. This suggests that the construction of identities - local and regional- was not merely the end result of the process but rather was, from the beginning, an important catalyst of change.

The book brings more comprehensive and nuance understanding to the archaeology and history of East Asia. By focusing on issues of identity, its construction, manipulation and materialization in symbols and artifacts, it also brings new theoretical and methodological innovations to a topic which has a relatively long history in anthropology but which has only recently been seriously addressed by archaeologists.

The Seeds of the New Order: Is it the Economy? Local, Regional and Global: Archaeological versus Historical Perspectives on Processes during the first half of the first Millennium BCE and Beyond from the website of the pubisher Hardback - pages. Prestige Goods along the Silk Road? An archaeological and historical study of Chinese relations to cultures of the Tarim Basin from 2nd through early 5th centuries CE The analysis first and foremost aims to assess exquisite objects of art, for instance Chinese silks in various weaving patterns, Chinese lacquer objects, Chinese bronze mirrors and Persian Sassanian glassware as well as their social function s within the ancient cultures of the Taklamakan Desert.

In Chinese and in Western sources, these burial sites are very well known under the names of Yingpan, Loulan, Zhagunluke Cherchen , and Niya. Therefore, the books fundamental task is the compilation and extensive commentation of the inventories of roughly eighty eligible graves from all four sites. The resulting database more than pages without figures and tables offers not only an extensive overview of all the findings, but also delivers a detailed description of every known object from every single grave for the first time in a Western language.

In order to do so, it was necessary to first evaluate what the Chinese primary historiographical sources Hanshu, Hou hanshu, Sanguozhi, Jinshu had to say in this respect. The archaeological sources, in general, mirror this impression.

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