The Royal Hunt In Eurasian History

Author : Thomas T. Allsen
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 417 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2011-06-03
Category : History
ISBN : 9780812201079

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The Royal Hunt in Eurasian History by Thomas T. Allsen Pdf

From antiquity to the nineteenth century, the royal hunt was a vital component of the political cultures of the Middle East, India, Central Asia, and China. Besides marking elite status, royal hunts functioned as inspection tours and imperial progresses, a means of asserting kingly authority over the countryside. The hunt was, in fact, the "court out-of-doors," an open-air theater for displays of majesty, the entertainment of guests, and the bestowal of favor on subjects. In the conduct of interstate relations, great hunts were used to train armies, show the flag, and send diplomatic signals. Wars sometimes began as hunts and ended as celebratory chases. Often understood as a kind of covert military training, the royal hunt was subject to the same strict discipline as that applied in war and was also a source of innovation in military organization and tactics. Just as human subjects were to recognize royal power, so was the natural kingdom brought within the power structure by means of the royal hunt. Hunting parks were centers of botanical exchange, military depots, early conservation reserves, and important links in local ecologies. The mastery of the king over nature served an important purpose in official renderings: as a manifestation of his possession of heavenly good fortune he could tame the natural world and keep his kingdom safe from marauding threats, human or animal. The exchanges of hunting partners—cheetahs, elephants, and even birds—became diplomatic tools as well as serving to create an elite hunting culture that transcended political allegiances and ecological frontiers. This sweeping comparative work ranges from ancient Egypt to India under the Raj. With a magisterial command of contemporary sources, literature, material culture, and archaeology, Thomas T. Allsen chronicles the vast range of traditions surrounding this fabled royal occupation.

Author : Angelica Groom
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2018-10-22
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004371132

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Exotic Animals in the Art and Culture of the Medici Court in Florence by Angelica Groom Pdf

An examination of the diverse roles exotic animals, both living species and depicted as motifs in art, played in the fashioning of the Medici’s courtly identity.

Author : Hugh M. Thomas
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2020-11-19
Category : History
ISBN : 9780192523419

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Power and Pleasure by Hugh M. Thomas Pdf

Although King John is remembered for his political and military failures, he also resided over a magnificent court. Power and Pleasure reconstructs life at the court of King John and explores how his court produced both pleasure and soft power. Much work exists on courts of the late medieval and early modern periods, but the jump in record keeping under John allows a detailed reconstruction of court life for an earlier period. Power and Pleasure: Court Life under King John, 1199-1216 examines the many facets of John's court, exploring hunting, feasting, castles, landscapes, material luxury, chivalry, sexual coercion, and religious activities. It explains how John mishandled his use of soft power, just as he failed to exploit his financial and military advantages, and why he received so little political benefit from his magnificent court. John's court is viewed in comparison to other courts of the time, and in previous and subsequent centuries.

Author : Simon Pearse Brodbeck
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2017-03-02
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781351886307

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The Mahabharata Patriline by Simon Pearse Brodbeck Pdf

The Sanskrit Mahabharata (which contains the Bhagavad Gita) is sorely neglected as a classic - perhaps the classic - of world literature, and is of particularly timely human importance in today's globalised and war-torn world. This book is a chronological survey of the Sanskrit Mahabharata's central royal patriline - a family tree that is also a list of kings. Brodbeck explores the importance and implications of patrilineal maintenance within the royal culture depicted by the text, and shows how patrilineal memory comes up against the fact that in every generation a wife must be involved, with the consequent danger that the children might not sustain the memorial tradition of their paternal family. The Mahabharata Patriline bridges a gap in text-critical methodology between the traditional philological approach and more recent trends in gender and literary theory. Studying the Mahabharata as an integral literary unit and as a story stretched over dozens of generations, this book casts particular light on the events of the more recent generations and suggests that the text's internal narrators are members of the family whose story they tell.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 350 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Asia, Central
ISBN : UCSD:31822037542149

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Central Asiatic Journal by Anonim Pdf

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 660 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Electronic journals
ISBN : STANFORD:36105131529187

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The Journal of Military History by Anonim Pdf

Author : David M. Robinson
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 444 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2020-10-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9781684170715

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Martial Spectacles of the Ming Court by David M. Robinson Pdf

Like most empires, the Ming court sponsored grand displays of dynastic strength and military prowess. Covering the first two centuries of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), Martial Spectacles of the Ming Court explores how the royal hunt, polo matches, archery contests, equestrian demonstrations, and the imperial menagerie were represented in poetry, prose, and portraiture. This study reveals that martial spectacles were highly charged sites of contestation, where Ming emperors and senior court ministers staked claims about rulership, ruler-minister relations, and the role of the military in the polity. Simultaneously colorful entertainment, prestigious social events, and statements of power, martial spectacles were intended to make manifest the ruler’s personal generosity, keen discernment, and respect for family tradition. They were, however, subject to competing interpretations that were often beyond the emperor’s control or even knowledge. By situating Ming martial spectacles in the wider context of Eurasia, David Robinson brings to light the commensurability of the Ming court with both the Mongols and Manchus but more broadly with other early modern courts such as the Timurids, the Mughals, and the Ottomans.

Author : Thomas T. Allsen
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2019-05-03
Category : History
ISBN : 9780812295900

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The Steppe and the Sea by Thomas T. Allsen Pdf

In 1221, in what we now call Turkmenistan, a captive held by Mongol soldiers confessed that she had swallowed her pearls in order to safeguard them. She was immediately executed and eviscerated. On finding several pearls, Chinggis Qan (Genghis Khan) ordered that they cut open every slain person on the battlefield. Pearls, valued for aesthetic, economic, religious, and political reasons, were the ultimate luxury good of the Middle Ages, and the Chingissid imperium, the largest contiguous land empire in history, was their unmatched collector, promoter, and conveyor. Thomas T. Allsen examines the importance of pearls, as luxury good and political investment, in the Mongolian empire—from its origin in 1206, through its unprecedented expansion, to its division and decline in 1370—in order to track the varied cultural and commercial interactions between the northern steppes and the southern seas. Focusing first on the acquisition, display, redistribution, and political significance of pearls, Allsen shows how the very act of forming such a vast nomadic empire required the massive accumulation, management, and movement of prestige goods, and how this process brought into being new regimes of consumption on a continental scale. He argues that overland and seaborne trade flourished simultaneously, forming a dynamic exchange system that moved commodities from east to west and north to south, including an enormous quantity of pearls. Tracking the circulation of pearls across time, he highlights the importance of different modes of exchange—booty-taking, tributary relations, market mechanisms, and reciprocal gift-giving. He also sheds light on the ways in which Mongols' marketing strategies made use of not only myth and folklore but also maritime communications networks created by Indian-Buddhist and Muslim merchants skilled in cross-cultural commerce. In Allsen's analysis, pearls illuminate Mongolian exceptionalism in steppe history, the interconnections between overland and seaborne trade, recurrent patterns in the employment of luxury goods in the political cultures of empires, and the consequences of such goods for local and regional economies.

Author : David Sneath
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 406 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Asia, Central
ISBN : STANFORD:36105131796356

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Imperial Statecraft by David Sneath Pdf

Author : Christopher I. Beckwith
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 512 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2009-03-16
Category : History
ISBN : 1400829941

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Empires of the Silk Road by Christopher I. Beckwith Pdf

The first complete history of Central Eurasia from ancient times to the present day, Empires of the Silk Road represents a fundamental rethinking of the origins, history, and significance of this major world region. Christopher Beckwith describes the rise and fall of the great Central Eurasian empires, including those of the Scythians, Attila the Hun, the Turks and Tibetans, and Genghis Khan and the Mongols. In addition, he explains why the heartland of Central Eurasia led the world economically, scientifically, and artistically for many centuries despite invasions by Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Chinese, and others. In retelling the story of the Old World from the perspective of Central Eurasia, Beckwith provides a new understanding of the internal and external dynamics of the Central Eurasian states and shows how their people repeatedly revolutionized Eurasian civilization. Beckwith recounts the Indo-Europeans' migration out of Central Eurasia, their mixture with local peoples, and the resulting development of the Graeco-Roman, Persian, Indian, and Chinese civilizations; he details the basis for the thriving economy of premodern Central Eurasia, the economy's disintegration following the region's partition by the Chinese and Russians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the damaging of Central Eurasian culture by Modernism; and he discusses the significance for world history of the partial reemergence of Central Eurasian nations after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Empires of the Silk Road places Central Eurasia within a world historical framework and demonstrates why the region is central to understanding the history of civilization.

Author : Maaike van Berkel,Jeroen Duindam
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 668 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2018-01-22
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004315716

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Prince, Pen, and Sword: Eurasian Perspectives by Maaike van Berkel,Jeroen Duindam Pdf

Prince, Pen, and Sword offers a synoptic interpretation of rulers and elites in Eurasia from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. Four core chapters zoom in on the tensions and connections at court, on the nexus between rulers and religious authority, on the status, function, and self-perceptions of military and administrative elites respectively. Two additional concise chapters provide a focused analysis of the construction of specific dynasties (the Golden Horde and the Habsburgs) and narratives of kingship found in fiction throughout Eurasia. The contributors and editors, authorities in their fields, systematically bring together specialised literature on numerous Eurasian kingdoms and empires. This book is a careful and thought-provoking experiment in the global, comparative and connected history of rulers and elites.

Author : John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Research
ISBN : PSU:000053641816

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Report of the Educational Advisory Board, Treasurer's Report by John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Pdf

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Asia
ISBN : IND:30000124954094

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Journal of Asian History by Anonim Pdf

Author : American Historical Association
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 356 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : United States
ISBN : WISC:89091895961

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Program of the Annual Meeting - American Historical Association by American Historical Association Pdf

Some programs include also the programs of societies meeting concurrently with the association.

Author : Houston Museum of Natural Science
Publisher : University of Washington Press
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Art
ISBN : STANFORD:36105133010723

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Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire by Houston Museum of Natural Science Pdf

Presents the untold story of Mongolia and its people, utilizing the latest results of research in archaeology, forensics, history, art, and literature, in a book whose clear prose, beautiful design, and wide-ranging illustraitos will fascinate general readers as well as scholars.