Abstract: This work comprises several studies dealing with the society, economy, ideology and power among the mainly tribal, semi-pastoral communities living and moving around the southern arid margins of the southern Levant, particularly the Negev desert, southern Transjordan (ancient Edom) and north-eastern Sinai during the first millennium BCE. Table of Contents:
Chapter One Introduction Chapter Two Pingcheng and the Rituals of Empire Chapter Three Yungang and the Tuoba Kingship Chapter Four Life and Death of the Northern Wei Elite Chapter Five The Many Faces of the Tuoba
Author: Duthie, Nina. School: Columbia University Publication Year: 2015 Advisor: Robert Hymes (韓明士) Degree: Ph.D. Abstract: In this dissertation, I explore Wei shu (魏書)historiography on the early Northern Wei imperial state, which was founded by the Tuoba Xianbei in the late fourth century C.E. In examining the Wei shu narrative of the Northern Wei founding, I illuminate not only the representation of cultural and imperial authority in the reigns of the early Northern Wei emperors, but also investigate historiography on the pre-imperial Tuoba past. I argue that the Wei shu narrative of Tuoba origins and ancestors is constructed from the perspective of the moment of the Northern Wei founding. Or, to view it the other way around, the founding of the Northern Wei imperial state by Tuoba Gui 拓拔珪 signifies the culmination of the Wei shu narrative on the early Tuoba. This narrative of the early Tuoba past is of course teleological: Essentially everything in this phase of Tuoba historiography leads up to the moment of the Northern Wei imperial founding, including genealogical descent from a son of Huangdi, who is represented as the Xianbei progenitor, in a remote northern wilderness; the continuous succession of Tuoba rulers that followed; and the journeys that brought the Tuoba out of the wilderness and toward the geographical center. In focusing on the account of the inaugural reign of Tuoba Gui, the Northern Wei founder, and the record of his ritual practice as emperor, I have discovered tensions in Wei shu historiography that I believe signal toward some of the actual cultural contestation that attended the founding of the Northern Wei imperial state. The Wei shu historiography on Buddhism in the early Northern Wei then, I argue, presents an alternative source of authority, one that stands outside both an imperial Han inheritance and a culturally Tuoba tradition. Link: http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac%3A186705
Editors: Reuven Amitai & Michal Biran Publication Year: 2014 Publisher: University Of Hawaii Press
Abstract: Since the first millennium BCE, nomads of the Eurasian steppe have played a key role in world history and the development of adjacent sedentary regions, especially China, India, the Middle East, and Eastern and Central Europe. Although their more settled neighbors often saw them as an ongoing threat and imminent danger—“barbarians,” in fact—their impact on sedentary cultures was far more complex than the raiding, pillaging, and devastation with which they have long been associated in the popular imagination. The nomads were also facilitators and catalysts of social, demographic, economic, and cultural change, and nomadic culture had a significant influence on that of sedentary Eurasian civilizations, especially in cases when the nomads conquered and ruled over them. Not simply passive conveyors of ideas, beliefs, technologies, and physical artifacts, nomads were frequently active contributors to the process of cultural exchange and change. Their active choices and initiatives helped set the cultural and intellectual agenda of the lands they ruled and beyond. This volume brings together a distinguished group of scholars from different disciplines and cultural specializations to explore how nomads played the role of “agents of cultural change.” The beginning chapters examine this phenomenon in both east and west Asia in ancient and early medieval times, while the bulk of the book is devoted to the far flung Mongol empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This comparative approach, encompassing both a lengthy time span and a vast region, enables a clearer understanding of the key role that Eurasian pastoral nomads played in the history of the Old World. It conveys a sense of the complex and engaging cultural dynamic that existed between nomads and their agricultural and urban neighbors, and highlights the non-military impact of nomadic culture on Eurasian history. Nomads As Agents of Cultural Change illuminates and complicates nomadic roles as active promoters of cultural exchange within a vast and varied region. It makes available important original scholarship on the new turn in the study of the Mongol empire and on relations between the nomadic and sedentary worlds. Table of Contents: Introduction: nomadic culture / Michal Biran -- Steppe land interactions and their effects on Chinese cultures during the second and early first millennia BCE / Gideon Shelach-Lavi -- The Scythians and their neighbors / Anatoly Khazanov -- From steppe roads to silk roads: inner Asian nomads and early interregional exchange / William Honeychurch -- The use of sociopolitical terminology for nomads: an excursion into the term buluo in Tang China / Isenbike Togan -- Population movements in the Mongolian era / Thomas T. Allsen -- The Mongols and nomadic identity: the case of the Kitans in China / Michal Biran -- Persian notables and the families which underpinned the Ilkhanate / George Lane -- The Mongol empire and its impact on the arts of China / Morris Rossabi -- The impact of the Mongols on the history of Syria: politics, society, and culture / Reuven Amitai -- The Tatar factor in the formation of Muscovy's political culture / Istvan Vasary -- Mongol historiography since 1985: the rise of cultural history / David Morgan.
Author: Guolong Lai 來國龍 Publication: March 2015 Publisher: University of Washington Press
Abstract: In Excavating the Afterlife, Guolong Lai explores the dialectical relationship between sociopolitical change and mortuary religion from an archaeological perspective. By examining burial structure, grave goods, and religious documents unearthed from groups of well-preserved tombs in southern China, Lai shows that new attitudes toward the dead, resulting from the trauma of violent political struggle and warfare, permanently altered the early Chinese conceptions of this world and the afterlife. The book grounds the important changes in religious beliefs and ritual practices firmly in the sociopolitical transition from the Warring States (ca. 453-221 BCE) to the early empires (3rd century-1st century BCE). A methodologically sophisticated synthesis of archaeological, art historical, and textual sources, Excavating the Afterlife will be of interest to art historians, archaeologists, and textual scholars of China, as well as to students of comparative religions. Table of Contents: Chronology of early Chinese dynasties Maps Introduction The dead who would not be ancestors The transformation of burial space The presence of the invisible Letters to the underworld Journey to the Northwest Conclusion -- Glossary of Chinese characters.
