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A critical biography of Zah?r al-Din Muhammad B?bur, the founder, in 1526, of the Timurid-Mughal Empire of India, offering

The interaction between Eurasian pastoral nomads and the surrounding sedentary societies is a major theme in world history. This volume explores the mulitfarious nature of nomadic society and its relations with China, Russia and the Middle East from antiquity into the contemporary world with emphasis on the Mongol and Turkish peoples.

This study of local art patronage in tenth and eleventh century on the Silk Road offers a new explanation for the development of the style and iconography of well known paintings today in the British Museum, in London and the Musee Guimet, in Paris exploring the important effect of regional artistic centres on Buddhist art in Dunhuang and China.

Applying the Weberian concept of the routinization of charisma, the book examines the transformation of the nomadic empire of Tamerlane into a sedentary polity based on the Perso-Islamic model by focusing on the reign of the last Timurid ruler Sul n-?usain Bayqara in fifteenth-century Iran.

This book covers new ground on the diffusion and transmission of geographical knowledge that occurred at critical junctures in the long history of the Silk Road. Much of twentieth-century scholarship on the Silk Road examined the ancient archaeological objects and medieval historical records found within each cultural area, while the consequences of long-distance interaction across Eurasia remained poorly studied. Here ample attention is given to the journeys that notions and objects undertook to transmit spatial values to other civilizations. In retracing the steps of four major circuits right across the many civilizations that shared the Silk Road, "The Journey of Maps and Images on the Silk Road" traces the ways in which maps and images surmounted spatial, historical and cultural divisions.

Alexander's alleged Wall against Gog and Magog, often connected with the enclosure of the apocalyptic people, was a widespread theme among Syriac Christians in Mesopotamia. In the ninth century Sallam the Interpreter dictated an account of his search for the barrier to the Arab geographer Ibn Khurradadhbih. The reliability of Sallam's journey from Samarra to Western China and back (842-45), however, has always been a highly contested issue. Van Donzel and Schmidt consider the travel account as historical. This volume presents a translation of the source while at the same time it carefully looks into other Eastern Christian and Muslim traditions of the famous lore. A comprehensive survey reconstructs the political and topographical data. As so many other examples, also this story pays witness to the influence of the Syriac Christian tradition on Koran and Muslim Traditions.

Explorations in the Social History of Modern Central Asia offers new insights on the continuities and changes in the history of Muslim rural and pastoral societies in Central Asia under Russian rule (19th - early 20th century).

Volume Three of the now standard translation of the Secret History of the Mongols (Brill 2004, 2006) by Igor de Rachewiltz is the indispensable companion to the first two volumes with its updated commentary, numerous revisions and some challenging new interpretations.The Secret History of the Mongols has been selected by Choice as Outstanding Academic Title (2005).

Turko-Mongol Rulers, Cities and City-life studies dynasties of Turkic, Mongol or Turko-Mongol origin from a spatial perspective.

The Art of Symbolic Resistance provides a longitudinal study of Uyghur-Han relations. Based on locally conducted interviews, Smith Finley argues that contemporary Uyghur identities involve a complex interplay between long-standing intra-group socio-cultural commonalities and common enmity towards the Han Chinese.

Nomads on Pilgrimage: Mongols on Wutaishan is a social history of the Mongols' pilgrimages to one of the main Buddhist mountain of China in late imperial and Republican times (1800-1940).