Download or read book Lost Maps of the Caliphs written by Yossef Rapoport and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-12-11 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: About a millennium ago, in Cairo, an unknown author completed a large and richly illustrated book. In the course of thirty-five chapters, this book guided the reader on a journey from the outermost cosmos and planets to Earth and its lands, islands, features, and inhabitants. This treatise, known as The Book of Curiosities, was unknown to modern scholars until a remarkable manuscript copy surfaced in 2000. Lost Maps of the Caliphs provides the first general overview of The Book of Curiosities and the unique insight it offers into medieval Islamic thought. Opening with an account of the remarkable discovery of the manuscript and its purchase by the Bodleian Library, the authors use The Book of Curiosities to re-evaluate the development of astrology, geography, and cartography in the first four centuries of Islam. Their account assesses the transmission of Late Antique geography to the Islamic world, unearths the logic behind abstract maritime diagrams, and considers the palaces and walls that dominate medieval Islamic plans of towns and ports. Early astronomical maps and drawings demonstrate the medieval understanding of the structure of the cosmos and illustrate the pervasive assumption that almost any visible celestial event had an effect upon life on Earth. Lost Maps of the Caliphs also reconsiders the history of global communication networks at the turn of the previous millennium. It shows the Fatimid Empire, and its capital Cairo, as a global maritime power, with tentacles spanning from the eastern Mediterranean to the Indus Valley and the East African coast. As Lost Maps of the Caliphs makes clear, not only is The Book of Curiosities one of the greatest achievements of medieval mapmaking, it is also a remarkable contribution to the story of Islamic civilization that opens an unexpected window to the medieval Islamic view of the world.
Download or read book Lost Maps of the Caliphs written by Yossef Rapoport and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-12-11 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: About a millennium ago, in Cairo, an unknown author completed a large and richly illustrated book. In the course of thirty-five chapters, this book guided the reader on a journey from the outermost cosmos and planets to Earth and its lands, islands, features, and inhabitants. This treatise, known as The Book of Curiosities, was unknown to modern scholars until a remarkable manuscript copy surfaced in 2000. Lost Maps of the Caliphs provides the first general overview of The Book of Curiosities and the unique insight it offers into medieval Islamic thought. Opening with an account of the remarkable discovery of the manuscript and its purchase by the Bodleian Library, the authors use The Book of Curiosities to re-evaluate the development of astrology, geography, and cartography in the first four centuries of Islam. Their account assesses the transmission of Late Antique geography to the Islamic world, unearths the logic behind abstract maritime diagrams, and considers the palaces and walls that dominate medieval Islamic plans of towns and ports. Early astronomical maps and drawings demonstrate the medieval understanding of the structure of the cosmos and illustrate the pervasive assumption that almost any visible celestial event had an effect upon life on Earth. Lost Maps of the Caliphs also reconsiders the history of global communication networks at the turn of the previous millennium. It shows the Fatimid Empire, and its capital Cairo, as a global maritime power, with tentacles spanning from the eastern Mediterranean to the Indus Valley and the East African coast. As Lost Maps of the Caliphs makes clear, not only is The Book of Curiosities one of the greatest achievements of medieval mapmaking, it is also a remarkable contribution to the story of Islamic civilization that opens an unexpected window to the medieval Islamic view of the world.
Download or read book Lost Maps of the Caliphs written by Yossef Rapoport and published by . This book was released on 2019-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: About a millennium ago, in Cairo, someone completed a large and richly illustrated book. In the course of thirty-five chapters, our unknown author guided the reader on a journey from the outermost cosmos and planets to Earth and its lands, islands, features and inhabitants. This treatise, known as The Book of Curiosities, was unknown to modern scholars until a remarkable manuscript copy surfaced in 2000.Lost Maps of the Caliphs provides the first general overview of The Book of Curiosities and the unique insight it offers into medieval Islamic thought. Opening with an account of the remarkable discovery of the manuscript and its purchase by the Bodleian Library, the authors use The Book of Curiosities to re-evaluate the development of astrology, geography and cartography in the first four centuries of Islam. Early astronomical 'maps' and drawings demonstrate the medieval understanding of the structure of the cosmos and illustrate the pervasive assumption that almost any visible celestial event had an effect upon life on Earth. Lost Maps of the Caliphs also reconsiders the history of global communication networks at the turn of the previous millennium. Not only is The Book of Curiosities one of the greatest achievements of medieval map-making, it is also a remarkable contribution to the story of Islamic civilization.
Download or read book Longing for the Lost Caliphate written by Mona Hassan and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-14 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States and Europe, the word "caliphate" has conjured historically romantic and increasingly pernicious associations. Yet the caliphate's significance in Islamic history and Muslim culture remains poorly understood. This book explores the myriad meanings of the caliphate for Muslims around the world through the analytical lens of two key moments of loss in the thirteenth and twentieth centuries. Through extensive primary-source research, Mona Hassan explores the rich constellation of interpretations created by religious scholars, historians, musicians, statesmen, poets, and intellectuals. Hassan fills a scholarly gap regarding Muslim reactions to the destruction of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad in 1258 and challenges the notion that the Mongol onslaught signaled an end to the critical engagement of Muslim jurists and intellectuals with the idea of an Islamic caliphate. She also situates Muslim responses to the dramatic abolition of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924 as part of a longer trajectory of transregional cultural memory, revealing commonalities and differences in how modern Muslims have creatively interpreted and reinterpreted their heritage. Hassan examines how poignant memories of the lost caliphate have been evoked in Muslim culture, law, and politics, similar to the losses and repercussions experienced by other religious communities, including the destruction of the Second Temple for Jews and the fall of Rome for Christians. A global history, Longing for the Lost Caliphate delves into why the caliphate has been so important to Muslims in vastly different eras and places.
Download or read book Medieval Islamic Maps written by Karen C. Pinto and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-11 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Islamic mapping is one of the new frontiers in the history of cartography. This book offers the first in-depth analysis of a distinct tradition of medieval Islamic maps known collectively as the Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Kitab al-Masalik wa al-Mamalik, or KMMS). Created from the mid-tenth through the nineteenth century, these maps offered Islamic rulers, scholars, and armchair explorers a view of the physical and human geography of the Arabian peninsula, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, Spain and North Africa, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, the Iranian provinces, present-day Pakistan, and Transoxiana. Historian Karen C. Pinto examines around 100 examples of these maps retrieved from archives across the world from three points of view: iconography, context, and patronage. By unraveling their many symbols, she guides us through new ways of viewing the Muslim cartographic imagination.
Download or read book Mapping the Middle East written by Zayde Antrim and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2018-04-15 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mapping the Middle East explores the many ways people have visualized the vast area lying between the Atlantic Ocean and the Oxus and Indus River Valleys over the past millennium. By analyzing maps produced from the eleventh century on, Zayde Antrim emphasizes the deep roots of mapping in a region too often considered unexamined and unchanging before the modern period. As Antrim argues, better-known maps from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—a period coinciding with European colonialism and the rise of the nation-state—not only obscure this rich past, but also constrain visions for the region’s future. Organized chronologically, Mapping the Middle East addresses the medieval “Realm of Islam;” the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire; French and British colonialism through World War I; nationalism in modern Turkey, Iran, and Israel/Palestine; and alternative geographies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Vivid color illustrations throughout allow readers to compare the maps themselves with Antrim’s analysis. Much more than a conventional history of cartography, Mapping the Middle East is an incisive critique of the changing relationship between maps and belonging in a dynamic world region over the past thousand years.
Download or read book Unruly Places written by Alastair Bonnett and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alastair Bonnett explores extraordinary, off-grid, offbeat places including micro-nations, moving villages, secret cities, and no man's lands. Consider Sealand, an abandoned gun platform off the English coast that a British citizen claimed as his own sovereign nation, issuing passports and making his wife a princess. Or Baarle, a patchwork city of Dutch and Flemish enclaves where crossing the street can involve traversing national borders. Or Sandy Island, which appeared on maps well into 2012 despite the fact it never existed.
Download or read book Lost Enlightenment written by S. Frederick Starr and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 694 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The forgotten story of Central Asia's enlightenment—its rise, fall, and enduring legacy In this sweeping and richly illustrated history, S. Frederick Starr tells the fascinating but largely unknown story of Central Asia's medieval enlightenment through the eventful lives and astonishing accomplishments of its greatest minds—remarkable figures who built a bridge to the modern world. Because nearly all of these figures wrote in Arabic, they were long assumed to have been Arabs. In fact, they were from Central Asia—drawn from the Persianate and Turkic peoples of a region that today extends from Kazakhstan southward through Afghanistan, and from the easternmost province of Iran through Xinjiang, China. Lost Enlightenment recounts how, between the years 800 and 1200, Central Asia led the world in trade and economic development, the size and sophistication of its cities, the refinement of its arts, and, above all, in the advancement of knowledge in many fields. Central Asians achieved signal breakthroughs in astronomy, mathematics, geology, medicine, chemistry, music, social science, philosophy, and theology, among other subjects. They gave algebra its name, calculated the earth's diameter with unprecedented precision, wrote the books that later defined European medicine, and penned some of the world's greatest poetry. One scholar, working in Afghanistan, even predicted the existence of North and South America—five centuries before Columbus. Rarely in history has a more impressive group of polymaths appeared at one place and time. No wonder that their writings influenced European culture from the time of St. Thomas Aquinas down to the scientific revolution, and had a similarly deep impact in India and much of Asia. Lost Enlightenment chronicles this forgotten age of achievement, seeks to explain its rise, and explores the competing theories about the cause of its eventual demise. Informed by the latest scholarship yet written in a lively and accessible style, this is a book that will surprise general readers and specialists alike.
Download or read book Picturing the Islamicate World written by Nadja Danilenko and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Picturing the Islamicate World, Nadja Danilenko explores the message of the first preserved maps from the Islamicate world. Safeguarded in al-Iṣṭakhrī’s Book of Routes and Realms (10th century C.E.), the world map and twenty regional maps complement the text to a reference book of the territories under Muslim rule. Rather than shaping the Islamicate world according to political or religious concerns, al-Iṣṭakhrī chose a timeless design intended to outlast upheavals. Considering the treatise was transmitted for almost a millennium, al-Iṣṭakhrī’s strategy seems to have paid off. By investigating the Persian and Ottoman translations and all extant manuscripts, Nadja Danilenko unravels the manuscript tradition of al-Iṣṭakhrī’s work, revealing who took an interest in it and why.
Download or read book Islamic Maps written by Yossef Rapoport and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning the Islamic world, from ninth-century Baghdad to nineteenth-century Iran, this book tells the story of the key Muslim map-makers and the art of Islamic cartography. Muslims were uniquely placed to explore the edges of the inhabited world and their maps stretched from Isfahan to Palermo, from Istanbul to Cairo and Aden. Over a similar period, Muslim artists developed distinctive styles, often based on geometrical patterns and calligraphy. Map-makers, including al-Khwārazmī and al-Idrīsī, combined novel cartographical techniques with art, science and geographical knowledge. The results could be aesthetically stunning and mathematically sophisticated, politically charged as well as a celebration of human diversity. 'Islamic Maps' examines Islamic visual interpretations of the world in their historical context, through the lives of the map-makers themselves. What was the purpose of their maps, what choices did they make and what was the argument they were trying to convey? Lavishly illustrated with stunning manuscripts, beautiful instruments and Qibla charts, this book shows how maps constructed by Muslim map-makers capture the many dimensions of Islamic civilisation, providing a window into the worldviews of Islamic societies.
Download or read book The Great Caliphs written by Amira K. Bennison and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This endlessly informative history brings the classical Islamic world to lifeIn this accessibly written history, Amira K. Bennison contradicts the common assumption that Islam somehow interrupted the smooth flow of Western civilization from its Graeco-Roman origins to its more recent European and American manifestations. Instead, she places Islamic civilization in the longer trajectory of Mediterranean civilizations and sees the ‘Abbasid Empire (750–1258 CE) as the inheritor and interpreter of Graeco-Roman traditions.At its zenith the ‘Abbasid caliphate stretched over the entire Middle East and part of North Africa, and influenced Islamic regimes as far west as Spain. Bennison’s examination of the politics, society, and culture of the ‘Abbasid period presents a picture of a society that nurtured many of the “civilized” values that Western civilization claims to represent, albeit in different premodern forms: from urban planning and international trade networks to religious pluralism and academic research. Bennison’s argument counters the common Western view of Muslim culture as alien and offers a new perspective on the relationship between Western and Islamic cultures.
Download or read book A Literary History of Medicine written by Emilie Savage-Smith and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-03-25 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An online, Open Access version of this work is also available from Brill. A Literary History of Medicine by the Syrian physician Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah (d. 1270) is the earliest comprehensive history of medicine. It contains biographies of over 432 physicians, ranging from the ancient Greeks to the author’s contemporaries, describing their training and practice, often as court physicians, and listing their medical works; all this interlaced with poems and anecdotes. These volumes present the first complete and annotated translation along with a new edition of the Arabic text showing the stages in which the author composed the work. Introductory essays provide important background. The reader will find on these pages an Islamic society that worked closely with Christians and Jews, deeply committed to advancing knowledge and applying it to health and wellbeing.
Download or read book The Mantle of the Earth written by Veronica della Dora and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-01-18 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term mantle has inspired philosophers, geographers, and theologians and shaped artists’ and mapmakers’ visual vocabularies for thousands of years. According to Veronica della Dora, mantle is the “metaphor par excellence, for it unfolds between the seen and the unseen as a threshold and as a point of tension.” Featuring numerous illustrations, The Mantle of the Earth: Genealogies of a Geographical Metaphor is an intellectual history of the term mantle and its metaphorical representation in art and literature, geography and cartography. Through the history of this metaphor from antiquity to the modern day, we learn about shifting perceptions and representations of global space, about our planetary condition, and about the nature of geography itself.
Download or read book Indian Migration and Empire written by Radhika Mongia and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-03 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did states come to monopolize control over migration? What do the processes that produced this monopoly tell us about the modern state? In Indian Migration and Empire Radhika Mongia provocatively argues that the formation of colonial migration regulations was dependent upon, accompanied by, and generative of profound changes in normative conceptions of the modern state. Focused on state regulation of colonial Indian migration between 1834 and 1917, Mongia illuminates the genesis of central techniques of migration control. She shows how important elements of current migration regimes, including the notion of state sovereignty as embodying the authority to control migration, the distinction between free and forced migration, the emergence of passports, the formation of migration bureaucracies, and the incorporation of kinship relations into migration logics, are the product of complex debates that attended colonial migrations. By charting how state control of migration was critical to the transformation of a world dominated by empire-states into a world dominated by nation-states, Mongia challenges positions that posit a stark distinction between the colonial state and the modern state to trace aspects of their entanglements.
Download or read book Sea of the Caliphs written by Christophe Picard and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-21 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christophe Picard recounts the adventures of Muslim sailors who competed with Greek and Latin seamen for control of the 7th-century Mediterranean. By the time Christian powers took over trade routes in the 13th century, a Muslim identity that operated within, and in opposition to, Europe had been shaped by encounters across the sea of the caliphs.
Download or read book written by ابن الساعي، علي بن انجب، and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consorts of the Caliphs is a seventh/thirteenth-century compilation of anecdotes about thirty-eight women who were, as the title suggests, consorts to those in power, most of them concubines of the early Abbasid caliphs and wives of latter-day caliphs and sultans. This slim but illuminating volume is one of the few surviving texts by Ibn al-Saʿi (d. 674 H/1276 AD). Ibn al-Saʿi was a prolific Baghdadi scholar who chronicled the academic and political elites of his city, and whose career straddled the final years of the Abbasid dynasty and the period following the cataclysmic Mongol invasion of 656 H/1258 AD.
Download or read book Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds written by Hyunhee Park and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-27 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book documents the relationship and wisdom of Asian cartographers in the Islamic and Chinese worlds before the Europeans arrived.
