This volume centres on the history and legacy of the Mongol World Empire founded by Chinggis Khan and his sons, including its impact upon the modern world. An international team of scholars examines the political and cultural history of the Mongol empire, its Chinggisid successor states, and the non-Chinggisid dynasties that came to dominate Inner Asia in its wake. Geographically, it focuses on the continental region from East Asia to Eastern Europe.

This volume introduces the geographical setting of Central Asia and follows its history from the palaeolithic era to the rise of the Mongol empire in the thirteenth century. From earliest times, Central Asia linked and separated the great sedentary civilisations of Europe and Asia. In the pre-modern period, 'Inner Asia' could be defined more as a cultural than a geographical entity, its frontiers shifting according to the changing balance of power.

In this intriguing book, Xinru Liu reveals both why and how a long distance trade in luxury goods emerged in the late third century BCE, following its story through to the Mongol conquest. Liu starts with China’s desperate need for what the Chinese called “the heavenly horses” of Central Asia, and describes how the traders who brought these horses also brought exotic products, some all the way from the Mediterranean.

A vast region stretching roughly from the Volga River to Manchuria and the northern Chinese borderlands, Central Asia has been called the "pivot of history," a land where nomadic invaders and Silk Road traders changed the destinies of the states that ringed its borders, including pre-modern Europe, the Middle East, and China. In Central Asia in World History, Peter B.

This innovative book examines cross-cultural encounters before 1492, focusing in particular on the major cross-cultural influences that transformed Asia and Europe during this period: the ancient silk roads that linked China with the Roman Empire, the spread of the world religions, and the Mongol Empire of the thirteenth century. The author's goal throughout the work is to examine the conditions - political, social, economic, and cultural - that enabled cultures, languages and ideas to interact and adapt to each other.

The development of the water ways of the Silk Roads across the Caspian Sea depended on the flood cycle of Amu Darya River. There are some hypotheses in Uzbek and Russian researchers’ studies. Historical literature pays little attention to the study of water ways along the Silk Roads. Some significant researches believe on existence of a water way between Central Asia and European continent. The water way changes were studying in relation of geographical and natural context.

Destiny can play strange games with archaeological discoveries. One can spend half his life studying a scientific problem or looking for traces of vanished civilizations, but all the efforts prove futile: the long and arduous labours remain unrewarded, whereas somebody else makes an unexpected discovery without ever thinking of it — while addressing entirely different tasks. This was the case with P. K. Kozlov, who made an outstanding contribution to archaeology without being a qualified archaeologist.

The enormously rich collection of the Russian Museum of Ethnography includes unique arrays of monuments of material culture and photographs of subjects related to the ethnography of the population of Eastern Turkestan. The history of the collections is inextricably linked with the Museum, whereas the illustrious names of those who amassed them — A. V. Adrianov, M. M. Berezovsky, S. M. Dudin, D. A. Klementz and S. F. Oldenburg — belong to the glorious page in the history of Russian science and museum work.

The first researcher of the Manichaean texts kept in the Asiatic Museum was it director (from 1890 to 1916) Academician Carl Germanovich Salemann (1849–1916). From the beginning of the 20th century up to his demise, he studied the Manichaean texts from Eastern Turkestan in the Middle Iranian languages: Middle Persian, Parthian and Sogdian. The collection of the Asiatic Museum (IOM RAS) included a considerable number of fragments of Manichaean texts in those languages, as well as in Chinese and Uighur...