Studies of Bactrian Legal Documents

Studies of Bactrian Legal Documents PDF Author: Hossein Sheikh
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900451998X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Studies of Bactrian Legal Documents deals with the legal practice in Greater Khorasan between the 4th and 8th centuries CE.

Studies of Bactrian Legal Documents

Studies of Bactrian Legal Documents PDF Author: Hossein Sheikh
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900451998X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Studies of Bactrian Legal Documents deals with the legal practice in Greater Khorasan between the 4th and 8th centuries CE.

Studies in the Chronology of the Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan

Studies in the Chronology of the Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan PDF Author: Nicholas Sims-Williams
Publisher: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press
ISBN: 9783700181842
Category : Afghanistan
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
More than 150 documents in Bactrian, the chief administrative language of pre-Islamic Afghanistan, have come to light during the last twenty-five years. These documents include letters, legal contracts, economic documents and a few Buddhist texts; many of them bear dates in the so-called "Bactrian era", which is also known from a few inscriptions, such as the Tochi valley inscriptions in Pakistan, but whose starting-point is controversial. The Bactrian documents have the potential to transform our knowledge of the history of the region during the 4th to 8th centuries CE, a period for which we have few contemporary records, but before they can be fully exploited as historical sources it is necessary to establish their relative and absolute chronology. The present volume aims to fulfil this need. In Part 1 we consider the dated documents, discussing the nature of the Bactrian calendar and the epoch of the Bactrian era, and concluding with a conspectus in which all the attested dates are converted to Julian dates on the basis of the facts and arguments presented. In Part 2 we turn to the equally important undated documents, systematically weighing up all types of evidence, whether historical, prosopographical, palaeographical, linguistic or orthographic, which may have a bearing on their dating. Part 3 provides a handy check-list of our conclusions, while the Appendices provide additional and supporting material including editions of the Tochi valley inscriptions and of a Pahlavi letter which was purchased together with the Bactrian documents. This book will be required reading for scholars and students of the pre-Islamic and early Islamic history of Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia. It will also be a useful resource for those interested in the languages, religions and numismatics of the region.

Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan

Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan PDF Author: Nicholas Sims-Williams
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Bactrian, the ancient language of Afghanistan, was virtually unknown before the recent discovery of more than a hundred leather documents written in Bactrian in a local variant of the Greek alphabet. As well as revealing an important new language of the Indo-European family, these documents shed light on the history and culture of Afghanistan during the 4th to 8th centuries AD, a turbulent period during which power changed hands many times, ending with the Arab conquest and the introduction of Islam. The three volumes of this series provide a comprehensive edition of the texts, with translations, photographs, glossary, and indexes, making this rich material available to linguists and historians alike.

Exegisti Monumenta

Exegisti Monumenta PDF Author: Werner Sundermann
Publisher: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag
ISBN: 9783447059374
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 644

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Book Description
This volume is a collection of forty articles dedicated to one of the most distinguished contemporary iranists, Nicholas Sims-Williams, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday on 11th April 2009. It includes an essay on Sims-Williams' outstanding contributions to Iranian studies, especially Sogdian and Bactrian, a list of his publications, editions of various texts written in Sogdian, Khotanese, Parthian, Middle Persian, and Avestan and articles on Old Persian, Middle Persian, New Persian, Bactrian, Balochi, Tati, Judeo-Persian, Caucasian, Uighur philology, linguistics and iconography. The book is illustrated by numerous plates. From the table of contents (40 contributions) A.D.H. Bivar, The Rukhkh, Giant Eagle of the Southern Seas F. de Blois, A Sasanian Silver Bowl A. Cantera, On the History of the Middle Persian Nominal Inflection C.G. Cereti, The Pahlavi Signatures on the Quilon Copper Plates (Tabula Quilonensis) J. Cheung, Two Notes on Bactrian I. Colditz, The Parthian "Sermon on happiness" J. Elfenbein, Eastern Hill Balochi H. Falk, The Name of Vema Takhtu P. Gignoux, Les relations interlinguistiques de quelques termes de la pharmacopee antique.

Tracing the Earliest Recorded Concepts of International Law

Tracing the Earliest Recorded Concepts of International Law PDF Author: Amnon Altman
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004222529
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This book offers a unique survey of legal practices and ideas relating to international relations in the Ancient Near East between 2500 and 330 BC.

The Hellenistic Far East

The Hellenistic Far East PDF Author: Rachel Mairs
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520292464
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
In the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s conquests in the late fourth century B.C., Greek garrisons and settlements were established across Central Asia, through Bactria (modern-day Afghanistan) and into India. Over the next three hundred years, these settlements evolved into multiethnic, multilingual communities as much Greek as they were indigenous. To explore the lives and identities of the inhabitants of the Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms, Rachel Mairs marshals a variety of evidence, from archaeology, to coins, to documentary and historical texts. Looking particularly at the great city of Ai Khanoum, the only extensively excavated Hellenistic period urban site in Central Asia, Mairs explores how these ancient people lived, communicated, and understood themselves. Significant and original, The Hellenistic Far East will highlight Bactrian studies as an important part of our understanding of the ancient world.

Seleukid Royal Women

Seleukid Royal Women PDF Author: Altay Coskun
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783515112956
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
The study of royal women has been one of the most dynamic fields of inquiry into the Hellenistic world (ca. 336-30 BC) and has dramatically shifted our perceptions of gender, status, and influence in the ancient world. Amid numerous works on the Ptolemies, Antigonids, and Argeads, this volume is the first to examine the roles and representations of the women of the Seleukid dynasty and its clients. These royal women were born or married into a dynasty that ruled an empire spanning dozens of cultures and languages, encompassing territory from western Asia Minor to modern-day Afghanistan. As representatives of their family's prestige, they were highly influential in shaping the culture and legacy of this Empire that spanned East and West. The contributions of this volume offer a systematic scrutiny of the representation of female Seleukids in visual and textual media. Avoiding Eurocentric perspectives in favour of embracing the diversity of the Empire, these scholars examine the interaction of Seleukid women with royal traditions ranging from Persia, Bactria, and Judaea to their Hellenistic contemporaries. The result is a landmark achievement in the study of ancient women.

Empire, Power and Indigenous Elites

Empire, Power and Indigenous Elites PDF Author: Anne Fitzpatrick-McKinley
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004292225
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
Ancient Near Eastern empires, including Assyria, Babylon and Persia, frequently permitted local rulers to remain in power. The roles of the indigenous elites reflected in the Nehemiah Memoir can be compared to those encountered elsewhere. Nehemiah was an imperial appointee, likely of a military/administrative background, whose mission was to establish a birta in Jerusalem, thereby limiting the power of local elites. As a loyal servant of Persia, Nehemiah brought to his mission a certain amount of ethnic/cultic colouring seen in certain aspects of his activities in Jerusalem, in particular in his use of Mosaic authority (but not of specific Mosaic laws). Nehemiah appealed to ancient Jerusalemite traditions in order to eliminate opposition to him from powerful local elite networks.

The Limits of Empire in Ancient Afghanistan

The Limits of Empire in Ancient Afghanistan PDF Author: Richard E. Payne
Publisher: Harrassowitz
ISBN: 9783447114530
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The territory of modern Afghanistan provided a center - and sometimes the center - for a succession of empires, from the Achaemenid Persians in the 6th century BCE until the Sasanian Iranians in the 7th century CE. And yet these regions most frequently appear as comprising a "crossroads" in accounts of their premodern history. This volume explores how successive imperial regimes established enduring forms of domination spanning the highlands of the Hindu Kush, essentially ungovernable territories in the absence of the technologies of the modern state. The modern term "Afghanistan" likely has its origins in an ancient word for highland regions and peoples resistant to outside rule. The volume's contributors approach the challenge of explaining the success of imperial projects within a highland political ecology from a variety of disciplinary perspectives with their respective evidentiary corpora, notably history, anthropology, archaeology, numismatics, and philology. The Limits of Empire models the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration necessary to produce persuasive accounts of an ancient Afghanistan whose surviving material and literary evidence remains comparatively limited. It shows how Afghan-centered imperial projects co-opted local elites, communicated in the idioms of local cultures, and created administrative archipelagoes rather than continuous territories. Above all, the volume makes plain the interest and utility in placing Afghanistan at the center, rather than the periphery, of the history of ancient empires in West Asia.

"At the Shores of the Sky"

Author: Paul W. Kroll
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004438203
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Albert Hoffstädt, a classicist by training and polylingual humanist by disposition, has for 25 years been the editor chiefly responsible for the development and acquisition of manuscripts in Asian Studies for Brill. During that time he has shepherded over 700 books into print and has distinguished himself as a figure of exceptional discernment and insight in academic publishing. He has also become a personal friend to many of his authors. A subset of these authors here offers to him in tribute and gratitude 22 essays on various topics in Asian Studies. These include studies on premodern Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and Korean literature, history, and religion, extending also into the modern and contemporary periods. They display the broad range of Mr. Hoffstädt's interests while presenting some of the most outstanding scholarship in Asian Studies today.