In the area of Boysun, present-day Uzbekistan, there is a living and vivid oral tradition based on stories from the epic Shah-nama. Barzu, son of Suhrab, is tragically killed at the hands of his famous father, the legendary hero Rustam.

The storytellers Jura Kamol and Mullo Ravshan composed two different versions of the story of Barzu in the Tajik as spoken in this area. This is the first printed version including a translation of these stories to appear.

The stories have been transcribed and...

The Altai region has yielded a cluster of Middle and Upper Paleolithic stratified sites that have been recently excavated using a multidisciplinary approach. These sequences provide key evidence illustrating changes in material culture corresponding to the transition from the Middle to the Upper Paleolithic. In Europe, this phenomenon is associated with the replacement of Neandertals by modern humans. Based on this archeological data set, local scholars have put forward a scenario of regional...

This ASLU volume examines the built environment and aspects of domestic material culture of the Late Byzantine/Frankish, Ottoman and Early Modern Cyclades in the Aegean (13th - 20th centuries).

On the basis of primary archaeological data gathered by the Cyclades Research Project, this monograph's aims are the reconstruction of everyday domestic life in towns and villages, the identification of socio-cultural identities that shaped or were reflected on pre-Modern material remains, and the hist...

The proclamation of Jihad by the Sultan-Caliph in Constantinople, after the Ottoman Empire's entry into World War I, made the headlines. This book investigates the background and nature of the Ottoman Jihad proclamation in addition to its effects in the wider Middle East - both among the Arabs and the Turks, and among Sunni Muslims as well as Shi'ites. It brings to light the German hopes for and British fears of a worldwide uprising of Muslims in the colonial empires at that time. Moreover, i...

Herencias e Interacciones Socioculturales en Mesoamérica y Occidente

The existence of communities and peoples develops over time, in a diachronic line of heritage and cultural memory as well as in a synchronous coexistence with the cosmos, marked by cyclically returning rituals. Under the pressure of "clock time" ("time is money") these organic "other times" of identity are eroding rapidly. In these respects, modernity has come to be characterized by a deep, dramatic and often violent conflic...

The League against Imperialism explores the dramatic and engaging story of a global institution that brought together activists across geographical and political borders for the goal of eradicating colonial rule worldwide. The League against Imperialism (LAI) attracted anticolonial activists like India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, Indonesia’s Sukarno, and Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, as well as prominent figures like Albert Einstein, Ernst Toller, Romain Rolland, Upton Sinclair, Mohandas Gandhi, and M...

Fernand Deligny (1913-1996), ‘poet and ethologist’, is mostly known for his work with autistic children and for his influence on the revolutions in French post-war psychiatry. Though neither director nor a theorist of the image, cinema is constantly called into his social, pedagogical, and clinical experimentations. More interested in the processes of making, he distinguishes ‘camering’ from filming, thus emphasizing not the finished film but a ‘film to come’. This volume provides...

Studying change in the course of human history, in different places, through the lens of a diverse set of core themes, World History for International Studies offers readers a set of windows into different debates historians have been conducting. Key themes, such as communication, trade, order, slavery, religion, war, identity, modernity, norms and ecology, are linked to specific world regions, which tell a story about how local ideas and individual contacts developed, started to overlap and ...

In 1884 an obscure British soldier, having finished his tour of duty in India, decided to make a detour on his trip home in order to spend three months crossing Persia unaccompanied except for the local muleteers. Among his accoutrements he packed a small leather-bound sketchbook in which he not only wrote a journal but in which he also added accomplished and charming water-colour illustrations. The authors' introduction contextualises this trip made in 1884 against the background of Persiana...

Islam exists in global history with its richly variegated cultural and social realities. When these specific cultural contexts are marginalized, Islam is reduced to an ahistorical religion without the ability to contribute to humanity. This limited understanding of Islam has been a contributing factor in many of the violent conflicts in the present day.

Reflecting on Islam in Indonesia, the world’s third largest democracy, supporting the largest Muslim population, Ahmad Syafii Maarif argues...