Three Open Access Books on the Silk Roads: by UNESCO

 

"The most astonishing innovations and fusions of the world’s religions, beliefs, and material cultures have occurred along the trade and communication networks between Asia, Africa, and Europe, known today as the Silk Roads. The empires and dynasties, fluctuating like ebbs and flows, triggered waves of cultural interchange across time and space, connected by caravans of knowledge and technological transfers crossing vast distances over barren steppes, impenetrable deserts, and unsurmountable ranges. This three-part volume on Architecture, Monuments and Urbanism explores cities and ports from Nanjing to Seville and Karakorum to Mumbai as individual pearls in a long string of historical vicissitudes and cultural exchanges across the overland Silk Roads and maritime Silk Routes." 

Architecture, monuments and urbanism, Part I: Architectural influences along the Silk Roads

Editors: Paskaleva, Elena; Turner, Michael 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54678/JNRQ3162

ISBN: 978-92-3-100738-5

Collation: 343 pages : illustrations, maps

Language: English

Year of publication: 2025

Licence type: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Architecture, monuments and urbanism, Part II: Cities on the overland Silk Roads

Editors: Paskaleva, Elena; Turner, Michael 

Series title and vol / issues: Thematic collection of the cultural exchanges along the Silk Roads 

DOI:https://doi.org/10.54678/VMIH5884

ISBN: 978-92-3-100738-5

Collation: 375 pages : illustrations, maps

Language: English

Year of publication: 2025

Licence type: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO 

Architecture, monuments and urbanism, Part III: Cultural networks and sea ports on the maritime Silk Routes

Editors: Paskaleva, Elena; Turner, Michael 

Series title and vol / issues: Thematic collection of the cultural exchanges along the Silk Roads

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54678/RUOM2593

ISBN: 978-92-3-100738-5

Collation: 347 pages : illustrations, maps

Language: English

Year of publication: 2025

Licence type: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO [14411]

OA-Book: Mechanisms of Social Dependency in the Early Islamic Empire

Mechanisms of Social Dependency in the Early Islamic Empire

Editors: Edmund Hayes and Petra M. Sijpesteijn

Date Published: November 2024

Hardback isbn: 9781009384261

Available in Open Access (gold)

" The success of Islamic imperialism in the period from the conquests to the Ayyubid dynasty has traditionally been explained as purely the result of military might. This book, however, adopts a bottom-up approach which puts social relationships and local power dynamics at the centre of the Islamic empire's cohesion. Its chapters draw on sources in diverse languages: not just Arabic, but also Greek, Coptic, Syriac, Hebrew, and Bactrian, showing how different linguistic communities intersected and contributed to a connected yet diverse empire. They highlight how not just literary and historical texts, but also physical documents and archaeological evidence should be incorporated into writing histories of the late antique and early medieval Middle East. Social institutions and relationships explored include oaths; petitions, decrees, and begging letters; and financial frameworks such as debt and taxation. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Provides a new framework for understanding how the early Islamic empire, and pre-modern empires more broadly, worked together through cooperation and interdependence as well as through coercion

Shows how different linguistic communities intersected and contributed to a connected yet diverse empire

Uses physical documents and archaeological evidence as well as literary and historical texts in order to produce a broader picture"

Open Access E-Book: Empires and Communities in the Post-Roman and Islamic World, C. 400-1000 CE

 Empires and Communities in the Post-Roman and Islamic World, C. 400-1000 CE

Rutger Kramer and Walter Pohl

Oxford Studies in Early Empires

"This book deals with how empires affect smaller communities such as ethnic groups, religious communities, and local or peripheral populations. It raises the question of how these different types of community were integrated into larger imperial edifices and in which contexts the dialectic between empires and particular communities caused disruption. How did religious discourses or practices reinforce (or subvert) imperial pretenses? How were constructions of identity affected? How were Egyptians accommodated under Islamic rule, Yemenis included in an Arab identity, Aquitanians integrated into the Carolingian Empire, Jews into the Fātimīd caliphate? Why did the dissolution of Western Rome and the Abbasid caliphate leave different types of polities in their wake? How was the Byzantine Empire preserved in the seventh century; how did the Franks construct theirs in the ninth? How did events in early medieval Rome and Constantinople promote social integration in both a local and a broader framework? Focusing on the post-Roman Mediterranean, the book deals with these questions from a comparative perspective. It considers political structures in the Latin West, Byzantium, and the early Islamic world in a period exceptionally well suited for studying the expansive and erosive dynamics of empires and their interaction with smaller communities. By never adhering to a single overall model and avoiding Western notions of empire, this volume combines individual approaches with collaborative perspectives. The chapters are in-depth studies written in full awareness of the other contributions; taken together, they constitute a major contribution to the advancement of comparative studies on premodern empires."

Keywords: Mediterranean history, medieval history, Roman Empire, Carolingian, Arabia, Byzantine history, Islamic history, Fātimīds, Ummayad, Byzantium

Print publication date: 2021

Print ISBN-13: 9780190067946

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2022

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190067946.001.0001

Open Access E-book: New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria

New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria. Proceedings of the themed day of the Fifth Conference of the School of Mamluk Studies

Editors: Jo van Steenbergen and Maya Termonia
Series: Islamic History and Civilization, Volume: 179
ISBN: 978-90-04-45890-1 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-90-04-44702-8 (hardback)
Publication Date: 19 Apr 2021

"The present volume contributes to research on historic Arabic texts from late medieval Egypt and Syria. Departing from dominant understandings of these texts through the prisms of authenticity and “literarization,” it engages with questions of textual constructedness and authorial agency. 

It consists of 13 contributions by a new generation of scholars in three parts. Each part represents a different aspect of their new readings of particular texts. Part one looks at concrete instances of textual interdependencies, part two at the creativity of authorial agencies, and part three at the relationship between texts and social practice. New Readings thus participates in the revaluation of late medieval Arabic historiography as a critical field of inquiry."

Contributors: Rasmus Bech Olsen, Víctor de Castro León, Mohammad Gharaibeh, Kenneth A. Goudie, Christian Mauder, Evan Metzger, Zacharie Mochtari de Pierrepont, Clément Onimus, Tarek Sabraa, Iria Santás de Arcos, Gowaart Van Den Bossche, Koby Yosef.