Muslims on the Volga in the Viking Age (eBook, PDF)

In the Footsteps of Ibn Fadlan
Redaktion: Shepard, Jonathan; Treadwell, Luke

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

The year 922 saw a series of remarkable face-to-face encounters in the steppes between Bukhara and the Middle Volga. Ibn Fadlan was an intrepid member of a diplomatic and religious mission from the distant caliphate in Baghdad to the ruler of the Volga Bulgars. His account gives a vivid eyewitness description of the peoples he came upon (whose appearance, rituals and filthy habits both fascinate and appal) and a famous depiction of a Viking Rus ship burial. It is unique testimony to burgeoning exchanges between several different cultures, and to the emergence of new political structures on the steppes. Yet the account survives only as part of a later composite work, raising questions of meaning and historical interpretation. This pioneering interdisciplinary study of Ibn Fadlan's text and the world he surveyed draws on a variety of specialists to give readers both 'the bigger picture' of cultural and economic change in Eurasia, Byzantium and the Muslim world, and hard facts, in the form of archaeological and numismatic data.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury UK eBooks
• Seitenzahl: 440
• Erscheinungstermin: 21. September 2023
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780755618170
• Artikelnr.: 68549369

Autorenporträt

Jonathan Shepard was Lecturer in Russian History in the University of Cambridge, UK. His books include The Emergence of Rus (1996, with S. Franklin) and (co-edited) Byzantium and the Viking World (2016) and Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic World (2021). Luke Treadwell is the Samir Shamma Lecturer in Islamic Numismatics and Curator of Islamic Coins at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK. He is the author of Craftsmen and Coins: Signed Dies in the Iranian World (2011) and Buyid Coinage: A Die Corpus (322-445 AH) (2001).

Inhaltsangabe

List of maps List of illustrations List of tables and appendices Preface
and acknowledgements List of abbreviations List of contributors Maps Plates
PART ONE: OVERVIEW 1. Editors' introduction 2. Ibn Fadlan's Kitab: text and
afterlife Viacheslav S. Kuleshov with Jonathan Shepard PART TWO: TEXT AND
CONTEXT 3. Where is the real Ibn Fadlan? Editing and translating the Kitab
James E. Montgomery 4. From Kitab to Risala: the long shadow of Yaqut's
version of Ibn Fadlan's account Luke Treadwell 5. Other Arab geographers'
sources on the North: al-Jayhani and the 'Anonymous Relation' Jean-Charles
Ducène 6. Other ethnographies of the steppe Walter Pohl 7. Other
travellers' tales Ian Wood PART THREE: BACKGROUND TO THE JOURNEY 8. The
Abbasid background Hugh Kennedy 9. Ibn Fadlan and the Khazars: the hidden
centre Nick Evans 10. Beyond the Gate of the Turks: archaeology around the
Aral Sea Irina Arzhantseva and Heinrich Härke, with a contribution by
Ekaterina A. Armarchuk PART FOUR: VIKING-AGE RUS 11. Ibn Fadlan and the
rituals of the Rus: Vikings on the Volga? Neil Price 12. Viking-Age markets
and emporia Søren M. Sindbæk 13. Rus, routes and sites Veronika Murasheva
14. Identities, ethnicities, cultures: Ibn Fadlan and the Rus on the Middle
Volga Þórir Jónsson Hraundal 15. Rus and other Northmen under non-Arabic
eyes Jonathan Shepard PART FIVE: VOLGA BULGARIA 16. What was Volga
Bulgaria? Leonard Nedashkovsky 17. Ninth- and tenth-century Volga Bulgar
trade Evgeniy P. Kazakov 18. Volga Bulgar imitative coinage Marek Jankowiak
PART SIX: CONCLUSION 19. 'Failure of a mission'? Jonathan Shepard List of
Reign Dates List of Alternative Place Names Glossary Index