Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: the concept of Inner Asia
- 2 The geographic setting
- 3 Inner Asia at the dawn of history
- 4 The Scythians and Sarmatians
- 5 The Hsiung-nu
- 6 Indo-Europeans in Inner Asia
- 7 The Hun period
- 8 The Avars
- 9 The peoples of the Russian forest belt
- 10 The peoples of the south Russian steppes
- 11 The establishment and dissolution of the Türk empire
- 12 The Uighurs
- 13 The Karakhanids and early Islam
- 14 Early and medieval Tibet
- 15 The forest peoples of Manchuria: Kitans and Jurchens
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
3 - Inner Asia at the dawn of history
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: the concept of Inner Asia
- 2 The geographic setting
- 3 Inner Asia at the dawn of history
- 4 The Scythians and Sarmatians
- 5 The Hsiung-nu
- 6 Indo-Europeans in Inner Asia
- 7 The Hun period
- 8 The Avars
- 9 The peoples of the Russian forest belt
- 10 The peoples of the south Russian steppes
- 11 The establishment and dissolution of the Türk empire
- 12 The Uighurs
- 13 The Karakhanids and early Islam
- 14 Early and medieval Tibet
- 15 The forest peoples of Manchuria: Kitans and Jurchens
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
The end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries brought to light exceedingly important discoveries by archeologists on the continent of Asia. For the first time Asia appeared to the students of the distant past as a land where complex events had occurred which were related to the beginnings of the human race and where cultures, frequently high cultures, had come into being, displaced each other, and left profound imprints on world history.
The countries in which these discoveries were made are lands related to the general concept of the Far and Near East: India, Mesopotamia, Palestine, in the west; and China, Japan, parts of Korea, Indochina, and the Malayan Archipelago in the east.
All that lay deeper within Asia, to the north and east of China and India, however, in one way or another remained outside the image of world history during its earliest stages as viewed by the majority of scholars and people in general.
History, it would seem, had actually halted before the high barriers of the mountain ranges, these grandiose mountainous structures and the lands which partitioned off the world of the high agricultural cultures of the Near and Far East as known to European scholarship. Actually, however, beyond these frontiers there existed a world of history which, although unknown, was just as great.
Even a desultory glance at a physical map of the continent of Asia allows a graphic view of this frontier, allows us to sense and realize its grandiose dimensions, hence to conceive its very real effect on the course of the historical development of those who during antiquity lived here behind these natural and historical barriers in the very depths of the continent.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia , pp. 41 - 96Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990
References
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