The Xiongnu

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyun Jin Kim
Keyword(s):  
Northern China ◽  
First Century ◽  
Aral Sea ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
The West ◽  
The North ◽  
First Empire ◽  
Western Eurasia ◽  
Asian People

The Xiongnu were an Inner Asian people who formed an empire, a state entity encompassing a multiethnic, multicultural, and polyglot population. The ruling elite of this empire were, for the most part, pastoralists. However, the empire also possessed a substantial agrarian base. In the late 3rd and early 2nd centuries bce, the Xiongnu created the first empire to unify much of Inner Asia. The Xiongnu Empire stretched from Manchuria in the east to the Aral Sea in the west, from the Baikal region in the north to the Ordos and Gansu regions of China in the south. In the 2nd century bce, the Xiongnu also subjected the Han Empire of China to tribute payments. However, late in that century, the Han broke the heqin policy of engagement with the Xiongnu and began a long struggle for supremacy with its northern foe. Political instability arising from protracted struggles over the imperial succession gradually undermined the Xiongnu Empire. In the middle of the first century ce, the state splintered into two halves: the Northern Xiongnu and the Southern Xiongnu. The Southern Xiongnu later conquered Northern China in the early 4th century ce, while the remnants of the Northern Xiongnu became the political and cultural forebears of the later Huns of western Eurasia.

Ritual under Change: Mongolian Influences on Horse Races and Mountain Divinity Worship in Tibet

Inner Asia ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 361-373
Author(s):  
Elke Studer
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Central Government ◽  
The Political ◽  
The South ◽  
The West ◽  
Horse Race ◽  
Autonomous Region ◽  
South Eastern ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of

AbstractThe article outlines the Mongolian influences on the biggest horse race festival in Nagchu prefecture in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR).Since old times these horse races have been closely linked to the worship of the local mountain deity by the patrilineal nomadic clans of the South-Eastern Changthang, the North Tibetan plain. In the seventeenth century the West Mongol chieftain Güüshi Khan shaped the history of Tibet. To support his political claims, he enlarged the horse race festival's size and scale, and had his troops compete in the different horse race and archery competitions in Nagchu. Since then, the winners of the big race are celebrated side by side with the political achievements and claims of the central government in power.

Walter Pohl, The Avars: A Steppe Empire in Central Europe, 567–822. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2018, xxiii, 636 pp., 4 maps.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 381-382
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
The West ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
The North ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Nomadic People ◽  
Military Structure

Even though this is not a new publication, Pohl’s study on the Avars deserves particular attention, now in its first English translation. While not identified on the cover page, Pohl’s book was superbly translated into English by Will Sayers, who is briefly mentioned in the preface. Pohl had published his book originally in German in 1988, and it appeared in its third edition in 2015. Only in the last few decades has our awareness and understanding of the Avars grown and changed, particularly because intensive archaeological evidence has vastly changed our concept of that Steppe people who lived in the Carpathian Basin long before the Magyars settled there. Consequently, Pohl has made great efforts to reflect on the new insights and rewrote the respective sections of this book. In short, although here we hold in our hands ‘only’ the English translation of the third edition, The Avars represents, after all, a new approach and a thorough update of the current research on that people that had significant influence on the Byzantines, the Germanic peoples to the west and southwest, and to the north and east. They were the first to introduce into Europe the stirrup, but they left practically no written sources. They were Nomadic people, and yet not simply barbarians, as later chroniclers liked to call them. Hence, Pohl’s study on this early medieval people sheds important light on the political and military structure of early medieval Europe in an area where the Byzantine sphere of interest ended and where the Carolingians endeavored to place their stakes.

The Evolution of a New Nato for a New Europe

1998 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 174-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Woodliffe
Keyword(s):  
North Atlantic ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Political Change ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Military Alliance ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Atlantic ◽  
Set Up

History suggests that a military alliance will rarely survive major political change that results in the disappearance of the original danger that the alliance was first set up to combat. Since 1989 the reshaping of the political and strategic map of Europe has proceeded on a scale and at a pace such as to give rise to an expectation that the North Atlantic Alliance would become a victim of historical inevitability and thus be either formally dissolved or left to atrophy. Instead, the North Atlantic Alliance has embarked on a root and branch transformation of its structures, procedures and strategies for the twenty-first century. What is equally remarkable is that these changes have been accommodated within the framework of the original text of the North Atlantic Treaty drawn up in 1949,1thus obviating the need for large-scale formal amendment.

Romania since the Revolution

1990 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 484-496 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Almond
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
The West ◽  
Coup D'etat ◽  
The North ◽  
Communist Revolution ◽  
Party Members ◽  
National Salvation ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Revolution

THE VIOLENCE WHICH MARKED THE OVERTHROW OF Nicolae Ceaugescu's regime at Christmas 1989, and the recurrent disorders, especially in Bucharest, which have punctuated developments over the last nine months, have made Romania's experience of anti-Communist revolution strikingly different from that of its neighbours to the north and to the west. Whatever the political and social tensions emerging in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland (and whatever may be the GDR's legacy to a reunified Germany), it is unlikely that the charge of neo-communism will be central to their political debate. It is precisely that charge levelled against the government party (National Salvation Front/FSN) and against the person of Ion Ilescu by various opposition groups, and former prominent dissidents under Ceaugescu, which remains the most emotive issue in Romanian politics. The question of whether the revolution which overthrew Nicolae Ceauyescu and led to the dissolution of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) was the result of a popular uprising or a coup d'état planned by Party members has haunted Romanian politics through the first nine months of the post-Ceauqescu period.

The Neolithic Age in Northern China

Antiquity ◽  
1933 ◽  
Vol 7 (28) ◽  
pp. 389-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl Whiting Bishop
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Yellow Sea ◽  
Northern China ◽  
The Yellow Sea ◽  
Eastern Asia ◽  
The West ◽  
The North ◽  
Neolithic Age ◽  
Western Asia ◽  
The Neolithic Age

Northern China forms an integral part of the north temperate zone of the Old World. It is, moreover, connected with western Asia and eastern Europe by a long but continuous belt of steppe presenting no transverse barriers to migration, whether faunal or human. It cannot, therefore, be treated as a region apart, save in a very limited and subordinate sense.The surface consists in the main of mountains in the west and of plains in the east. Over much of it lie thick deposits of loess, extending from Chinese Turkistan right across eastern Asia, nearly to the Yellow Sea. These great accumulations of wind-borne soil were most probably formed during times roughly contemporary with the Riss-Wurm glaciation of Europe.

Civilization on a Crash Course? Imperialism, Subimperialism and the Political-Ecological Breaking Point of the Modern/Colonial World-System

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 255-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonardo E. Figueroa-Helland ◽  
Tim Lindgren ◽  
Tori Pfaeffle
Keyword(s):  
Emerging Economies ◽  
Ecological Footprint ◽  
Breaking Point ◽  
The Political ◽  
Planetary Boundaries ◽  
Internal Colonialism ◽  
The West ◽  
The North ◽  
Catch Up ◽  
Urban Civilization

Modern/colonial civilization has already breached several planetary boundaries and its ecological footprint is overwhelming the Earth’s carrying capacity. The ecological space for the growth of modern urban civilization is at its breaking point. We conduct two case studies, of Russia and Brazil, to show that the aspirations of semi-peripheral “emerging economies” to catch-up, clone and compete with the West within the hegemonic terms of an ecologically unsustainable and socially stratifying civilizational model requires their systematic practice of internal colonialism and regional subimperialism. Playing catch-up with the North and its unsustainable mode of political economy demands the present-day rehearsal, in accelerated, compressed and subimperial modes of the structurally violent practices that have underpinned the North’s “rise” to planetary dominance. Yet in striving to catch-up and join in the overconsumptive and exploitative lifestyle of economic cores, large “emerging economies” like thebricsare in an economic, political and military crash course against the hegemonically-entrenched Northern core powers they aspire to emulate, in what looks like an increasingly volatile scramble to grab whatever dwindling ecological space is left in a rapidly degraded planet.

Challenging the State-socialist Order: a New Social Movement in Poland

2001 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 698-721 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Wylie
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
The West ◽  
East European ◽  
Peace Movements ◽  
New Social Movement ◽  
State Socialist ◽  
Rule Out

Though their environmental problems are even more severe and their arms expenditures at least as high as those in the West, the political systems of the East European countries rule out the emergence of independent and vigorous environmentalist movements or peace movements comparable to those in the West. It is relatively easy for the ruling elite to simply ignore such issues, officially the problems underlying them exist only in the capitalist West.

4. From the end of the cold war to a new world dis-order?

2019 ◽  
pp. 70-83
Author(s):  
Michael Cox
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International System ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
Clinton Presidency ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Rise Of China ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Rise Of China

This chapter provides a broad overview of the international system between the end of the cold war— when many claimed that liberalism and the West had triumphed— through to the second decade of the twenty-first century, when the West itself and the liberal economic order it had hitherto promoted appeared to be coming under increased pressure from political forces at home and new challenges abroad. But before we turn to the present, the chapter will look at some of the key developments since 1989—including the Clinton presidency, the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy following the attacks of 9/11, the 2008 financial crash, the crisis in Europe, the transitions taking place in the global South, the origins of the upheavals now reshaping the Middle East, the political shift from Barack Obama to Donald Trump, the emergence of Asia, and the rise of China. The chapter then concludes by examining two big questions: first, is power now shifting away from the West, and second, to what extent does the current wave of populism in the West threaten globalization and the liberal order?

Q. Mucius Scaevola and Oenoanda: a new Inscription

1995 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 73-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. F. Eilers ◽  
N. P. Milner
Keyword(s):  
Outer Edge ◽  
Second Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Northern Margin ◽  
The North ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
Th 1

The following inscription was found at Oenoanda, an antique city in north Lycia, by the late Alan S. Hall in 1974. The text (inv. no. YÇ 1014) is inscribed on the short face of a large grey limestone statue base, found lying on its left side at the northern margin of the Upper Agora (the “Esplanade”), directly before the outer edge of the portico of the north stoa (cf. Figs. 1 and 2). Its position suggests that it has fallen forward, with other bases beside it to the west, from its original situation on the pavement of the Upper Agora, immediately fronting the podium of the stoa. There was no evidence that it had been re-used, as originally thought by Hall. Its dimensions are h. 0·73 m.; w. 0·74 m. (slightly broken to the left); th. 1·50+ m. (buried behind). Since it is unmoulded and there are no foot-holes in the top, it is probable that top and bottom sections have become detached. The large base beside it to the west, measuring h. 1·25 m.; w. 2·10 m.; th. 0·60+ m., has two sets of foot-holes and a moulded top; a connection between this and our base is perhaps not unlikely—possibly they formed part of a family monument. On architectural grounds it has been argued that the north stoa was built in either the first century B.C. or the first century A.D. Since it is reasonable to suppose that the base, which we date to the 90s B.C. for reasons that will become clear shortly, was erected after its construction, the stoa should probably be dated no later than second century B.C.

Some Literary References to the History of the Gurjara-Pratihāras Mahendrapāla and Mahipāla

1964 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-17
Author(s):  
M. L. Nigham
Keyword(s):  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Archaeological Remains ◽  
The South ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Condition ◽  
Indian History ◽  
Northern India ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of

The Gurjara-Pratihāras were the last Hindu power of early Indian history who strove to unify the whole of Āryāvarta under one parasol, and the dynasty produced a brilliant galaxy of monarchs such as Nāgabhaṭa, Mihira-Bhoja, Mahendrapāla and Mahipāla who, apart from their military genius, were great patrons of learning and art. The archaeological remains of this dynasty have been brought to light from Pihova (Pṛthūdaka) in the north to Deogarh and Gwalior in the south, and from Kathiawar in the west to Bihar and Bengal in the east. Rājaśēkhara, the great Sanskrit poet-dramatist, was the spiritual preceptor (upādhyaya) of Mahendrapāla alias Nirbhayanarendra. He continued to grace the Pratihāra court till the reign of Mahipāla, the son and successor of Mahendrapāla, in whose presence the play Bālabhārata was staged. Besides the Bālabhārata, three other dramas, Bālarāmāyaṇa, Karpūramañjarī and Viddhaśālabhañjikā, and Kāvyamīmāṃsā, an elaborate work on poetics, were written by the same author. Being closely associated with the political life of the court, Rājaśēkhara's dramas, although based on conventional themes of love, give us glimpses of the political condition of northern India at that time.

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