Ancient Egypt and the Near East in World History

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 11-28
Author(s):  
Marc Van De Mieroop

Abstract Ancient Egypt and the Near East are central to many histories that aim to look at the world in its entirety, mostly because they are the earliest cultures that are well-documented both with textual and material evidence. This article surveys how these studies use that evidence in the various ways the discipline of world or global history is practiced. Those include chronological narratives of human activities from prehistory up to today, investigations that consider the worlds in which the peoples of ancient Egypt and the Near East lived, and comparative studies that seek to explain how certain features of human society and culture came about. The final question it addresses is whether the people of ancient Egypt and the Near East had any interest in a global history themselves.

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (60) ◽  
pp. 253-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diego Olstein

Abstract World history can be arranged into three major regional divergences: the 'Greatest Divergence' starting at the end of the last Ice Age (ca. 15,000 years ago) and isolating the Old and the New Worlds from one another till 1500; the 'Great Divergence' bifurcating the paths of Europe and Afro-Asia since 1500; and the 'American Divergence' which divided the fortunes of New World societies from 1500 onwards. Accordingly, all world regions have confronted two divergences: one disassociating the fates of the Old and New Worlds, and the other within either the Old or the New World. Latin America is in the uneasy position that in both divergences it ended up on the 'losing side.' As a result, a contentious historiography of Latin America evolved from the very moment that it was incorporated into the wider world. Three basic attitudes toward the place of Latin America in global history have since emerged and developed: admiration for the major impact that the emergence on Latin America on the world scene imprinted on global history; hostility and disdain over Latin America since it entered the world scene; direct rejection of and head on confrontation in reaction the former. This paper examines each of these three attitudes in five periods: the 'long sixteenth century' (1492-1650); the 'age of crisis' (1650-1780); 'the long nineteenth century' (1780-1914); 'the short twentieth century' (1914-1991); and 'contemporary globalization' (1991 onwards).


2019 ◽  
pp. 318-334
Author(s):  
Avra Xepapadako

Τ‎his chapter focuses on the activity of musical theatre companies touring in south-eastern Europe, the Near East, the Caucasus and Central Asia during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It investigates cultural transfer and amalgamation between the metropolitan culture of the West and the Orient in the domain of opera and operetta. Greece, in particular, functioned as a cultural crossroads between East and West. From 1840 onwards, Italian opera companies began to tour in Greece and its new theatres, and even further towards the Near East; they were followed, from 1870 onwards, by French operetta and vaudeville companies. In the last decades of the 19th century, these French artists expanded their itineraries towards the East, beyond familiar geographical boundaries, tracing their own small odysseys on the map. The chapter charts and presents these traces, attempting to shed light on an unexplored area of the world history of music and theatre.


2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peer Vries

Global history seems to be the history for our times. Huge syntheses such as the seven-volume Cambridge World History or the six-volume A History of the World suggest the field has come to fruition. Robert Moore, in his contribution to the book under review, The Prospect of Global History, is quite confident in this respect: if there is a single reason for “the rise of world history”, it is “the collapse of every alternative paradigm” (pp. 84–85). As early as 2012, the journal Itinerario published an interview with David Armitage with the title “Are We All Global Historians Now?” That may have been provocative but Armitage obliged by claiming “the hegemony of national historiography is over”.


The Umayyads, the first Islamic dynasty, ruled over the largest empire that the world had seen, stretching from Spain in the west to the Indus Valley and Central Asia in the east. They played a crucial rule in the articulation of the new religion of Islam during the seventh and eighth centuries, shaping its public face, artistic expressions, and the state apparatus that sustained it. The present volume brings together a collection of essays that bring new light to this crucial period of world history, with a focus on the ways in which Umayyad elites fashioned and projected their image and how these articulations, in turn, mirrored their times. These themes are approached through a wide variety of sources, from texts through art and archaeology to architecture, with new considerations of old questions and fresh material evidence that make the intersections and resonances between different fields of historical study come alive.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-178
Author(s):  
Gabriela Goldin Marcovich ◽  
Rahul Markovits

AbstractThis article offers the first study of the Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale, the Journal of World History published under the auspices of UNESCO from 1953 to 1972 as a by-product of the ‘History of mankind’ project. Drawing on material in the UNESCO archives, it delves into what Lucien Febvre, the first editor of the Cahiers, called his ‘kitchen’, in order to understand world history as a practice. Data on author origin and article subject matter point to the journal’s mitigated success in overcoming Eurocentrism. The article ultimately contends that the Cahiers was at once a laboratory that experimented with new forms of relational history, and a forum where the very nature of world history was discussed by scholars from around the world (mainly from the West, but also from the East and the South). It suggests that today’s epistemological discussion on global history might benefit from the reflection offered by this now largely forgotten experiment.


2021 ◽  
Vol 03 (05) ◽  
pp. 155-165
Author(s):  
Marwan Mustafa RABAYA

This study addresses the search in an effective and influential historical figures in human nodal, and moral and cultural, and was a prominent and dangerous in world history to attend, and in the three monotheistic religions, is heavenly, which is of centuries, or Alexander the Great of Macedonia, or other, with accounts of various, It is a personal aroused controversy and controversy around it, between historians and commentators, and even the writers of the Arabs, ancient and modern, and appeared for him studies, and numerous articles and scientific books, tried their authors, and worked hard to reach a determined, find out his name, and the reason for his title, and his time, came the study to reveal the depth of the crisis In recording and investigating, with the Arabs and Muslims, in the past and the modern, and to show the extent to which these classifiers deviate from the true goal of the Quran and the Qur’an, and the Holy Qur’an. Q, implanting belief in the souls.


Author(s):  
Eric Hobsbawm

This chapter discusses Marxist historiography in the present times. In the interpretation of the world nowadays, there has been a rise in the so-called anti-Rankean reaction in history, of which Marxism is an important but not always fully acknowledged element. This movement challenged the positivist belief that the objective structure of reality was self-explanatory, and that all that was needed was to apply the methodology of science to it and explain why things happened the way they did. This movement also brought together history with the social sciences, therefore turning it into part of a generalizing discipline capable of explaining transformations of human society in the course of its past. This new perspective on the past is a return to ‘total history’, in which the focus is not merely on the ‘history of everything’ but history as an indivisible web wherein all human activities are interconnected.


Author(s):  
Abdul Rashid

Allah commanded the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) to inform the people in the following way: O' my people, do you see whether I am on the (right) reason from my Lord Who provided me with the best subsistence, and I only intend to reform as far as possible, and whatever my capacities are, they are from Allah upon whom I have trust and revert to Him (for guidance and help.) In this verse, the Qur'an has given the words that Hazrat Shoaib (A.S) used for the reformation of his nation. This also makes obvious the fact that the primary objective of the advent of Messengers has been the reformation of society. This great reformatory work was performed from Hazrat Adam (A.S.) up till Hazrat Isa according to the prevalent situation of their times. But after these holy personalities, their followers tampered with their teachings. Subsequently a personality was sent (by Allah) who in the light of the divine teachings pledged to reform not only his own people but the whole world. This holy man was Hazrat Muhammad (ﷺ) who came to this world fourteen hundred and sixty years ago as Mercy for All the Worlds By virtue of his magnanimity, he turned the darkness of the world into light. He reformed the society, uprooting all the evils of the human society, in such a manner that this society, corrupt for centuries, instantly turned into one that became exemplary for future generations. In other words, he, Muhammad (p.b.u.h) reformed the worst society of the world successfully, effectively and in a very short period of time.


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