The Ghaznavid Empire of India

2021 ◽  
pp. 001946462110411
Author(s):  
Ali Anooshahr

Almost all of our information on the Ghaznavids comes from two contemporary chronicles (one in Persian and one in Arabic) and a divan (poetic anthology) from the early eleventh century. The Arabic text is the Tarikh-i Yamini written by Abu Nasr al-ʻUtbi, and the Persian chronicle is the Zayn al-Akhbar by Gardizi. Virtually, all subsequent Persian chroniclers drew on the later Persian translation of the Yamini. After the Mughal period, a few used Gardizi as well. In the nineteenth century, H. M. Elliot translated parts of the Persian translation of ʻUtbi into English, which popularised that particular version of events in modern scholarship. This uncritical overreliance on a single source has led to perhaps the greatest misunderstanding of medieval Indian history. I will argue that the version of the Ghaznavid campaigns in ʻUtbi was meant strictly for the court of the ‘Abbasid caliph in Baghdad where a sufficiently learned audience could actually be expected to understand the very difficult Arabic of the text. The Yamini did not simply embellish reality but was actually trying to create a narrative that was in contradiction to and even independent of reality. It was part of a campaign of misinformation to hide the fact that the Ghaznavids were creating an Indian empire both as a network of tributary kings and as an open trade zone ruled by a king of kings symbolised by the elephant.

2021 ◽  
pp. 096777202110010
Author(s):  
Peter J Selley

Thomas Shapter spent almost all his working life in Exeter, Devon. He lived to be 93 years old. He is remembered primarily for his book describing the 1832 epidemic of cholera in Exeter in which 402 people died.


1947 ◽  
Vol 37 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 70-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Hussey

John Mauropous, an eleventh-century Metropolitan of Euchaïta, has long been commemorated in the service books of the Orthodox Church. The Synaxarion for the Office of Orthros on 30th January, the day dedicated to the Three Fathers, St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian, and St. John Chrysostom, tells how the festival was instituted by Mauropous and describes him as ‘the well-known John, a man of great repute and well-versed in the learning of the Hellenes, as his writings show, and moreover one who has attained to the highest virtue’. In western Europe something was known of him certainly as early as the end of the sixteenth century; his iambic poems were published for the first time by an Englishman in 1610, and his ‘Vita S. Dorothei’ in the Acta Sanctorum in 1695. But it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that scholars were really able to form some idea of the character and achievement of this Metropolitan of Euchaïta. Particularly important were two publications: Sathas' edition in 1876 of Michael Psellus' oration on John, and Paul de Lagarde's edition in 1882 of some of John's own writings. This last contained not only the works already printed, but a number of hitherto unpublished sermons and letters, together with the constitution of the Faculty of Law in the University of Constantinople, and a short introduction containing part of an etymological poem. But there remained, and still remains, one significant omission: John's canons have been almost consistently neglected.


2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shohei Sato

AbstractThis article re-examines our understanding of modern sport. Today, various physical cultures across the world are practised under the name of sport. Almost all of these sports originated in the West and expanded to the rest of the world. However, the history of judo confounds the diffusionist model. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a Japanese educationalist amalgamated different martial arts and established judo not as a sport but as ‘a way of life’. Today it is practised globally as an Olympic sport. Focusing on the changes in its rules during this period, this article demonstrates that the globalization of judo was accompanied by a constant evolution of its character. The overall ‘sportification’ of judo took place not as a diffusion but as a convergence – a point that is pertinent to the understanding of the global sportification of physical cultures, and also the standardization of cultures in modern times.


PMLA ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 266-282
Author(s):  
David H. Stewart

One of the most impressive features of Anna Karenina is the way in which Tolstoy draws the reader's imagination beyond the literal level of the narrative into generalizations that seem mythical in a manner difficult to articulate. With Dostoevsky or Melville, one sees immediately a propensity for exploiting the symbolic value of things. With Tolstoy, things try, as it were, to resist conversion: they strive to maintain their “thingness” as empirical entities. A character in Dostoevsky is usually only half man; the other half is Christ or Satan. Moby Dick is obviously only half whale; the other half is Evil or some principle of Nature. But Anna Karenina is emphatically Anna Karenina. Like almost all of Tolstoy's characters, she has a proficiency in the husbandry of identity; she jealously hoards her own unique reality, so that it becomes difficult to say of her that she is a “type” of nineteenth-century Russian lady or a “symbol” of modern woman or an “archetypical” Eve or Lilith.


2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 339-371 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Gould

Notwithstanding its value as the earliest extant New Persian treatment of the art of rhetoric, Rādūyānī's Interpreter of Rhetoric (Tarjumān al-Balāgha) has yet to be read from the vantage point of comparative poetics. Composed in the Ferghana region of modern Central Asia between the end of the eleventh century and the beginning of the twelfth century, Rādūyānī's vernacularization of classical Arabic norms inaugurated literary theory in the New Persian language. I argue here that Rādūyānī's vernacularization is most consequential with respect to its transformation of the classical Arabic tropes of metaphor (istiʿāra) and comparison (tashbīh) to suit the new exigencies of a New Persian literary culture. In reversing the relation between metaphor and comparison enshrined in Arabic aesthetics, Rādūyānī concretized the Persian contribution to the global study of literary form.


1998 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 93-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quentin Gausset

Traditional accounts of the nineteenth-century Fulbe conquest in northern Cameroon tell roughly the same story: following the example of Usman Dan Fodio in Nigeria, the Fulbe of Cameroon organized in the beginning of the nineteenth century a “jihad” or a “holy war” against the local pagan populations to convert them to Islam and create an Islamic state. The divisions among the local populations and the military superiority of the Fulbe allowed them to conquer almost all northern Cameroon. They forced those who submitted to give an annual tribute of goods and servants, and they raided the other groups. In these traditional accounts the Fulbe are presented as unchallenged masters, while the local populations are depicted as slaves who were powerless over their fate; their role in the conquest of the region and in the administration of the new political order is supposed to have been insignificant.I will show that, on the contrary, in the area of Banyo the Wawa and Bute played a crucial role in the conquest of the sultanate and in its administration. I will then re-examine the cliche that all members of the local populations were the slaves of the Fulbe by distinguishing the fate of the Wawa and Bute on one side from that of the Kwanja and Mambila on the other, and by showing the importance of the Fulbe's identity in shaping the definition of slavery. Finally I will argue that, if the historical accounts found in the scientific literature invariably insist on Fulbe hegemony and minimize the role played by the local populations, it is because those accounts are often based on Fulbe traditions, and because these traditions are remodeled by the Fulbe in order to correspond to their discourse on identity.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 158-159
Author(s):  
Thomas E. Cone

In the early years of the nineteenth century William Perry's The Only Sure Guide to the English Tongue, published by Isaiah Thomas, Jr., was the most widely used speller and reader in New England schools (Fig. 1). The two things in Perry's book that were said to have most impressed those who learned to spell and read from it were the frontispiece (Fig. 2) and the collection of fables. The frontispiece shows a tree of learning growing in a schoolyard, and groups of boys playing in its shadow. A ladder reaches into the branches and several boys with open books in their hands are climbing up the ladder into branches of the tree. The illustrated fables found toward the end of Perry's book were studied and memorized by almost all New England school children a century and a half ago. Perry's choice of fables, one of which will be published each month, will offer an excellent view of the kind of moral instruction our children were once taught.1


2020 ◽  
pp. 38-65
Author(s):  
Alberto Tiburcio

This chapter presents the history of a cycle of theological polemics of which Jadid al-Islam’s work was the last link. This cycle starts in Mughal India with the work of the Jesuit missionary Jerome Xavier, followed by responses in Iran and counter-responses in Rome, under the auspices of the missionary congregation of Propaganda Fide. The chapter also presents the history of biblical translation projects in Arabic and Persian, which were directly linked to these polemics, including Jadid al-Islam’s own biblical Persian translation and commentary. A general overview about other polemical works in Iran into the nineteenth century is also provided.


Traditio ◽  
1965 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 445-449
Author(s):  
Francis Newton

A Venice manuscript of the eleventh century (Marcianus Z. L. 497), containing a handbook of the liberal arts, deserves the attention of students of medieval education, for it is connected with a man who was considered one of the most learned scholars of his day. The man is Lawrence of Amalfi. Information on the life of this scholar is meager, but we have glimpses of his literary activity as a monk of Monte Cassino, through writings of his which were preserved in the abbey; much later, after his elevation to the archbishopric of Amalfi and his subsequent exile, we find him taking refuge in Florence, where he wrote a life of a local saint; still later, we hear of him in Rome, teaching the boy Hildebrand, who was to become pope as Gregory VII; and we see him at the close of his life in affectionate friendship with Odilo of Cluny. Yet the renown of the archbishop suffered an eclipse within a century of his death. At Monte Cassino, almost all knowledge of Lawrence's subsequent history (after his leaving the monastery) was lost, and those elsewhere who recorded the few facts known about the archbishop of Amalfi did not connect him with the ancient monastery from which he came. In modern scholarship, Lawrence the monk and Lawrence the archbishop appeared as two distinct figures. Therefore, until Professor Walther Holtzmann brought together the scattered references and, through stylistic analysis, identified the monk of Monte Cassino with the archbishop of Amalfi, even the main outline of the scholarly churchman's career was obscure.


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