scholarly journals Contextualising Numismatic with Religion: Focus on Medieval Northeast India

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Debajit Dutta

Coins are utility object mostly produced by the state for the use of day-do-day transactions, long-distance trade and sometimes as gifts. Hence, numismatic has mainly been used for the study of economic, political and administrative histories. But numismatic can also be used for the reconstruction of the material culture of our glorious past. By a minute study of our ancient and medieval coinage, we can get an impression about contemporary religious and cultural sensibilities of various ethnic societies. By examining the religious epithets and figures of gods and goddesses and other non-anthropogenic signs present on the coins, one can judge the religious affiliation of the state or the king. This article will address the issue of religious symbolism on medieval Northeast Indian dynastic coins like those of Tripura, Koch Behar and Ahom kingdoms and will try to ventilate how these kingdoms used coins to advocate their religio-cultural affinity as well as to maintain their sovereign stature for quite a long period in their respective domains.

This interdisciplinary volume presents nineteen chapters by Roman historians and archaeologists, discussing trade in the Roman Empire in the period c.100 BC to AD 350, and in particular the role of the Roman state, in shaping the institutional framework for trade within and outside the Empire, in taxing that trade, and in intervening in the markets to ensure the supply of particular commodities, especially for the city of Rome and for the army. The chapters in this volume address facets of the subject on the basis of widely different sources of evidence—historical, papyrological, and archaeological—and are grouped in three sections: institutional factors (taxation, legal structures, market regulation, financial institutions); evidence for long-distance trade within the Empire, in wood, stone, glass, and pottery; and trade beyond the frontiers, with the East (as far as China), India, Arabia, and the Red Sea, and the Sahara. Rome’s external trade with realms to the east emerges as being of particular significance to the fisc. But in the eastern part of the Empire at least, the state appears, in collaboration with the elite holders of wealth, to have adapted the mechanisms of taxation, both direct and indirect, to support its need for revenue. On the other hand, the price of that collaboration, which was in effect a fiscal partnership, in slightly different forms in East and West, in the longer term fundamentally changed the political character of the Empire.


Author(s):  
Elena Lombardi

This chapter explores a more concrete and historicized figure of the woman reader. It explores the forces that make her appear and disappear, and surveys the state of knowledge on medieval female literacy, and the documentary evidence on women readers. It investigates typically female modes of reading (such as the educational, the devotional, and the courtly) and the visual models that were available to vernacular authors to forge their imagined textual interlocutor. It shows how the protagonist of this book is the product of two cultural events within the history of reading and the material culture of the book: the raise of literacy among the laity and women in the years under consideration, and a changed scenario insofar as theories and practices of reading are concerned.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Christina Torres-Rouff ◽  
Gonzalo Pimentel ◽  
William J. Pestle ◽  
Mariana Ugarte ◽  
Kelly J. Knudson

Camelid pastoralism, agriculture, sedentism, surplus production, increasing cultural complexity, and interregional interaction during northern Chile's Late Formative period (AD 100–400) are seen in the flow of goods and people over expanses of desert. Consolidating evidence of material culture from these interactions with a bioarchaeological dimension allows us to provide details about individual lives and patterns in the Late Formative more generally. Here, we integrate a variety of skeletal, chemical, and archaeological data to explore the life and death of a small child (Calate-3N.7). By taking a multiscalar approach, we present a narrative that considers not only the varied materiality that accompanies this child but also what the child's life experience was and how this reflects and shapes our understanding of the Late Formative period in northern Chile. This evidence hints at the profound mobility of their youth. The complex mortuary context reflects numerous interactions and long-distance relationships. Ultimately, the evidence speaks to deep social relations between two coastal groups, the Atacameños and Tarapaqueños. Considering this suite of data, we can see a child whose life was spent moving through desert routes and perhaps also glimpse the construction of intercultural identity in the Formative period.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Jessica Z. Metcalfe ◽  
John W. Ives ◽  
Sabrina Shirazi ◽  
Kevin P. Gilmore ◽  
Jennifer Hallson ◽  
...  

The Promontory caves (Utah) and Franktown Cave (Colorado) contain high-fidelity records of short-term occupations by groups with material culture connections to the Subarctic/Northern Plains. This research uses Promontory and Franktown bison dung, hair, hide, and bone collagen to establish local baseline carbon isotopic variability and identify leather from a distant source. The ankle wrap of one Promontory Cave 1 moccasin had a δ13C value that indicates a substantial C4 component to the animal's diet, unlike the C3 diets inferred from 171 other Promontory and northern Utah bison samples. We draw on a unique combination of multitissue isotopic analysis, carbon isoscapes, ancient DNA (species and sex identification), tissue turnover rates, archaeological contexts, and bison ecology to show that the high δ13C value was not likely a result of local plant consumption, bison mobility, or trade. Instead, the bison hide was likely acquired via long-distance travel to/from an area of abundant C4 grasses far to the south or east. Expansive landscape knowledge gained through long-distance associations would have allowed Promontory caves inhabitants to make well-informed decisions about directions and routes of movement for a territorial shift, which seems to have occurred in the late thirteenth century.


1973 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. S. O'Fahey

The institutions of slavery, slave raiding and the slave trade were fundamental in the rise and expansion of the Keira Sultanate of Dār Fūr. The development of a long-distance trade in slaves may be due to immigrants from the Nile, who probably provided the impetus to state formation. This process may be remembered in the ‘Wise Stranger’ traditions current in the area. The slave raid or ghazwa, penetrating into the Baḥr al-Ghazāl and what is now the Central African Republic, marked the triumph of Sudanic state organization over the acephalous societies to the south.The slaves, who were carefully classified, were not only exported to Egypt and North Africa, but also served the sultans and the title-holding elite as soldiers, labourers and bureaucrats. In the latter role, the slaves began to encroach on the power of traditional ruling groups within the state; the conflict between the slave bureaucrats and the traditional ruling elite lasted until the end of the first Keira Sultanate in 1874.


Author(s):  
Yuri P. Perevedentsev ◽  
Konstantin M. Shantalinskii ◽  
Boris G. Sherstukov ◽  
Alexander A. Nikolaev

Long-term changes in air temperature on the territory of the Republic of Tatarstan in the 20th–21st centuries are considered. The periods of unambiguous changes in the surface air temperature are determined. It is established that the average winter temperature from the 1970s to 2017, increased in the Kazan region by more than 3 °C and the average summer temperature increased by about 2 °C over the same period. The contribution of global scale processes to the variability of the temperature of the Kazan region is shown: it was 37 % in winter, 23 % in summer. The correlation analysis of the anomalies of average annual air temperature in Kazan and the series of air temperature anomalies in each node over the continents, as well as the ocean surface temperature in each coordinate node on Earth for 1880 –2017, was performed. Long-distance communications were detected in the temperature field between Kazan and remote regions of the Earth. It is noted that long-period climate fluctuations in Kazan occur synchronously with fluctuations in the high latitudes of Asia and North America, with fluctuations in ocean surface temperature in the Arctic ocean, with fluctuations in air temperature in the Far East, and with fluctuations in ocean surface temperature in the Southern hemisphere in the Indian and Pacific oceans, as well as air temperature in southern Australia. It is suggested that there is a global mechanism that regulates long-term climate fluctuations throughout the Earth in the considered interval of 200 years of observations. According to the CMIP5 project, climatic scenarios were built for Kazan until the end of the 21st century.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Søren Mentz

Michael Pearson has argued that “rights for revenue” was an important element in the European way of organizing long-distance trade in the early modern period. The state provided indigenous merchant groups with commercial privileges and allowed them to influence political affairs. In return, the state received a part of the economic surplus. The East India Company and the British state shared such a relationship. However, as this article demonstrates, the East India Company was not an impersonal entity. It consisted of many layers of private entrepreneurs, who pursued their own private interests sheltered by the Company’s privileged position. One such group was the Company servants in Asia. The French conquest of Madras in 1746 and the following period of British sub-imperialism in India demonstrate that the state had traded off too many rights. Through the business papers of Willian Monson, a senior Company servant in Madras, the historian can describe the fall of Madras as a consequence of deteriorating relationships between private interests within the Company structure. Directors, shareholders, Company servants and private merchants in India fell out with each other. In this situation, the British state found it difficult to intervene.


2019 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 184-202
Author(s):  
Noémi Beljak Pažinová ◽  
Tatiana Daráková

The article focuses on the current state of research of the first Neolithic culture in Slovakia.So far around 70 sites are known from Slovakia dated to the Early Linear Pottery Culture and the Early Eastern Linear Pottery Culture. Most of the sites are known only from surface collections, and in only four cases have dwellings been documented. Settlement features/pits have been discovered at around half the sites. Finally, we know graves from only four (and possibly five) sites. In the article we deal also with the elaboration of the Early LPC/ELPC material culture. We discuss pottery from the point of view of typology and decoration and other types of findings, such as chipped stone industry, ground and polished stones, small clay artefacts, daub, animal bones etc., are not omitted either. The goal is to evaluate the research possibilities of the Early LPC/ELPC in Slovakia.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roluahpuia

Hydropower is now emerging as an important economic driver in Northeast India. A rapid drive for damming the rivers of the region is underway which is speeding up at a rapid pace after the post-reform period in particular. This article uses the framework of securitisation to analyse the broader development politics in Northeast India. It does so by taking the case of hydropower projects with a specific focus on Tipaimukh Dam in Manipur. Developmental efforts, the article argues, in the Northeast are embedded within the securitised discourse exacerbating conflicts between the state and the people over rights and resources. This article will emphasise on the continuing imposition of securitised discourse in the region and explicates the people’s response to it.


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