Trade and traders: An exploration into trading communities and their activities in early medieval Odisha

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-145
Author(s):  
Bhairabi Prasad Sahu
Keyword(s):  
Social Competence ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Medieval India ◽  
Marketable Surplus

The article makes an effort to locate the emergence of merchant groups in the context of agrarian growth, availability of a marketable surplus, the rise of different types of exchange centres and political enterprises, which must have created their own requirements and facilitated the movement of goods and commodities. It also tries to factor in the transport and communication routes because coastal Odisha had a large hinterland moving up to the Chhattisgarh plains, as also access to southern Bengal and Jharkhand and beyond through the eastern littoral, especially Dandabhukti, among other routes. The rise of transregional states under the Somavaṁśīs and Later Eastern Gangas must have widened the orbit of activity for the regional mercantile groups. Practices and customs followed by the trading communities and their social competence are also investigated. The idea is to situate the developments in the region in the larger context of the issues and debates in the field of ancient and early medieval India. This essay is largely based on inscriptional sources and charts developments up to the fifteenth century.

scholarly journals China in medieval Indian imagination: “China”-inspired images in medieval South Asia

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Jinah Kim
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Cultural Exchanges ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Physical Presence ◽  
Different Types ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Chinese Buddhists ◽  
Medieval India ◽  
The Impact ◽  
India And China

Abstract Cross-cultural exchanges between India and China during the first millennium are often understood through a Buddhist lens; by investigating the impact of Indian Buddhist sources, be they literary, doctrinal, or artistic, to receiving Chinese communities. In these cultural transactions, instigated by traveling pilgrim-monks and enacted by imperial power players in China, India emerges as a remote, idealized, and perhaps “hollow” center. Imagined or real, the importance of images of India in medieval Chinese Buddhist landscape has been established beyond doubt. What seems to be missing in this unidirectional looking is the impact of these cultural communications in India. What were the Indian responses to Chinese Buddhists' demands and their physical presence? How was China imagined and translated in medieval India? This essay proposes to locate the activities of Chinese monks in India and the iconographies of China-inspired Indian Buddhist images within the larger historical context of shifting cultural and political geography of the medieval Buddhist world. By exploring different types of evidence from borderlands, vis-à-vis the monolithic concepts of China and India, the essay also complicates the China–India studies' comparative model.

scholarly journals Asentamientos fortificados en el Rif Oriental (siglos VIII-XV). Nuevos datos sobre Ghassasa y Tazouda (Nador, Marruecos)

X ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bilal Sarr ◽  
Luca Mattei ◽  
Yaiza Hernández Casas
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Original Research ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
North African ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Trade Routes ◽  
New Information ◽  
Medieval Pottery ◽  
Written Sources

Fortified settlements in Eastern Rif (eighth-fifteenth centuries): new data on Ghassasa and Tazouda (Nador, Morocco)The present paper attempts to aproximate to the archaeological research of two of the most relevants fortified settlements of the Medieval Rif (north of Morocco), Ghassasa and Tazouda. Reviewing the written sources –Ibn Ḥawqal, al-Bakrī, al-Idrīsī, Ibn Ḥayyān, al-Bādisī, etc.– and comparing the data they offer with the archaeological records of surface, we report here the recent hypothesis deduced from the analysis of their emerging structures and pottery, trying to trace some new information of the fortification process in the Rif since Early Medieval centuries  to the fifteenth century and to detect the development of the interrelations and influences by the commercial exchanges between twice Mediterranean coasts: North African and al-Andalus. So, we offer the planimetry of both settlements, Ghassasa and Tazouda, which haven´t been documented before, and also some typologies of Magrib’s medieval pottery founded there, contributing with an original research to the study of medieval urbanism in Magrib al-Aqṣā and the role that they take on the trade routes existing between Bilād al-Sūdān, to Siŷilmāsa, and al-Andalus.

scholarly journals El ḥiṣn de Almansa (Albacete): fortificaciones y poblamiento

X ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro Jiménez Castillo ◽  
José Luis Simón García
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Central Element ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Don Juan ◽  
Relevant Research ◽  
Administrative District ◽  
Field Surveys ◽  
Good State ◽  
Different Types

The ḥiṣn Almansa: fortifications and settlementsBecause of its spectacular location and its good state of conservation, the image of the castle of Almansa has been widely reproduced in publications of informative and even tourist purpose. The building is the result of construction, remodeling, plundering, demolition, blasting and restoration processes, carried out over more than eight centuries, although the current aspect is essentially that of the castle remodeled by Don Juan Pacheco, Marquis of Villena, in the fifteenth century, that camouflage or suppress those made previously, whether taifa, almohad or feudal. In this paper we are interested in the castle (ḥiṣn) of Almansa in Islamic times, but not strictly from the architectural point of view but its history as a central element that organized an administrative district or iqlīm. In this sense, Almansa offers very relevant research possibilities, because we know exactly the delimitation of its district in almohad times thanks to the Castilian documentation after the conquest, we have some data from the Arabic texts and, above all, we have of a very detailed archaeological information from intensive field surveys. Therefore, we will study the different types of castral buildings, fortresses and towers, as well as settlements –farmhouses, hamlets and shelters– in order to get information about the evolution of the modes of occupation and exploitation of the territory between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, which will be modified throughout the feudal period, becoming a rare case in the scientific literature to date.

Paolino da Venezia, Tractatus de Ludo Scachorum. A cura di Roberto Pesce. Collana Medioevo e Rinascimento, Testi. Venice: Centro di Studi Medioevali e Rinascimentali “E. A. Cicogna”, 2018, 179 pp., 51 b/w. ill.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 527-528
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Alfonso X ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Medieval India ◽  
Central Form ◽  
The Middle Ages

Recent scholarship has increasingly paid more attention to the game of chess as a central form of entertainment combined with a strong didactic component. Chess has a very long history, probably dating back to early medieval India, and was passed on to the Arabs and from them to the Europeans. Both kings such as Alfonso X el Sabio and theologians such as the Dominican Jacopo da Cessole were deeply involved in reflecting on this game and explaining it to their audiences, as is well documented in the volume Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age, ed. Daniel E. O’Sullivan (2012). Shortly after 1321, the Venetian Paolino da Venezia, papal penitentiary and apostolic nuncio, composed his own treatise on chess, his Tractatus de Ludo Scachorum, which Roberto Pesce here introduces, edits, and translates into modern Italian in an exemplary fashion.

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