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Empires of the Silk Roadby: Christopher I. Beckworth
Princeton NJ:
Princeton University Press 2009, $16.95, Hardbound
ISBN: 978-0-891-15034-5
Reviewed by: Jacqueline M. Newman
Summer Volume: 2019 Issue: 26(2) page(s): 26
This 476-page
2009 ‘PROSE’
winner award
for excellence in
World History and
Biography details
the history of
Central Eurasia
from ancient times
to very recent
ones. “Scholarly, thoughtful, and in some places turning
conventional wisdom on its head,” says Professor VH
Mair of the University of Pennsylvania, it does so making
Central Eurasia the central part of human history, not
the backwater as it is usually portrayed.
Others agree with this professor from Pennsylvania’s
Indiana University whose expertise is Central Eurasian
studies. An earlier volume titled The Tibetan Empire in
Central Asia does set the stage for this book where the
author provides new ideas and information that Central
Eurasians are not and were not predatory raiders but
simply traders along the Silk Road. He says they led
the world economically and revolutionized Eurasian
civilization in their time. This book tells about the Sythians, Atilla the Hun, the
Turks, and Tibetans; Mongols, too who led their world
economically, scientifically, and artistically. It puts
them in a historical framework and provides new
understandings about them and how they revolutionized
Eurasian civilizations. It is from the Bronze Age to the
present. |
