|
While European intellectual, cultural, and commercial life stagnated during the Middle Ages, Asia flourished as the wellspring of science, philosophy, and religion, and as the world's epicenter of commerce and diplomacy. Common cultural and intellectual traditions linked its great civilizations throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, India, Southeast Asia, and China. Thousands of monks, warriors, scholars, and merchants traveled its caravan routes and seaways. Their works, clashes, studies, and exchanges created a literate, elegant, glittering world -- the stuff of legend in Europe, the true riches of the East.
Stewart Gordon has examined original texts in science and history, philosophy and courtly culture in order to understand and re-create the vast network of international, interethnic, and intercontinental activity that made Asia the center of the world. He brings to life this world of lively exchange and travel by recounting the fascinating stories of an array of explorers and travelers -- an eighth-century Chinese Buddhist monk who learned Sanskrit in India, an ambassador from Baghdad who traveled to the Ukraine to recruit a Bulghar king, a Tunisian Jew who set up shop in India and traded spices to the Middle East, a Sunni Islamic scholar who logged over 75,000 miles traveling to Spain and China then back again.
It's a compelling new way to look at Asia's golden age, and it's a rich story that emerges -- a unique and revealing journey into a time when Asia was the world.
Stewart Gordon is a Senior Research Scholar for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan and is the author of three books on Asia. He speaks frequently on the Asian world at seminars, academic conferences, and public lectures, and has been an advisor for two History Channel documentaries, one on the Mughal Empire and one on Marco Polo and Kubla Khan.
|
