I flipped through a book on ancient ports of Maharashtra recently, hoping it would be useful for my work. The introduction begins "History has yet to conclusively answer the question of the origins of the adventurous community of the Phoenicians. How the first Ayyar Inca crossed the eighteen thousand kilometers of ocean to reach the western coast of America is still a puzzle of maritime history. The Indians seem to have commanded the sea-routes of the world in the fourth millenium BC. The sun-worshipers of India would seem to have used Egypt as a base with On, Anu, or Heliopolis, the city of the sun, having been their capital in predynastic times. [etc]"

Ah, the distinct joys of south Asian studies...

Galley production schedule came yesterday. First round starts a week from Monday! I may indeed have a proper book by ASA in late November. Huzzah, etc.

Maybe this question can go here? I am about to begin a masters program in cultural heritage... any book recommendations? I'll be researching the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and the Levant regions throughout different periods, mainly medieval, so suggestions for books or articles on cultural heritage in general or the history of these regions, etc. would be helpful.

Thanks!!

What effect did Italian unification have on Italy's very regionalized cuisine?

Have there been significant (yet failed) pushes to break up states after their official formation similar to the current movement in California?

What are your favorite "popular" history books or movies?

Is Claudius considered a decent Roman Emperor?

If not, why?

I have followed Tom Holland for sometime now, the argument he presents regarding the beginings of early Islam. Yesterday though, I came across something rather interesting in Cambridge History of Islam Volume 1. Concretely, the conclusion of Chapter titled Rise of Islam 600 - 705 reads (It is LONG, I am sorry.):

*Given the extraordinarily modest cultural and political traditions generally associated with western Arabia in Late Antiquity, how is it that Muhammad and the Arab caliphs and commanders who immediately succeeded him had both the vision and perspicacity to forge a new religio political tradition that would survive in post conquest Syria and Iraq? Sophisticated religious traditions generally emerge in societies with relatively high levels of social differentiation; the rule of history calls for the assimilation of conquering pastoral and semi pastoral tribesmen, along with their political and cultural traditions, into the more developed, sedentary culture so conquered, be it fifth century Roman Italy or twelfth century Saljuq Iraq. Why were seventh century Arabs so different? These questions can be answered in a variety of ways, but it may be useful to contrast two of them.

The first, here put in its most extreme form, is to argue that the Hijaz had nothing to do with earliest Islam. Because religious traditions have a habit of misrepresenting their origins, and because we lack corroborating evidence that is contemporaneous to the crucial events of the seventh century, there is no reason to suppose that everything happened as the Islamic tradition tells us it happened. One may accordingly assert that Muhammad did not exist, that the conquests that is, the Hijazı Arabs’ violent seizure of power from the Byzantines (and Sasanians) did not take place, and that the Quran, with all of its debts to Judaism and Christianity, was compiled at least a century (and perhaps two centuries) later. (Islamic history would thus be comparable to Israelite history, its scripture, conquest and early polity as enigmatic as those ascribed to Moses and David.) There being no historical basis for early Islamic narratives, the problematic Hijazı context of earliest Islam is thus solved at a stroke: Islam’s origins lie not in Arabia, but in the Late Antique world of the eighth and ninth century Fertile Crescent, in the religious, ethnic and linguis tic matrix that produced comparable forms of monotheism, such as, especially, rabbinic Judaism. According to this line of argument, Arabian origins reflect not historical reality, but an invented tradition.

Now, it can hardly be doubted that the early Islamic historiographic tradition was at once deeply conditioned by polemical assertions regarding identity, origin and social status, and preserves only very incompletely any authentic material from the seventh century. But if it is one thing to envision the growth of the Islamic tradition as part of a much broader process, in which monotheist identity of several varieties took shape, it is altogether something else to reject in its entirety the tradition’s claim for Arabian origins. In fact, revisionism of this sort can readily be blunted by adducing a variety of seventh century evidence. The fact is that Christian and Jewish sources con firm that Muhammad did exist and did make prophetic claims, that some kind of violent political change effected by monotheist tribesmen soldiers from Arabia did occur, and that, at least in some fragmentary form, some kind of an Islamic scripture can be dated to the seventh century. Non Islamic and material evidence is far too sketchy to produce a coherent account of Islam’s beginnings, but it securely locates those beginnings in events that are familiar to us from the Islamic tradition itself. In any case, if one deprives the conquests of the great motive force of Muhammad’s revelations and politics, one makes them altogether harder to understand.

One solution to the problem of the Hijaz’s cultural insularity is thus to pull Islamic origins entirely out of Arabia and into the Late Antique Fertile Crescent of the eighth and ninth centuries. The second, which is more promising, is to pull Late Antiquity into the seventh century Hijaz. For the more evidence we have that it was open to the political, cultural and religious currents of Late Antiquity, the easier it is for us to understand not merely the Qurpan that ‘text without a context’ but also early Islam more generally. There is disappointingly little of it that we can securely date to the sixth and early seventh centuries, however. (Arguments for Christian, Jewish or Manichaean influence upon Muhammad and his contemporaries typically adduce the biographical and historical tradition, especially Prophetic sıra, which generally dates from eighth and ninth century Iraq; until the genesis and transmission of this tradition are understood more fully, evidence such as this is far from clinching.) The political and cultural circumstances for Arabian archaeology are admittedly very unfavourable, but, such as the archaeology is, it yields virtually no sure evidence for the extension of political and cultural influences from the Late Antique heartland into the sixth and seventh century Hijaz; this contrasts with earlier periods and other regions of Arabia, particularly the south and the east, which, according to the material and historical record, were frequently brought into the orbit of the Byzantine and Sasanian empires. To assemble the thin evidence for local monotheisms, we must fall back upon the incidental references in the slim non Islamic tradition, and, as we have already seen, the testimony of the one text that was generated in the seventh century Hijaz the Quran.

In the present state of our knowledge, the most we can do is propose hypotheses that accommodate the available evidence according to models appropriate to the Late Antique world in which early Muslims evolved. Arabia was moving perhaps sluggishly towards monotheism, and Muhammad seems to have greatly accelerated this process. Beyond adducing the force of his personality, political acuity and the victories of the early Medinan period, explaining why his vision of reform and political action should have been so successful is very difficult, but it may be because western Arabia lay outside the dense network of Christian and Jewish belief and institutions that Muhammad was free to innovate in the long abandoned style of a Hebrew prophet, legislating, leading and warring, and that this style had such appeal; had he been born and raised in Syria, one might expect a very different career, perhaps as a more typical (but equally charismatic) holy man. What is clearer is that he articulated a religious vision that was at once reassuringly familiar and passionately revolutionary and this, in a distinctively Arabian idiom. Thus paganism is repudiated, but the pagan sanctuary of Mecca is reinter preted as Abrahamic and integrated into the new dispensation; similarly, the Arabic Qurpan rejects the jahiliyya ethos, but draws upon registers of orality that had been closely associated with the very kinship patterns that were at the heart of jahilı paganism. While the universality of Islam took some time to develop, the special role of the Arabs and their traditions of kinship had to have a place from the start. Indeed, from as early as we can trace things, we know that the central institution of rule (the caliphate) was dominated by Arabs, while, at least in theory, the only institution of incorporation (conversion) was effected through the adoption of Arab tribal lineage.

Whatever their Hijazı origins, Arab identity and the nascent religious tradition were subsequently conditioned by patterns of post conquest settle ment and assimilation. There is no reason to doubt that the garrisons founded apart from or adjacent to pre Islamic settlements were intended at least in part to insulate Arab Muslims from non Arab non Muslims; but they inevitably attracted and generated trade and exchange, and, with it, the influx of non Arabs. What appears to have been an initial experiment, in which an ethnic and religious elite would rule at arm’s length, was overtaken by the realities of settlement. From this perspective, the late seventh century programme of Arabisation marks a transitional phase between the relative insularity of the first generations, born and bred in Arabia and among the Arabs of Syria, and the clear universalism and cosmopolitanism of the Iraqi based caliphate of the qAbbasid period. In the meantime Muslims developed their religious tradition in response to, and in interaction with, their fellow monotheists, even if the early Islamic tradition is disappointingly taciturn about the world in which these interactions took place. Muslims having been small minorities through out the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, classical Islam that is, the religious and political system that crystallised during the ninth century owes innumerable debts to the prevailing, majority cultures of the day, which were evolving and transforming as well, at least sometimes in response to Islam. Disputation and controversy began very early on, but much of classical tradition was forged in multi ethnic Iraq and the Islamic east. As Muslim rulers left Arabia and Arabian Syria, Islamic society and belief were changing.*

Hey Mesoamerican specialists! I need to find some images of Toltec art. Is there a catalogue some where?

I just got my PhD in historology from Hollywood Upstairs Historically School. Did I pay too much? It was $39.95 with free shipping on the diploma.

Hector Fleischmann and his attempts to rehabilitate Fouquier-Tinville are giving me life right now.

I'm reading his commentary on Fouquier's defense pamphlets published before his trial. "It's the defense of a slightly harsh attorney". Slightly harsh!

What is the most successful Roman leader

After reading Dougal Dixon's "Man After Man" I began to wonder about future historians studying our era. I feel like we've created a massive amount of data in a multitude of mediums, is there a point in the future where they wouldn't know about every tiny fact about our day to day lives?

Is the modern Pepys a LiveJournal account that someone but on a disc and buried in their homemade time capsule?

Mike Duncan is starting his series on the French revolution!

http://www.revolutionspodcast.com/

Why was HE ammunition for the 6-pdr not distributed to British tank units? Or was it.......