What is the line between the ancient and medieval worlds? 330? 476? 800? Most historians acknowledge that these are arbitrary distinctions, but they remain nevertheless, taking on lives of their own. Alex Feldman challenging us to see them as the same world, except for the imposition of a given monotheism.
In this process, he studies top-down, monotheistic conversions in Western Eurasia and their respective mythologisations, preserved both textually and archaeologically, serving as the foundation of recognisable state-formation.
Applying this idea to Byzantium’s policies around the Black and Caspian Seas, he reveals how what we today call the ‘Migration-Age’ continued perpetually up to the Mongolian invasions and perhaps later. This book enhances our understanding, not only of Western history, but presents it in the context of global monotheisation.
Author(s): Alex M. Feldman
Series: Edinburgh Byzantine Studies
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 312
City: Edinburgh
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Note on Transcription and Transliteration
A Proposition
1 The Monotheisation of Khazaria
The Earliest Textual Sources on Khazaria
The Advent of Khazarian Judaism
Monotheisation and Sedentarisation in Khazaria
Approximate Conclusions
2 A Commonwealth Inchoate: Byzantium and Pontic-Caspian Eurasia in the Tenth Century
Khazaria’s Decline and Disappearance
Reinterpreting Northern Peoples in the DAI
3 Case Studies of Monotheisation in Eighth- to-Thirteenth-Century Pontic-Caspian Eurasia
Volga Bulgaria
Magyars, Pečenegs and Cumans
Rus’: Byzantine Christianisation
4 Monotheisation in Metal
Empires of Faith and their Finances
Coinage and ‘Commonwealth’ (Eighth to Thirteenth Century): the Ummah and the Oikoumene
A Reassessment of Civilisation in Pontic-Caspian Eurasia
Monotheisation Revisited
Periodisation and Civilisation
Appendices
Appendix 1 Gog and Magog’s Association with Khazaria
Appendix 2 Steppe Nomadism and Gumil.v’s Eurasian Ideology
Appendix 3 The Khazar-Ashkenazi Descent Theory
Bibliography
Primary Source
Secondary and Archaeological Literature
Index
