Word: samarkand
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...expeditionary force of the Chinese Tang Dynasty. Historians suggest that this decisive battle solidified Central Asia within the orbit of the Muslim cultural world rather than that of China. It also marked an epochal moment in human history: as the story goes, war prisoners taken to the city of Samarkand were compelled to set up a mill to produce a key Chinese invention: paper. That product would later spread through Muslim lands and eventually to Europe. (See pictures of the ouster of the Kyrgyz government...
...claims to have been born, firstly, as a mare near the Caspian Sea in 1125 B.C. In A.D. 1402, he says, he was reincarnated as a peddler in Samarkand and, half a millennium later, after stints as a firewood collector and an "innkeeper in an unknown land," he says he was born the eldest son of a farmer in Gunsan, present day South Korea, in 1933. Walking home from school one day in that "obscure corner of the world" - then like the rest of the country under Japanese colonial occupation, but now a drab port with an American Air Force...
...inlaid with mother-of-pearl, tortoiseshell, ebony and ivory, these were made for Sultan Murad III's pavilion in the harem area of the Topkapi Palace. A synthesis of art and architecture dates to the Timurid-Turkmen period (1370-1506). Timur, known in the West as Tamerlane, came from Samarkand, Uzbekistan, and went on to conquer near Eastern and Central Asian areas. The earliest known architectural scroll from the period "reflects the application of geometry in the Islamic tradition," according to "Turks" catalog editor David J. Roxburgh, a Harvard professor of history of art and architecture. The Ottomans took over...
...exhibition is designed to take viewers on a virtual journey along the Silk Road. It begins in the ancient Sogdian capital of Samarkand in present-day Uzbekistan?one of the last of Alexander the Great's conquests before he went south to India?and moves east through the now vanished western kingdoms of Khotan, Kroraina and Miran before ending in China. Over the course of this journey eastward, remarkably well preserved 1,000-year-old manuscripts and icons reveal the growth and evolution of the Silk Road's most illustrious commodity: Buddhism. The merging and morphing of regional beliefs produced...
...history of man can be read as a litany of metropolises risen and fallen. The first major clusters of wealth, such as Babylon, Bactria, Nineveh, Persepolis, Samarkand and Thebes, were mostly located around the Nile, Euphrates and Tigris rivers and along the Silk Road. With the rise of the seafaring Phoenician trading empire, prosperity and power shifted toward the Mediterranean Sea. At different times, this led to the emergence of Alexandria, Athens, Carthage, Constantinople, Rome and Tyre. And in the 15th century, it culminated in the first centers of capitalism: the Italian trading cities of Florence, Genoa, Pisa and Venice...