Rural Life in Medieval Bamiyan - Arezou Azad скачать в хорошем качестве

Rural Life in Medieval Bamiyan - Arezou Azad

The wellbeing of medieval people depended almost exclusively on land and what agriculture allowed people to extract from it. And yet, scholarship on medieval societies, especially those in the Middle East and Asia, has focussed almost exclusively on a sliver of medieval society, namely the élite: the courts of caliphs and sultans and their retinue. In this webinar, we will explore the realities of rural life in medieval Afghanistan - how land was managed, who owned it, and how the government taxed it. We will consider whether peasants were as voiceless, and landlords as exploitative, as one might imagine. We draw our conclusions based on cutting-edge research that is being carried out by Oxford’s Invisible East programme on new documents that have emerged from Afghanistan during the past decade, most of which remain unpublished and are currently being prepared for publication. The Afghanistan documents add an eastern perspective to the already existing research on contemporaneous 12th-century documents from Egypt known as the Cairo Geniza. They bring to life a part of our human history that had previously been a "black hole," and as such, they enrich our knowledge of medieval societies in general, and of Afghanistan, specifically, when it was a prosperous and influential region on the world stage.