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The Silk Road: A New History . By Valerie Hansen . New York : Oxford University Press , USA, 2012. Pp. 320. ISBN 10: 0195159314 ; ISBN 13: 978-0195159318 .
Book Reviews
In this book the author explores several important cities along the Silk Road, which traversed Central Asia and China, and surveys their history during the first millennium of the Common Era. A distinctive feature of this book is that, in geographical terms, its coverage is limited to the area extending from Samarkand in Sogdiana in the west to Chang'an, the largest city along the Silk Road, in the east, and it excludes Iran and regions further to the west. However, the cities taken up for consideration are all localities where important historical materials have been discovered.
The greatest strength of this book lies in the fact that it fully incorporates the archaeological, artistic, and textual materials that have been discovered in this region as well as the body of research on the Silk Road that has accumulated in Japan and China, including the very latest findings. In specialist studies of the Silk Road published in Europe and America it is often the case that important research results produced in Japan and China are casually ignored, as a result of which many such publications are full of statements based on misunderstandings. But this book is not marred by any such defects. The author displays an accurate grasp of Chinese and non-Chinese historical sources and studies published in Chinese and Japanese and also has a good command of information on materials being newly discovered along the Silk Road, and this has resulted in an extremely reliable general history.
Seven cities are taken up in this book, with one chapter assigned to each city, as is indicated by the chapter subtitles: Chapter 1, "At the Crossroads of Central Asia: The Kingdom of Kroraina"; Chapter 2, "Gateway to the Languages of the Silk Road: Kucha and the Caves...