Research Catalog

Title

Religions of the Silk Road : overland trade and cultural exchange from antiquity to the fifteenth century / Richard C. Foltz.

Author

Foltz, Richard C., 1961-

Publication

New York : St. Martin's Press, 1999.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

viii, 186 p., [8] p. of plates : ill., maps; 22 cm.

Summary

"Religions of the Silk Road looks behind the romantic notions of the colonial era and tells the story of how cultural traditions, especially in the form of religious ideas, accompanied merchants and their goods along the overland Asian trade routes in pre-modern times. As early as three thousand years ago Hebraic and Iranian religious ideas and practices traveled eastwards in this way, to be followed centuries later by the great missionary traditions of Buddhism, Christianity, Manichaeism, and Islam. But the Silk Road was more than just a conduit along which these religions hitched rides East; it was a formative and transformative rite of passage, and no religion emerged unchanged at the end of the journey."--Jacket.

Subjects

• History
• Trade routes > Asia, Central > History
• Culture conflict > Asia, Central > History
• Silk Road > History
• Asia, Central > Religion

Genre/Form

History

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [163]-178) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Chinese transliterations -- Maps -- The Silk Road and its travelers -- Religion and trade in ancient Eurasia -- Buddhism and the Silk Road -- A refuge of heretics : Nestorians and Manichaeans on the Silk Road -- The Islamization of the Silk Road -- Ecumenical mischief -- A melting pot no more.

ISBN

• 0312214081
• 0312233388

LCCN

^^^98043092^

OCLC

39930674

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library