Central Asian Monuments

Central Asian Monuments PDF

Author: H. B. Paksoy

Publisher: ISIS Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 9754280339

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CARRIE, a full-text electronic library based at the University of Kansas, presents the text of "Central Asian Monuments" (ISBN 975-428-033-9). H. B. Paksoy edited the book, which was originally published in 1992 by the Isis Press. The book contains essays on eight Central Asian literary monuments and provides historical perspective on each.

Monuments of Central Asia

Monuments of Central Asia PDF

Author: Edgar Knobloch

Publisher: I.B. Tauris

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13:

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In this comprehensive account of the culture and history of Central Asia, Edgar Knobloch describes the main centers of the age-old civilization. Throughout the book he spices the text with quotations from the works of contemporary travelers, while providing an expert's commentary on the archaeological, architectural, and decorative features of the sites he describes. His original photographs are supplemented by numerous line drawings, plans of the main cities, and sketches of principal monuments and their ornamental features.

Medieval Monuments of Central Asia

Medieval Monuments of Central Asia PDF

Author: Richard Piran McClary

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2020-05-28

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1474423981

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This is a comprehensive study of the surviving monuments of the Qarakhanids - an important yet little-known medieval dynasty that ruled much of Central Asia between the late 10th and early 13th centuries. Based on extensive fieldwork and many hard-to-find Russian sources, the book places the surviving monuments into the wider cultural context of the region. Many photographs and new ground-plans are included, as well as detailed studies of individual monuments and the wider architectural aesthetic. These monuments serve as the link between the mostly lost Samanid architecture and the far larger and better-known monuments of the Timurids.

Soviet Asia

Soviet Asia PDF

Author: Roberto Conte

Publisher: Fuel Publishing

Published: 2019-04-25

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 9780995745551

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A fantastic collection of Soviet Asian architecture, many photographed here for the first time Soviet Asia explores the Soviet modernist architecture of Central Asia. Italian photographers Roberto Conte and Stefano Perego crossed the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, documenting buildings constructed from the 1950s until the fall of the USSR. The resulting images showcase the majestic, largely unknown, modernist buildings of the region. Museums, housing complexes, universities, circuses, ritual palaces - all were constructed using a composite aesthetic. Influenced by Persian and Islamic architecture, pattern and mosaic motifs articulated a connection with Central Asia. Grey concrete slabs were juxtaposed with colourful tiling and rectilinear shapes broken by ornate curved forms: the brutal designs normally associated with Soviet-era architecture were reconstructed with Eastern characteristics. Many of the buildings shown in Soviet Asia are recorded here for the first time, making this book an important document, as despite the recent revival of interest in Brutalist and Modernist architecture, a number of them remain under threat of demolition. The publication includes two contextual essays, one by Alessandro De Magistris (architect and History of Architecture professor, University of Milan, contributor to the book Vertical Moscow) and the other by Marco Buttino (Modern and Urban History professor, University of Turin, specializing in the history of social change in the USSR).

Monuments of Merv

Monuments of Merv PDF

Author: Georgina Herrman

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13:

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The survival of the mudbrick monuments of Merv against all the odds is little short of a miracle. Mudbrick and rammed earth are not building materials famed for their longevity, rather for their economy. However, some buildings of the Merv oasis in the Karakum desert in Turkmenistan have survived for more than seven centuries and some, unbelievably, for a millennium. Mud was the building material of choice, wonderfully flexible and a superb insulator, ideal for the extremes of the Central Asian climate, and one used by the architects of Merv with ingenuity and virtuosity to construct a wide variety of vaults and domes. The survivng monuments include palatial residences, small houses, summer pavilions and watch towers, as well as the earliest examples of tall conical icehouses. Perhaps the most remarkable are the extraordinary corrugated buildings, which, like the icehouses, dominate the flat landscape of the oasis. These are a distinctly Central Asian type of building with a surprising dearth of parallels elsewhere. Merv's key position during the eighth and ninth centuries may suggest that these remarkable buildings originated in the oasis, and they continued to be built through the Seljuk period. They present a unique record of an otherwise lost architechtural heritage and are of such importance that they form a major part of Merv's application to UNESCO for World Heritage Status. Merv was, of course, one of the great cosmopolitan capitals of the day, a centre of learning, industry and of long-distance trade: it was strategically located on the Great Silk Road'.

The Turkic Speaking Peoples

The Turkic Speaking Peoples PDF

Author: Ergun Çağatay

Publisher: Prestel Pub

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 495

ISBN-13: 9783791335155

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"Written by a group of eminent scholars, it covers subjects that range from the classification of Turkic languages to religion, literature, the arts, and general lifestyle, from the inception of Turkic history documented by Runic inscriptionson the Orkhon River in Mongolia, to the rise and decline of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of the Republic of Turkey, from the shamanistic cults of Turks in Siberia to Islam, whose standard bearers were the Ottoman Turks confronting Europe in the Balkans and the Mediterranean." - from back cover.

Photographing Central Asia

Photographing Central Asia PDF

Author: Svetlana Gorshenina

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-09-05

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 3110754460

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This volume addresses new theoretical approaches in visual and memory studies that prompted to rethink of the photography of Russian Turkestan of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Attempts to relate the visual unknown documentations to postcolonial criticism also opened up new interpretive arenas, helping to decentralize the analysis of the history of photography. The aim of this volume is to interpret photography as a specific tool that reifies reality, subjectively frames it, and fits it into various political, ideological, commercial, scientific, and artistic contexts. Without reducing the entire argument to the binary of ‘photography and power’, the authors reveal the different modes of seeing that involve distinct cultural norms, social practices, power relations, levels of technology, and networks for circulating photography, and that determined the manner of its (re)use in constructing various images of Central Asia. The volume demonstrates that photography was the cornerstone of imperial media governance and discourse construction in colonial Turkestan of the tsarist and early Soviet periods. The various cases show the complex mechanisms by which images of Turkestan were created, remembered, or forgotten from the nineteenth until the twenty-first century. The book should appeal to scholars of the Russian Empire and Central Asia; of history of photography and visual culture; of memory studies. It should be appropriate for use in upper-level undergraduate courses, and even a broader public.