A History of Persian Navigation

Hasan, Hadi

doi:10.4324/9781315162713

Cited by 11 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Торговлей по морю активно занималось и вассальное государство Аббасидов в восточном Иране -мусульманская империя Саманидов (819-999) [Schafer, 1951, pp. 404-405;Hasan, 1928]. Свидетельства симбиоза между арабами и иранцами мы получаем с самого начала аббасидского периода: автор знаменитой энциклопедии «Тундянь» Ду Ю пишет, что «в Даши (зд.…”

Section: арабо-персидские торговцы в портовых городах эпохи танunclassified

On the Dangers of International Maritime Trade in the Tang Era (The Incidents of Genocide of the Arab-Persian Population of China in 760 and 879)

Dubrovskaya

2023

Oriental Courier

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

At the end of the Tang Empire (618–907), the universally recognized “golden age” of imperial China, the country entered a long period of socio-political and ethnic turmoil. The broader set of problems associated with the An Lushan uprising (755–763) is widely known — this civilizational catastrophe marked a turning point in the development of the dynasty and, by impacting all aspects of a powerful empire, caused the sun to start setting on Tang China. Still, many episodes remain relatively unexplored, among them the crises that befell Arab-Persian communities in southern China, which fell victim to the echoes of the An Lushan and Huang Chao uprisings (878–884), which also aimed to put an end to the Tang Dynasty. In layman’s Asian studies and public consciousness, the tragedies that occurred in Yangzhou and Guangzhou a little more than a century apart and took the form of largescale massacres of foreign merchants of Arab and Persian descent are often taken out of context and extrapolated to the entire system of interactions between China and foreigners — in particular, Muslims from West Asia arriving in the ports of the Tang Empire. This article seeks to place these dramatic events in a tighter historical context. Part of the difficulty here lies in the absence of Chinese sources about the Guangzhou massacre, known to researchers only from reports by Arab authors. The paper aims to consider some of the pre-requisites of these incidents, showing the role of Arab-Persian merchants not only as victims of violence by rebels and locals alike, but also by analyzing their own raid on Guangzhou at the very beginning of the events in question. The author also warns against simple projections around conflicts in China’s coastal cities because these sunset episodes of the Tang Dynasty do not extrapolate well to later history.

show abstract

Section: арабо-персидские торговцы в портовых городах эпохи танunclassified

On the Dangers of International Maritime Trade in the Tang Era (The Incidents of Genocide of the Arab-Persian Population of China in 760 and 879)

Dubrovskaya

2023

Oriental Courier

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…42 However, Arabian, East African and Persian mariners in the tenth century could well have possessed portolan charts and nautical guides, not in Arabic but most likely in Persian which was, at the time, the dominant maritime repertoire and it is probable that the geographer-traveller, al-Muqaddasī, would have been conversant in Persian as many scholars were in Medieval Islam. There is a late Persian source of the twelfth century which mentions a manual guide after the Persian rahnāma (manual of sailing instructions) model 43 containing information on star positions 44 , bearings and physical descriptions of coastal landscape, and islands. The point here is that al-Muqaddasī's observation of mariners discussing nautical instructions before putting them into practice is noteworthy.…”

Section: Climatic Conditions and Seamanshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Archaeology of Knowledge Traditions of the Indian Ocean World

Ray¹

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…6 From a half-century later (717), we learn of an Indian Buddhist who sailed in a convoy of 35 Persian ships from Ceylon to Palembang (Srivijaya), eventually arriving in Guangzhou in 720, quite possibly being met my merchants such as those in Figure 1.2. 7 A Chinese account by a Chinese monk from 727 of Persian commercial activities asserts that they . .…”

Section: Persians Arabs and Muslimsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Muslim Merchants of Premodern China

Chaffee

2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Merchants of an Imperial Trade One day in late September of 758, Persians and Arabs raided the frontier port city of Guangzhou (Canton). According to two sources, they plundered the city and burned its warehouses and storehouses before departing by sea. 1 Another source describes them as troops from the countries of Arabia (Dashi 大食) and Persia (Bosi 波斯) and recounts that they captured the city after the prefect, Wei Lijian 韋利見, abandoned the city and went into hiding. 2 Who were these men whothousands of miles from their homes in west Asiawere able to seize one of the major cities of the Tang, if only briefly? Speculative answers have included seeing them as a reflection of the newly established Abbasid Caliphate, as disgruntled troops sent by the Caliph to quell a rebellion in central Asia (who somehow made their way to the coast of China), or as followers of the Hainanese warlord Feng Ruofang 馮若芳, who specialized in capturing and enslaving Persian sailors, about whom we will have more to say. They might also have been traders enraged by grievances against local officials or some other trade issue (thus the burning of the warehouses). We will be returning to this question; here it is enough to note that this incident marks the first mention of Arabs in Tang documentary sourcesa signpost, as it were, for the early stages of the first great age of Asian maritime commerce. This age was a period quite distinct from those that followed. At its height, it involved a flourishing and lucrative trade in luxuries between the two great Asian empires of the day: the Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258) in the west and the Tang Empire (618-907) in the east. It was also a period of significant change at both ends of the continent. The Abbasids continued the process of the Islamicization of much of southwestern and central Asia, which the Umayyad Caliphate (661-750) had initiated, but

show abstract

A History of Persian Navigation

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

On the Dangers of International Maritime Trade in the Tang Era (The Incidents of Genocide of the Arab-Persian Population of China in 760 and 879)

On the Dangers of International Maritime Trade in the Tang Era (The Incidents of Genocide of the Arab-Persian Population of China in 760 and 879)

The Archaeology of Knowledge Traditions of the Indian Ocean World

The Muslim Merchants of Premodern China

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About