Show/Hide Menu
Hide/Show Apps
Logout
Türkçe
Türkçe
Search
Search
Login
Login
OpenMETU
OpenMETU
About
About
Open Science Policy
Open Science Policy
Open Access Guideline
Open Access Guideline
Postgraduate Thesis Guideline
Postgraduate Thesis Guideline
Communities & Collections
Communities & Collections
Help
Help
Frequently Asked Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
Guides
Guides
Thesis submission
Thesis submission
MS without thesis term project submission
MS without thesis term project submission
Publication submission with DOI
Publication submission with DOI
Publication submission
Publication submission
Supporting Information
Supporting Information
General Information
General Information
Copyright, Embargo and License
Copyright, Embargo and License
Contact us
Contact us
The Eurasian Steppe: People, Movement, Ideas (Book Review)
Date
2022-07-01
Author
Pamir Dietrich, Ayşe
Metadata
Show full item record
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
.
Item Usage Stats
116
views
0
downloads
Cite This
The Eurasian Steppe is one of the more recent works on the history of Central Asia and/or the Eurasian steppe that have appeared in recent years. The work consists of an introduction, thirteen chapters, notes, bibliography and index and generally presents a chronological narrative. This chronological account is interrupted by three chapters dedicated to topics that the author believed merited a detailed discussion: the origins, movements and language(s) of the Indo-Europeans (Chapter 3), the image of the female warrior/Amazon (Chapter 5), and steppe art (Chapter 6). While some of the information in the other chapters is not significantly different from what is found in other books, there are several qualities of this book that distinguish it from the other works and make it a valuable contribution to the field of Eurasian studies. To begin with, the author is an archaeologist by training with extensive experience working and living in the Near East and surrounding regions. As a result, The Eurasian Steppe often provides clear, comprehensible archaeological perspectives on the people and states of the steppe, a pespective that is not always presented in as detailed a fashion in books written by historians without a background in archaeology. Having visited many of the sites described in the book, the author is also able to provide first-hand observations of these sites. In the chronological accounts, the author dedicates longer discussions to certain topics that he clearly believes are important and have not been adequately discussed in other works. Examples of such discussions can be found in chapters 8, 9 and 10. Chapter 8 covers the early history of the Turkic peoples, a topic that has obviously been covered in all other works related to the history of the Eurasian steppe. However, what makes this work different is his examination of the term “Turk”, and the various peoples who have designated as “Turks”. His discussion clearly demonstrates how flexible this designation has been over the centuries. In chapter 9 he discusses the impact of the peoples of the Eurasian steppe on the history and culture of Europe in general, and Russia in particular. Throughout, the author is able to demonstrate when, where and how various steppe peoples had a clear influence on the course of European history, particularly in the early medieval period. Finally, chapter 10 is dedicated to the Khazars, their empire, and their complex legacy, a topic that is generally not covered as completely as it is here. Chapter 12 discuss the establishment and effect of Mongol states in Europe, the first Mongol state in Russia, the Golden Horde, the defeat of the Mongols by the Russians at Kulikova Battle, establishment of other Tatar Khanates, invasion of the khanates by the Russians, the emergence of new steppe groups on the southern steppes in the 17th century and the last major tribal movement into Europe, the Kalmyks; and the last Chapter 13 examines Russia’s European credentials and Asiatic influences and Mongol legacy. The book contains an extensive bibliography of books and articles related to the peoples, events and issues discussed in the text. While the works listed in the bibliography are numerous and cover diverse topics related to the history of the Eurasian steppe, there are two minor shortcomings to this bibliography. One is the scarcity of original sources, the ancient and medieval works on which our understanding of Eurasian history is based. The other is the almost complete lack of sources, ancient or modern, in languages other than English. As the author himself has so clearly shown in this work, the history of the Eurasian steppe is linked to the history of numerous peoples and states, and scholars from many countries have written works about it. Some of these works certainly deserve mention in any bibliography on the Eurasian steppe. Overall, The Eurasian Steppe: People, Movement, Ideas is a well-written and well-researched work on a vast topic. The author’s style is enjoyable and interesting, and the book is extensively illustrated. Its extended discussions on topics that have received less attention in other works in the field provide a unique and valuable contribution to our understanding of the history and impact of the Eurasian steppe. For anyone interested in the history of Eurasia, The Eurasian Steppe: People, Movement, Ideas is highly recommended.
URI
https://www.ijors.net/issue11_2_2022/reviews/ayse-richard_Dietrich.html
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/102235
Journal
International Journal of Russian Studies
Collections
Graduate School of Social Sciences, Article
Suggestions
OpenMETU
Core
Review of THE EURASIAN STEPPE: PEOPLE, MOVEMENT, IDEAS
Dietrich, Richard (2022-07-01)
The Eurasian Steppe is one of the more recent works on the history of Central Asia and/or the Eurasian steppe that have appeared in recent years. The work consists of an introduction, thirteen chapters, notes, bibliography and index and generally presents a chronological narrative. This chronological account is interrupted by three chapters dedicated to topics that the author believed merited a detailed discussion: the origins, movements and language(s) of the Indo-Europeans (Chapter 3), the image of the fe...
First Genomic Insights into Pre-pottery Neolithic of Upper Mesopotamia
Altınışık, Nefize Ezgi; Aydoğan, Ayça; Kazancı, Duygu Deniz; Vural, Kıvılcım Başak; Koptekin, Dilek; Özkan, Mustafa; Gemici, Hasan Can; Karamurat, Cansu; Erdal, Ömür Dilek; Götherström, Anders; Sürer, Elif; Atakuman, Çiğdem; Erim, Aslı; Özer, Füsun; Somel, Mehmet; Erdal, Yılmaz Selim (2021-06-01)
Recent studies showed that Neolithic populations in southwest Asia included distinct gene pools in the Levant, in Central Anatolia, and in the Zagros. Further, genomic comparisons suggested that all three populations adopted sedentism and farming without major admixture or replacement from other regions. Meanwhile, the population genetic characteristics of the geographic midpoint of these regions, namely upper Mesopotamia, has not been investigated so far. Here in this study, we present the first genomic da...
The politics of recognition of Crimean Tatar collective rights in the post-Soviet period: With special attention to the Russian annexation of Crimea
Aydin, Filiz Tutku; Şahin, Fethi Kurtiy (2019-03-01)
This paper examines the process of how Crimean Tatars strived to attain group differentiated rights since they have returned to their homeland in the early 1990s. Whereas the politics of minority rights were viewed through security lens in earlier literature, we emphasize the significance of cultural constructs in influencing the minority policies, based on qualitative content analysis of "speech acts" of elites, and movement and policy documents. Focusing on the interaction of the framing processes of Crim...
The water system at the upper city of Hasankeyf and its impact on urban settlement
Oğuz, Eser Deniz; Toprak, Vedat; Department of Settlement Archaeology (2007)
Hasankeyf, located in Upper Mesopotamia, southeastern Turkey with its environs at the floodplains of Tigris, welcomed many cultures in different periods. It has a very unique status with its difficult topography and distinctive outlook where spatial urbanization in almost every period must have been extraordinary, as well. The aim of this thesis is to study the water distribution system, specifically its relation to natural and man-made environment, at the Upper city of Hasankeyf, in order to identify the i...
Ancient genomes suggest the eastern Pontic-Caspian steppe as the source of western Iron Age nomads
Krzewińska, Maja; Kılınç, Gülşah Merve; Juras, Anna; Koptekin, Dilek; Chyleński, Maciej; Nikitin, Alexey G.; Shcherbakov, Nikolai; Shuteleva, Iia; Leonova, Tatiana; Kraeva, Liudmila; Sungatov, Flarit A.; Sultanova, Alfija N.; Potekhina, Inna; Łukasik, Sylwia; Krenz-Niedbała, Marta; Dalén, Love; Sinika, Vitaly; Jakobsson, Mattias; Storå, Jan; Götherström, Anders (American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2018-10)
For millennia, the Pontic-Caspian steppe was a connector between the Eurasian steppe and Europe. In this scene, multidirectional and sequential movements of different populations may have occurred, including those of the Eurasian steppe nomads. We sequenced 35 genomes (low to medium coverage) of Bronze Age individuals (Srubnaya-Alakulskaya) and Iron Age nomads (Cimmerians, Scythians, and Sarmatians) that represent four distinct cultural entities corresponding to the chronological sequence of cultural comple...
Citation Formats
IEEE
ACM
APA
CHICAGO
MLA
BibTeX
A. Pamir Dietrich, “The Eurasian Steppe: People, Movement, Ideas (Book Review),”
International Journal of Russian Studies
, vol. 11, no. 11/2 2022, pp. 228–229, 2022, Accessed: 00, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.ijors.net/issue11_2_2022/reviews/ayse-richard_Dietrich.html.