Articles de revues sur le sujet « Dynasty Warriors »

Terracotta statues of warriors and war horses represent a type of sculpture from ancient burials. They are an important part of the system of objects buried together with the deceased during the Han dynasty (the so-called Mintsi). Yun, the most characteristic funeral figurines which archaeologists find especially in the region of the Chu kingdom of the pre-Qin period, began to appear during the Chunqiu and the Warring States periods. The burial of statues of soldiers together with the deceased carried an authentic meaning connected with the burial of living warriors during the Shang dynasty. Terracotta statues of warriors and war horses in the tomb of Qin Shi Huang were completed in a very short time and mainly reproduced the figures of people and soldiers on high alert before the start of a military campaign. Despite the fact that the Han Dynasty succeeded the Qin Dynasty in the administrative system, it also drew some lessons, to varying degrees, regarding martial arts, as evidenced by the location combinations of the terracotta statues and horses. In 1965, a large burial place of the ancestor of Liu Bang, the first emperor of the Han dynasty, was discovered in the Shaanxi province north of Xianyang in Yangjiawan village. In history, it was known as Zhoushitsuy or Mound of Zhou Ancestors. The size and Ill. 1. National architectural monument. Han Dynasty. Mausoleum Han Yang Ling. Ill. 2. Grave pits in the Hanyangling Museum depth of the pits are not the same, the number of ceramic statues found is also various and of different shapes and sizes; however, most of the statues have a bright colour and a perfectly regular shape. These excavations of the Han terracotta statues have historical significance due to the fact that this is the first finding of terracotta statues of the Han period since the founding of New China.

Based on the information presented in the official chronicles of the Chinese imperial dynasties Song and Yuan, the author discusses the issue of the time of the massacre of the Alan warriors in Mongol service, that occurred during their occupation of the southern Chinese city of Zhenchao. The study of this issue seems relevant, since the information of the mentioned Chinese official chronicles, in the same way conveying the general plot of this event, diverges in the designation of its time, attributing it to different reign years of the first emperor of the Yuan dynasty Kublai (Shi-zu) and to one of the years of the sixteenth emperor of the Song Dynasty Zhao Xian (Gong of Song). The materials for the study were the original texts of the official “History of Song [Dynasty]” and the “History of Yuan [Dynasty]” as well as some other Chinese written sources. The study introduces new information from sources about this event, which have not previously been translated into Russian. A brief historiographic review of this issue is given. The purpose of the study is to definite the time of the massacre of Alan warriors in Southern China. In the course of the study the inductive method, the method of comparative historical analysis, systemic chronological and retrospective analytical methods were applied. It was found that the information about the time of the event in question contained in various sections of the “History of the Yuan [Dynasty]” is erroneous, while the similar information about the time of the event in question contained in the “History of Song [Dynasty]” is correct, as it was indicated by P. Pelliot. The translation of the latter information into the modern chronology system allows to determine the time of this historical episode on April 28, 1275.

Based on the information presented in the official chronicles of the Chinese imperial dynasties Song and Yuan, the author discusses the issue of the time of the massacre of the Alan warriors in Mongol service, that occurred during their occupation of the southern Chinese city of Zhenchao. The study of this issue seems relevant, since the information of the mentioned Chinese official chronicles, in the same way conveying the general plot of this event, diverges in the designation of its time, attributing it to different reign years of the first emperor of the Yuan dynasty Kublai (Shi-zu) and to one of the years of the sixteenth emperor of the Song Dynasty Zhao Xian (Gong of Song). The materials for the study were the original texts of the official “History of Song [Dynasty]” and the “History of Yuan [Dynasty]” as well as some other Chinese written sources. The study introduces new information from sources about this event, which have not previously been translated into Russian. A brief historiographic review of this issue is given. The purpose of the study is to definite the time of the massacre of Alan warriors in Southern China. In the course of the study the inductive method, the method of comparative historical analysis, systemic chronological and retrospective analytical methods were applied. It was found that the information about the time of the event in question contained in various sections of the “History of the Yuan [Dynasty]” is erroneous, while the similar information about the time of the event in question contained in the “History of Song [Dynasty]” is correct, as it was indicated by P. Pelliot. The translation of the latter information into the modern chronology system allows to determine the time of this historical episode on April 28, 1275.

By the end of the 10th century, the area of Opatów and Sandomierz was probably inhabited by a small tribe whose name has not been recorded in written sources. The establishment of a gord in Zawichost Podgórze before the end of the 9th century coupled with the emergence of a local cluster of pyre kurgan grave fields may be evidence of the arrival of new settlers from an area east of the Vistula. Inclusion of the Sandomierz area into the domain of the Wielkopolska Polans in the late 10th century resulted in disappearance of the existing tribal settlement structures which were replaced by new ones. This was related to the arrival to this area of individuals and groups representing the new Piast dynasty rule who came from other parts of the country or even from abroad. They included warriors from the ducal team, craftsmen, merchants as well as settlers relocated voluntarily or by force, possibly captives. As they represented different cultural traditions, their appearance has been well documented in archaeological sources. It also seems to be confirmed in toponymy. On top of the biggest number of Wielkopolska newcomers from the heart of the Piast dynasty domain, in the vicinity of Sandomierz and Opatów there could have also operated merchants related to the broadly defined Scandinavian and Russian culture as well as nomadic tribes, most probably Hungarians. The latter could have arrived as warriors, members of the ducal team, merchants or captives.

Mainly as a result of the work of E. E. Evans-Pritchard, the Azande are among the best-known African peoples. In anthropological theory they have become indissolubly associated with the study of religion and magic. Also remarkable is their expansion under the leadership of the dynasties of the Avungara and the originally Ngbandi-speaking Abandia. Starting from a small core area in the basin of the lower Mbomu, where the ancestors of the Avungara and Abandia had established themselves as rulers over parts of the resident, mainly Zande-speaking, population around the middle of the eighteenth century, the Abandia extended their rule into the region of the lower Mbomu and lower Uele, while the Avungara and their Azande followers swept eastward in a vast movement and in less than one hundred years conquered a huge area reaching as far as the upper Sue and upper Uele, integrating the population into their system of rule.One of the reasons for the speed of this expansion is that individual members of the Avungara dynasty (who all claimed descent from Ngura, the first historical ruler in the lower Mbomu area) repeatedly founded principalities of their own in new territories. This led to the existence of a varying number of polities under numerous, more or less, powerful rulers who descended from several dynastic branches, thereby preventing the formation of a single kingdom, stable in time and place. Through the integration of numerous groups of different linguistic and ethnic origins, the population cluster was formed for which the collective name Azande has become established. The history of Azande expansion thus provides a very interesting example of a society being created through political processes, which raises questions concerning the origin, acceptance, and characteristics of centralized political organizations, as well as assimilation and acculturation processes (besides the Mangbetu in the Uele-Bomokandi area, the Azande were the only group in the region to develop centralized political structures on a wide scale).

The phenomenon of the king’s rewarding of the court officials and warriors for the loyal service reached the peak of its development during the New Kingdom Era, which is confirmed by lots of historical sources, as well as the scenes depicting the king’s rewarding the noble people which first appeared in private tombs during the reign of Thutmose IV and went on appearing during the whole New Kingdom Era. This article deals with the rewarding scenes which can be seen in private tombs in Thebes and which are dating back to Dynasty XIX period. Painting of private tombs of Dynasty XIX is characterized by fewer number of scenes depicting services and daily life of officials, and, to the contrary, larger amount of scenes related to the posthumous existence of the tomb owner. There are only three rewarding scenes in the private tombs dated back to the period in question, and these scenes can be found in the burials of Paser, the mayor of Thebes (TT 106), Apy the sculptor (TT 217) as well as in the burial of Thai who was a royal scribe. The composition of these scenes is based on scenes dated back to the period of Dynasty XVIII reign, however, they are smaller in scale.

AbstractThe site of Chinkultic in Chiapas, Mexico, remains largely absent from discussions of Classic Maya history and culture, despite a long history of excavation and a substantial corpus of monumental sculpture. This paper explores two groups of sculptures from Chinkultic, photographed using raking-light photographic techniques in 2011 and 2013. Sculptures in the first group depict royal accession and suggest that the rulers of Chinkultic acceded the throne as warriors. The second group of monuments demonstrates a ritual tradition involving rulers and subordinate individuals. Based on analysis of these groups, I argue that Chinkultic was home to consistent artistic programming that performed an elite identity based on warfare and control over surrounding people and places. Combined, these sculptures demonstrate artistic connections between Chinkultic and the Usumacinta region, provide a new window into the sociopolitical history of the Comitán valley, and reflect the innovative artistic programs of frontier places in ancient Mesoamerica.

Mao Zedong’s views on literature were enigmatic: although he coerced writers into “learning the language of the masses,” he made no secret of his own enthusiasm forDream of the Red Chamber, a novel written during the Qing dynasty. In 1954 this paradox appeared to be resolved when Li Xifan and Lan Ling presented an interpretation that saw the tragic love story as a manifestation of class struggle. Ever since, the conception of Baoyu and Daiyu as class warriors has become a powerful and unquestioned cliché of Chinese literary criticism. Endowing aristocratic protagonists with revolutionary grandeur, however, violates a basic principle of Marxist orthodoxy. This article examines the reasons behind this position: on the one hand, Mao’s support for Li and Lan’s approach acts as a reminder of his early journalistic agitation against arranged marriage and the social ills it engenders. On the other hand, it offers evidence of Mao’s increasingly ambiguous conception of class.

The internal structure of Maya governing elites has been much debated over the last decade. In the perspective of that debate, I propose a model of political organization at Copán at the end of the Late Classic (A. D. 750-800) based on a reinterpretation of two monuments that depict members of the governing elite, each one wearing a pectoral. The analysis of the pectorals leads to the identification of two functional groups, priests and warriors. Sovereignty incorporates both functions and is embodied in a diarchy where a coruler is adjoined to the ruler. Rulers and corulers come from the two opposing groups who, with each succession to power, exchange these roles. The executive branch, which comprises the ruler and his coruler, four ministers and four war captains, is counterbalanced by a council of nine lords. Furthermore, there are some indications that each functional group was a corporate descent group that had its own territory in the valley and its own traditions. The relations between the two groups conditioned the history of the royal dynasty, from its foundation in A. D. 426 until its collapse in A. D. 822.

As one of the Four Great Classic Novels of Chinese literature, Romance of the Three Kingdoms found its way to the constellation of World Literature via translation and being adapted into the movie Red Cliff (2008) and famous video games series Dynasty Warriors (1997-now). This process further made the story of the Three Kingdom is widely known as many cinemagoers and gamers can associate themselves with the story in the form that they adore. Both processes, however, have disadvantages as they erase the Chinese cultural elements that are demonstrated in the novel. This novel is also heavily riddled with patriarchal paradigm that makes scholars consider Romance of the Three Kingdoms masculine novel by portraying women in a very weak position in Chinese society. This paper would try to dissect the issues of translation and women portrayal in detail by analyzing the translated work of Romance of the Three Kingdoms to see what cultural aspect that is disappear as a result of translation and dissecting the dismissive and derogative portrayal of several women characters in the novel.Keywords: Luo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Feminism, World Literature

Cracks are one of the most common issues affecting colored pottery relics; these can be divided into macroscopic cracks, recognizable by the human eye, and micron cracks, which cannot be observed by the naked eye. The gradual development of micron cracks eventually leads to large-scale cracks and the shedding of the coating layer. The repair of such micron cracks poses a key technical difficulty in restoring painted pottery remnants from the Western Han Dynasty. We attempt to solve this problem by reporting on a method that entails the use of a water-borne fluoropolymer material as the adhesive agent, as well as ultra-depth-of-field, digital microscopic imaging technology to build an operating platform for an optical imaging monitoring system. By making simulated ceramic samples, we systematically investigated the influences of water-borne fluoropolymer on chromaticity, adhesion, contact angle, surface morphology, and thermal stability of the paint layer. The results indicate that the color of the painted layer, when treated with the water-borne fluoropolymer, did not change, and the adhesion and contact angle of the painted layer were improved. Additionally, the outcomes of the SEM analysis show that the adhesion and hydrophobicity of the painted layer were improved because the water-borne fluoropolymer filled up the porous structure of the painted layer and covered the pigment particles. These findings demonstrate that aqueous, water-borne fluoropolymer can be used as an adhesive agent for micron cracks. Meanwhile, via the operating platform of the optical imaging monitoring system, the micron cracks of the painted terracotta warriors and horses from the Western Han Dynasty were successfully repaired using the water-borne fluoropolymer. The results imply that the microstructure, size, and geometric spaces of the cracks can be obtained directly utilizing microscopic imaging technology. The dynamic monitoring and imaging system described above can be employed to assist prosthetists in visualizing micro-repair operations in real time, assist with fine visual operations during the repair process, and realize dynamic video recording of the entire repair process. Our work provides a simple visualization method to repair micron-scale cracks in painted pottery relics by applying modern fluoropolymer and ultra-depth-of-field digital microscopic imaging technology.

In Early Anglo-Saxon England, Style I anthropomorphic and zoomorphic motifs played a key role in shaping identity and communicating ideas in a non-literate society. While the zoomorphic designs are well discussed, the meaning of the human element of Style I remains underexplored. This paper addresses this imbalance by examining a rare and overlooked group of anthropomorphic images: human faces with small, pointed ears depicted on fifth- to sixth-century female dress fittings recovered from archaeological contexts in eastern England. This paper identifies quadrupedal creatures as a stylistic parallel within the menagerie of Style I, including equine, lupine and porcine creatures. Although it is difficult to identify the character/s depicted with ears, there are notable affinities between the anthropomorphic masculine face with pointed ears and the ancient Germanic practice of warriors donning wolf and bear pelts. The facial motif with pointed ears appears on feminine metalwork within East Anglia, the historic region of the sixth-century Wuffingas (Little Wolf) dynasty – Wuffa being Wolf and the -ingas suffix meaning ‘people/descendants of Wuffa’. This paper explores this rare design with contextual information from pictorial and historical texts of shapeshifting and considers the relationship between this motif, the object, and the wearer/user.

Abstract Elaborately glazed Chinese pottery figures of camels and servants, dating to the Tang dynasty (A.D. 618–906), have been much prized by collectors and museums over the last three quarters of a century. They have been readily admired as a category of sculpture, but little attention has been paid to their functions within the tomb complex. An examination of the tomb of the First Emperor (d. 210 B.C.) reveals tomb figures as just one part of a large complex of structures and images. The famous terracotta warriors were an element in the elaborate burial of the Emperor, which also included ‘real’ people and animals, miniature bronze chariots, models of palaces and images of the heavenly bodies. If we are to understand the purposes of this complex of many different parts, we need to consider how the ancient Chinese viewed images of all categories. It would appear that in the eyes of the ancient Chinese, images were equivalent to the subject of the image. By creating images in bronze, pottery or in pictures, the ancient Chinese were presenting a universe for the dead Emperor. This article describes the philosophical concepts that informed this understanding of images and illustrates the discussion with archaeological finds and textual information. The archaeological discoveries of recent years have made a reassessment of Chinese tomb models necessary. The powers of these images were deemed to be considerable. The Chinese have never collected tomb figures because, in their view, such figures were the actual servants and soldiers of the dead.

The phenomenon of clan-regional rulemaking during the military-oligarchic regime in medieval Japan is studied for the first time. The purpose of the study was a comparative analysis of the texts of the largest princely codes of daimyo and military houses, as well as the norms of the Bushido code . The analysis was carried out on the basis of historical-genetic and synchronous-logical methods using Japanese primary sources with a survey translation, as well as scientific and abstract materials of Japanese, English and Russian medieval studies. Among the results achieved, a typology and hierarchy of sources of traditional law of the Shogun period are identified. The evolution of the system of law sources from the Kamakura shogunate to the Miromati dynasty is traced. One of the most striking monuments of Kamakur law is examined (the military-estate code Goseibai Sikimoku, 1232). Its sources, structure, technic mode and criminal provisions are studied. The analysis of the Bushido code showed that this quasi-legal regulator of the samurai behavior was an eclectic code of norms and rules for the bushi warriors with their ideals of loyalty and patriotism. The main transition to a new stage in the legal history of Japan after the Kammu сode, 1336 and during the period of Warring Provinces was established. It was distinguished by an increase in the number and significance of local law monuments - princely and clan codes, city statutes and charters of merchants' houses. From this list, the author singled out and compared in juridical techniques the ten large bunkokuho codes published by the largest princes- daimyo in order to systematize local laws and streamline the administrative-judicial system.

The article is devoted to the analysis of images on a gold pectoral from the Tovsta Mogyla of the middle of the 4th century BC. The product has a well-thought-out structure (fig. 1). The main friezes are the internal and external ones. The central axis on which the most important scenes are located is highlighted. The arrangement of the scenes inside the friezes is subject to pendulum symmetry (fig. 2). The main theme of the external frieze is the death. The central scene embodies the triumph of death, but with each next scene it recedes, and in scenes with a hare and grasshoppers one can watch the transition of the theme to its opposite. The main theme of the internal frieze is life. The development of life is shown through the growth of cubs from the moment of birth to the beginning of adult life. Figures of birds on the frieze edges indicate a change in theme. The story of man, which also has its development, is interwoven into the internal frieze. Its beginning is in the central scene where two men create the clothes from sheep’s clothing. Such clothes in Iranian mythology symbolized the royal khwarrah. It can be assumed that the central characters are the gods who create the royal khwarrah and the happy fate of the future ruler. Such gods could be the Iranian Verethragna and Mithra, corresponding to the Scythian «Ares» and Oitosyros. In the three scenes of the upper frieze the myth about royal power is enclosed. Its main motives are following: predetermining the birth of the king and his happy fate, birth, raising by shepherds, being at the headquarters of the ruler after reaching adulthood and gaining royal power. The appearance of this mythology in the Iranian environment is probably associated with the accession of Cyrus the Great and the Achaemenid dynasty. In the Scythian environment it was called upon to legitimize the power of the ruler-owner of the pectoral. Apparently the myth was a reference to the legendary times of Kolaxais, the ancestor of the Paralates, Scythian warriors and kings. In such a situation the pectoral was conceived as one of the visible incarnations of the royal family khwarrah, telling by means of iconography about its origin.

More or less covering lines 1071a-1159a (not counting the introductory verses), the Finnsburg digression comprises the longest and most intensively studied episode inBeowulf. Its context in the poem may be summarized briefly. Beowulf has mortally wounded Grendel. War-leaders from surrounding territories follow Grendel's tracks to the mere, now boiling with gore. On the way back a warrior sings of Sigemund and Heremod. Horse races are held, and the Danes and their guests gawk at Grendel's arm, which has been hung from a beam in Heorot. Hroðgar acknowledges Beowulf as an adoptive “son,” and a lavish celebration honors the hero, who secures five dynastic treasures not only in recognition of his valor and but also as confirmation of retainership and possibly of Hroðgar's adoption. Immediately following the bestowal of these gifts, a poet recites Finnsburg “fore Healfdenes I hildewisan” (“before Healfdene's warriors,” 1064). The tale commemorates a Danish victory over Frisians, a triumph which all agree should compliment Danish resolve. In fact, just before the episode opens, the Scylding Hntef is called a “hæleð Healf-Dena” (“hero of the Half-Danes,” 1069a), an epithet explicitly linking audience and characters.

Zhang Yimou’s Hero presents an action hero, yet in a slightly different cinematic mode than that of Stephen Chow-directed Shaolin Soccer to blend myth and modernity. In Yimou’s martial arts cinema, Jet Li-starred Nameless hero uses martial arts to combat the king’s adversaries, including Donnie Yen-starred Long Sky, Maggie Cheung-starred Flying Snow and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai-starred Broken Sword in the service to the Qin Dynasty (221 BC – 207 BC). The warrior hero’s indigenous body art helps the Qin Dynasty transform the smaller warring kingdoms into a powerful Chinese Empire, a strong foundation of modern China with economic and military superpower. Like their western counterparts, including T1000 and Neo, the Hong Kong action heroes, such as the warrior hero and the Qin King have been refashioned in the Hollywood controlled twentieth-century popular culture. Different from their Hollywood counterparts in actions, the Hong Kong action heroes in Hero primarily use their trained bodies and martial skills to promote the Chinese civilization, an adaptation of the Hollywood tradition of technologized machine body. Reworking of myth and archetype in Nameless’s service to the Qin Dynasty and the emperor’s mission to incept the Chinese Empire, the Hong Kong action heroes appear on screen, a blend of tradition and modernity. The film industry’s projection of the Chinese history with the legendary action heroes, including Nameless soldier and the Qin King globalizes the indigenous Chinese culture by using modern electronic digital technology, a resonance of the western technological advancement.

Victor Lieberman'sStrange Parallelsis the culmination of an extended effort to compare many major polities of the Eurasian continent in the early modern age. Lieberman finds common cycles of administrative integration and disintegration that were increasingly synchronized over time. Although he does not give a single-factor explanation for this synchronization, his model provides a common vocabulary for political, economic, and cultural analysis that can inspire all comparative world historians. China, however, is missing from this analysis, even though its dynastic cycles share much with the other polities. China's ambivalent position in Eurasia deserves comparative study because of divergent interpretations of Chinese dynastic relations with frontier warriors, the strong influence of Chinese trade and power on its neighbors’ polities, and China's long-lasting cultural and bureaucratic tradition.

The author of this article attempts to interpret the name ?gorgos? associated with Saint George, utilizing data from the oldest tradition in conjunction with the historical environment in which revives the worship of the saint as equestrian Akrita warrior. The relationship of the rider hero with his warhorse raises the heroism of the military saints of the East, particularly of Cappadocia at a time when the bravery and the heroism of the lads of the Akritian circle is generally emerging. The combination akrita/soldier and farmer meets at the same person of Saint George, who later appears in the iconography, as protector of the water, highlighting the type of ?dragonslayer?. As a formidable equestrian warrior, the Saint smites the enemies of Byzantium during the two wars that Constantine IX Monomachus conducts against the Patsinakoi, considering that Saint George stood firmly by his side. So George as ?gorgos? warrior, is being adopted as the protector of the palace at whom the emperor dedicates the temple of the Mangana Palace. With the status of ?protector? of the imperial house of Byzantium, Saint George becomes prostate symbol of the ?royal house? and is being adopted in imitation, from the Serbian House of Nemanides, whose members lived in the environment of the capital of Byzantium and experienced customs and traditions of the Byzantine court and society. This explains the ?transposition? of the worship of Saint George with the status of warrior - ?gorgos? protector of Byzantium at the Serbian territory of the house of Nemanides and appears to resort in the monuments, accepting the great honor as ?family saint protector? from the rulers of the dynasty that had multifarious relations with Byzantium.

At the end of the decade of the 90’s of the 20th century, the Calakmul Archaeological Project reported an unfinished monument, listed by Martin as Stela 117, which was found in Structure IV. On the front, the hieroglyphics were uncarved, but still show a figure carrying warrior attributes sitting on a throne located on the top of a witz basement with a toponymic name. In the monument’s informative card at the Museo de la Arquitectura Maya of the Baluarte de la Soledad (in Campeche, México) where it is exhibited, mentions that it’s an “Early Classic lintel in which it’s represented K’altun Hix” who was one of the early ajawtaak of the Kaan dynasty. However, formally the monument does not seems like a lintel, stylistically it does not coincide with the proposed chronology and, also, the Kaan dynasty was not installed in Calakmul yet during the Early Classic. Therefore, through the iconographic analysis of the monument, with and emphasis on the symbolic elements that are still preserved and taking into account the historical and archaeological context of the Structure IV, we will discuss the possible temporality, the type of monument and who the character represented could be.

In recent years the impact of the Almoravid movement on the sahelian societies has been the object of some debate. Ancient Ghana seemed to be the most rewarding area of investigation, since al-Zuhrī (1154) and Ibn Khaldūn (end of the fourteenth century) suggested its ‘conquest’ by Almoravid forces. The evidence provided by these narrative sources has been disputed, but it could not be discarded.A new field of investigation was opened by the discovery in 1939 of a number of royal tombstones in Gao-Sané close to the old capital of the Gawgaw empire. The dates of the epitaphs extend from the early twelfth to the late thirteenth century. However, none of the Arabic names given to the rulers of Gao-Sané seemed to correspond to any of the names provided in the chronicles of Timbuktu, the T. al-Sūdān and the T. al-Fattāsh. A closer look at the epitaphs shows that the third ruler of Gao-Sané, called ‘Umar b. al-Khaṭṭāb and also Yāmā b. K.mā and who died in 1120, is in fact identical with Yama Kitsi mentioned in the chronicles. The available evidence suggests that by 1080 the local Berbers of Gao-Sané were able to seize power from the earlier Qanda/Kanta dynasty of Old Gao. This change of dynasty was certainly not the result of a military conquest, although it is likely that Almoravid propagandists contributed to arouse the religious fervour of the local Muslims in both Gao-Sané with its community of traders and Old Gao with its Islamic court members and dynastic factions. The clear message of the Gao epitaphs is that the new rulers of Gao-Sané, the Zāghē, tried to establish good relations with members of the former ruling clan resorting to a policy of intermarriage. By the middle of the thirteenth century the Zāghē rulers were so much integrated into the local Mandé society that they adopted the title Z.wā (Zā) which was originally the title of the Kanta rulers. Thus it would appear that in spite of the far-reaching dynastic effects resulting from the religious and political upheaval of the Almoravid period, there was no major incursion of Berber people into the kingdom of Gawgaw. Indeed, there are reasons to believe that the basic institutions of the original‘Mande’ society were destroyed only in the course of the fifteenth century, when Songhay warrior groups from the east under the leadership of the Sonni radically changed the ethnic set-up of the Middle Niger. In spite of these changes the Zarma, whose aristocracy descend from the Zā, preserve the tradition of their origin from Mali until the present day.

The Chin-so liu-chu yin is a text of twenty-nine fascicles preserved in the Taoist canon in the form of a revelation to Chang Tao-ling, the late Han founder of the Taoist religion, to which comments by Li Ch‘un-feng (602–670) are attached. Though scholars have not so far addressed the question of the origins of the text itself, a certain willingness to accept the attribution of the commentary has already been made manifest. Yet to the eye of the expert in Sung Taoism this attribution raises serious doubts: text and commentary display features much more reminiscent of Sung religion than that of the early T'ang. It has already been noticed that Li Ch'un-feng provides information on the cult of the city gods (ch'eng-huang shen) and on Thunder magic; the former religious development may be traced back before the T‘ang but only achieved prominence towards the end of the dynasty, while the latter is unattested in T‘ang Taoist literature. One might add that Li displays a detailed knowledge of the legend of Hsü Sun in a developed form—again a cult v with early origins hardly noticed until the late T‘ang. The text also provides information (though separately) on the Buddhist warrior-king Vaisravana (P‘isha-men PI) and on the seventh-century warrior-hero Li Ching (571–649): these two figures were eventually to merge.

Elite necropolises are the most important sources for studying the process of the formation of early states. In Ancient Egypt, this process took place over a long period of development of the sedentary culture Naqada, which developed in the 4th millennium BC, from its early phases to the final stages, when the political unification of Egypt took shape. Analysis of the burial architecture of elite burials from Hierakonpolis and Abydos, iconography, motifs and images depicted on ritual objects from tombs of the Late Dynastic and Early Dynastic times continue the scenes of hunting and battles characteristic of the earlier phases of the Naqada culture. However, their style is changing. The motives associated with the king as the protector of society, a successful warrior responsible for the stability and prosperity of Egypt come to the fore. Traditions and innovations, being oppositions, nevertheless work in an integral field, a kind of cultural and historical unity. And in terms of the socio-cultural development of Egypt, the elite necropolises of the Predynastic and Early dynastic periods provide extremely important and objective information about the formation of the first state in Egypt.

Abstract The idea that physical features and character traits are inherited from ancestors is central to the self-identification and representation of pre-modern elites. For the 12th-century Byzantine aristocracy, the idea of family and ancestry was of major importance. Members of the military elite frequently had themselves depicted as the latest scions of a lineage of brave warriors. The ruling Komnenoi and Angeloi tried to establish dynastic claims to the throne by presenting their families as being more fit to rule than any other. To support these claims, panegyrists turned to nature in search of legitimizing comparanda. The idea that animal species reproduce unchanged and pass on their specific traits from one generation to the next, provided a suitable model. Comparisons of emperors or aristocrats and their sons with lion and lion cub or eagle and eaglet were popular images in court poetry. Through a detailed examination of this imagery, the paper exemplifies how writers and orators made use of theories from ancient/medieval natural science and created legitimizing models for socio-political needs.

The cult of St George in the Eastern Mediterranean is one of the most extraordinary examples of cohabitation among different religious communities. For a long time, Greek Orthodox, Latins, and Muslims shared shrines dedicated to the Cappadocian warrior in very different places. This phenomenon touches on two aspects of the cult—the intercultural and the transcultural—that should be considered separately. My paper mainly focuses on the cross-cultural value of the cult and the iconography of St George in continental and insular Greece during the Latinokratia (13th–14th centuries). In this area, we face the same phenomenon with similar contradictions to those found in Turkey or Palestine, where George was shared by different communities, but could also serve to strengthen the identity of a particular ethnic group. Venetians, Franks, Genoese, Catalans, and Greeks (Ῥωμαῖοι) sought the protection of St George, and in this process, they tried to physically or figuratively appropriate his image. However, in order to gain a better understanding of the peculiar situation in Frankish-Palaiologian Greece, it is necessary first to analyze the use of images of St George by the Palaiologian dynasty (1261–1453). Later, we will consider this in relation to the cult and the depiction of the saint on a series of artworks and monuments in Frankish and Catalan Greece. The latter enables us to more precisely interrogate the significance of the former cult of St George in the Crown of Aragon and assess the consequences of the rulership of Greece for the flourishing of his iconography in Late Gothic art.

The aspects of the Old Testament figure of Moses highlighted in the charters of post-Nemanjic Serbia, or under the Lazarevic and Brankovic dynasties (1371-1459), testify to a changed attitude towards Old Testament role models. While members of the Nemanjic house such as the archbishop Sava I and the rulers Stefan of Decani and Dusan look up to Moses as a "religious leader", a prayerful intercessor before God and a victorious warrior, all of that for the sake of the "chosen" people, the role he is assigned in the arengae of the charters issued by prince Lazar and despots Stefan Lazarevic and Djuradj Brankovic is completely different. In the universal Christian context of the post-1371 arengae Moses figures as a "prophet" and the builder of the Tabernacle - a prefiguration of the Church, thereby epitomizing a major stage in the salvation history of humankind. The role of Moses, as well as that of David, the only other Old Testament figure still referred to in the charters of the period, has a universal ecclesiologically interpreted, significance. This new pattern of interpreting Moses implies that the ruler?s main virtue now becomes his concern for the "true faith" and the houses of God. The practice of the Nemanjics as regards selection and interpretation of Old Testament themes is reestablished by the titular despots of the Brankovic dynasty. In their charters, the first part of the Bible with Moses as a popular leader reassumes a "national" character and becomes part of the ideological apparatus intended to posit the Serbs as a "New Israel".

Queen Helen Nemanjić (1250–Brnjaci near Zubin Potok, February 8, 1314) was a Serbian medieval queen and consort of King Stefan Uroš I (r. 1243–1276), the fifth ruler of the Serbian Nemanide dynasty. She was the mother of the kings Stefan Dragutin and Stefan Uroš II Milutin. Today, she is known as Helen of Anjou (Jelena Anžujska in Serbian) although her real name was most probably Heleni Angelina (Ελένη Aγγελίνα). She was the founder of the Serbian Orthodox monastery of Gradac as well as four Franciscan abbeys in Kotor, Bar, Ulcinj, and Shkodër. Together with her sons, Kings Stefan Dragutin and Stefan Uroš II Milutin she helped renovation of Benedictine abbey of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus near Shkodër on Boyana river in present-day Albania. After the death of her husband, she ruled Zeta and Travunija until 1306. She was known for her religious tolerance and charitable and educational endeavors. She was elevated to sainthood by the Serbian Orthodox Church. Along with Empress Helen, the wife of Serbian Emperor Stefan Uroš IV Dušan, Queen Helen was the most frequently painted woman of Serbian medieval art. Six of her portraits can be found in the monumental painting ensembles of the Serbian medieval monasteries of Sopoćani, Gradac, Arilje, Đurđevi Stupovi (Pillars of St. George), and Gračanica, as well as on two icons and one seal. Queen Helen is also the only female Serbian medieval ruler whose vita was included in the famous collection of the “Lives of Serbian Kings and Archbishops” by Archbishop Danilo II, a prominent church leader, warrior, and writer.

The period from the Treaty of Kanghwa (1876) until the fall of the Korean Empire (1897–1910) is commonly characterized as a period of kaehwa—Enlightenment—in which the Chosŏn state strived to reform and modernize. This article complicates the notion of Enlightenment in the late Chosŏn context, arguging that it was a hybrid term concurrently connoting modernization and religious awakening. In particular, this article sheds light on spirit-written texts—so called ‘morality books’—employed by civil and military elites to participate in Enlightenment discourse. By the mid-nineteenth century, Guandi—the apotheosized version of the warrior Guan Yu—had emerged as one of the most popular spirit-writing deities in Qing dynasty China. This article explores the Korean faith and practice of spirit-writing centered on Thearch Kwan (Ch. Guandi) at shrines in Seoul. The King Kwan Shrines (Kwanwang myo) were the sites of production and publication of morality books during a critical period on the eve of modernization of Korea. Surprisingly, these texts were published with the sanction of King Kojong (reigned 1863–1907), the reformer who founded the new country. Kojong and his confidant servants were fully aware of the spirit-written texts and published them as the “Corpus of Enlightenment.” The corpus unintentionally emphasized the key term of modernization in their eschatology, urging enlightenment—conceived of as religio-ethical values—in order to resolve contemporary ills and bring about a new era of peace. This research will dissolve the sharp demarcation between premodern and modern in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Korea by illuminating the polyphony of Enlightenment ideas, comflicting and competing between the old and new.

The article studies the helmet under inventory number ВО-171, stored in the Tobolsk Historical and Architectural Museum-Reserve (THAMR) depositary. Previously, the helmet attracted the attention of scientists; however it has never been the object of an independent scientific study. The key objectives is to provide a description of the construction and design of the helmet, clarify its dating and attribution, reconstruct its potential original appearance. The helmet was obtained from Siberian Tatars in 1910. The name of the donator is not specified. Presumably, the helmet was donated to Tobolsk Provincial Museum by the descendants of an authoritative Tatar dynasty — the Kulmametievs. The Kulmametievs have been the donators of other Siberian and Central Asian helmets, stored in Tobolsk Museum-Reserve depositary, in 1908–1910. It has been established that the helmet is part of the Oirat spherocylindrical grouping (‘jug-shaped’, ‘vase-shaped’) of helmets of the late Middle Ages and early Modern Period. It is likely that the craftsmen who made such helmets were inspired by the Buddhist stupa (in Kalmyk ‘suburgan’). Based on the construction and design features (including the presence of Buddhist symbols on the crown) it is possible that the helmet was forged by Oirat or South Siberian gunsmiths for a wealthy Oirat Buddhist warrior in the 1610’s — 1680’s. Originally the helmet was equipped with a three-part platelike aventail, that is currently connected to the helmet of Siberian Tatars (inventory number: ВО-70). A comprehensive analysis of the sources made it possible to reconstruct the likely initial appearance of the helmet. The helmet under inventory number ВО-171 presents a striking example of the 17th century Oirat helmets. It could be obtained by Siberian Tatars as war booty, political present or trade exchange. The history of the helmet is a vivid example of interaction between Mongolian- and Turkic-speaking population of Central Asia and Western Siberia during the period of ‘Minor Mongolian (Oirat) invasion’ in the 17th — the middle of the 18th centuries.

Nearly seventy years ago, a group of competitive explorers, few on good terms, reconnoitred the Maya ruins of Bonampak, Chiapas, Mexico. There, in what is now known as Structure 1, they found the most densely figured and compositionally ambitious paintings from Precolumbian America – the Bonampak murals, in a building dated by their final, painted notation to c. AD 791. The themes, events, dramatis personae, dynastic setting and execution of the murals find general consensus among scholars, if with some disagreement about detail and, in some respects, the overall thematic focus of the paintings. A key, under-used resource consists of some 125 texts or captions in hieroglyphic writing that identify, or studiously ignore, the serried warriors, dancers in feathered costumes, courtly ladies, foes in extremis, ambassadors, and lords in repose that crowd the murals. Brought to crisp view by infrared vidicon imaging in 1996, subsequently processed and here reported, the captions pose further questions about the decision to name people, past and present. The typology, positioning, relative weighting and onomastic contents of the captions at Bonampak clarify a veridical story, artfully positioned and cadenced, that stresses a tale of three youths. Likely brothers, they can be seen to enjoy a distinct centrality in the murals, more so than the ruler himself. The Bonampak paintings thus discharge several functions. They offer a specific account of a prince's career, assisted by two young peers, a primer for the skills and accomplishments of a suitable heir, a vertical account of generational interplay at times of transition, and a horizontal lesson, too, that a good prince both leads and relies on brothers, close kin and courtiers for collective success. Whether the path to the throne was completed remains an unresolved matter, insoluble without further evidence.

These are the three lectures about Croatian nationalism presented in the Serbian Culture Club in 1940. They review the history of the Croato-Serbian relations in a specific way, from the time when the Serbs settled in the regions of the former Croatian medieval state, after the Turkish conquest of the Balkans, after the fall of Bosnia in 1463 and after the Moh?cs Battle in 1526, till the period preceding World War II. Comparing Serbian and Croatian nationalism, the author points out that nationalism among the Croats appeared relatively late, that it did not have deeper folk roots and that at first it was the nationalism of the upper class. It was a feudal-estate nationalism but later there also appeared Austro-Catholic nationalism of the lower class in the regions under the Habsburgs. Enmity, hatred towards the Serbs and Serbophobia were the common features of these two nationalisms. The author points out that the feudal-estate nationalism of the upper class was caused by the state-legal and agrarian-legal regulation in the regions of the former Croatian kingdom settled by the Serbs. These regions, under the name of Military Border, were granted a special legal system. As for their state-legal status, the Serbs were completely excluded from the rule of the Croatian Ban the Croatian Assembly, and were under the jurisdiction of the Austrian military commanders ? therefore, directly under Vienna. As for the agrarian-legal status, Vienna completely freed the inhabitants of the Border from all taxes for the Croatian gentry, who had owned these regions before the Turkish offensive; the reason was to motivate the Serbs for permanent military service at the Border and to use these regulations to lure new Serbs-solders from the neighbouring Turkish Empire. And the dynastic-catholic nationalism of the lower class clashed with the Serbs, inhabitants of the Border, primarily because of the religious intolerance, of the irresistable desire to convert the Serbs into Catholicism. In addition, envy towards the Serbs in the Border area ? warriors and free men ? began to develop more and more among the Croatian peasants in the Ban?s Croatia, in the so-called provincial, who still remained the serfs of their gentry. The author underlines that the Croatian Serbophobias have deep historical and social roots, and points to the typical historical facts which confirm that. Croatian nationalism withdrew only sporadically before the Illyrian Yugoslavism, which saw several rises and falls in Croatia. Yugoslavism was strengthened only when the pressure from Vienna, Pest or the Italians was stronger and, secondly, it worked only when there were chances to realize it from Zagreb, not from Belgrade. As soon as one of these two conditions was not met, Croatian spirit exclusively prevailed. The author disagrees with those who believed that the Croatian nationalism could have been neutralized by decentralization, federalization and democratization of the common state. He thinks that the Croatian nationalist movement did not want a just arrangement of the relations with the Serbs, but Croatia with the border on the Drina, in which the Serbian nation would be stifled with the use of "modern" methods. Therefore, he believes that only a resolute resistance of the Serbs in the defence of their interests could stop Croatian chauvinism.

Spain is more commonly known as Andalusia, the Andalusia comes from the word Vandalusia, which means the country of the Vandals, because the southern part of the Peninsula was once ruled by the Vandals before they were defeated by Western Gothia in the fifth century. This area was ruled by Islam after the rulers of The Umayyah seized the peninsula's land from the West Gothies during the time of the Caliph Al-Walid ibn Abdul Malik. Islam entered Spain (Cordoba) in 93 AH (711 AD) through the North African route under the leadership of Tariq bin Ziyad who led the Islamic army to conquer Andalusia. Before the conquest of Spain, Muslims had taken control of North Africa and made it one of the provinces from the Umayyad Dynasty. Full control of North Africa took place in the days of Caliph Abdul Malik (685-705 AD). Conquest of the North African region first defeated until becoming one of the provinces of the Umayyad Caliph spent 53 years, starting from 30 H (Muawiyah ibn Abi Sufyan's reign) to 83 H (al-Walid's period). Before being defeated and then ruled by Islam, in this region there were sacs which became the basis of the power of the Roman Empire, namely the Gothic Kingdom. In the process of conquering Spain there were three Islamic heroes who could be said to be the most effective in leading units of troops there. They are Tharif ibn Malik, Tariq ibn Ziyad, and Musa ibn Nushair. Subsequent territorial expansion emerged during the reign of Caliph Umar ibn Abdil Aziz in the year 99 AH/717 AD, with the aim of controlling the area around the Pyrenian mountains and South France. The second largest invasion of the Muslims, whose movement began at the beginning of the 8th century AD, has reached all of Spain and reached far to Central France and important parts of Italy. The victories achieved by Muslims appear so easy. It cannot be separated from the existence of external and internal factors. During the conquest of Spain by Muslims, the social, political and economic conditions of this country were in a sad state. Politically, the Spanish region was torn apart and divided into several small countries. At the same time, the Gothic rulers were intolerant of the religious beliefs adopted by the rulers, namely the Monophysites, especially those who adhered to other religions, Jews. Adherents of Judaism, the largest part of the Spanish population, were forced to be baptized to Christianity. Those who are unwilling brutally tortured and killed. The people are divided into the class system, so that the situation is filled with poverty, oppression, and the absence of equality. In such situations, the oppressed await the arrival of the liberator and the liberator was from Muslims. Warrior figures and Islamic soldiers who were involved in the conquest of Spain are strong figures, their soldiers are compact, united, and full of confidence. They are also capable, courageous, and resilient in facing every problem. Equally important are the teachings of Islam shown by the Islamic soldiers, like tolerance, brotherhood, and help each other. The attitude of tolerance of religion and brotherhood contained in the personalities of the Muslims caused the Spanish population to welcome the presence of Islam there. Since the first time Islam entered in the land of Spain until the collapse of the last Islamic empire was about seven and half centuries, Islam played a big role, both in fields of intellectual progress (philosophy, science, fiqh, music and art, language and literature) and the splendor of physical buildings (Cordova and Granada). The long history passed by Muslims in Spain can be divided into six periods. Spanish Muslims reached the peak of progress and glory rivaled the glory of the Abbasid sovereignty in Baghdad. Abdurrahman Al-Nasir founded the Cordova University. He preceded Al-Azhar Cairo and Baghdad Nizhamiyah.

Ancient Chinese ceramics is usually related or equated with the terms pottery and porcelain. In fact the manufacture of porcelain in ancient China is one of the most important chapters in the history of ceramics. Porcelain products were developed gradually from stoneware over a time span of nearly a thousand years. The typical white and translucent porcelain that we know as China was probably first made in the ninth century.

Трагические последствия нашествия татаромонгол на Аланию наряду с уничтожением государственности имели следствием последующие волны миграции уцелевшего населения, что способствовало возникновению крупных аланских поселений на западе и востоке Евразии. Мигрировавшие на территорию современной Венгрии аланы достаточно известны исторической науке, чего нельзя сказать о той их части, которая в свое время по тем или иным причинам ушла в Китай и Монголию. В начале ХIII в. перед захватившими Северный Китай монголами стояли две первоочередные задачи: завоевание Южного Китая и организация управления над огромной территорией. Для этих целей они использовали представителей покоренных народов и в их числе алан как военную силу. Будучи в состоянии феодальной раздробленности, аланские князья не консолидировались в борьбе с общим врагом, наоборот часть из них по разным причинам перешла на сторону противника, другие же подчинились монголам после захвата Алании. В статье приводится множество примеров перехода на сторону врага аланских князей с подвластным населением и участие их в войнах монгольских ханов ради защиты интересов Юаньской империи. Процесс движения аланских всадников на восток проходит в три этапа: после поражения алан в 1222 г, до завоевания Алании Батыем и после окончательного покорения Алании в 1239 г. Судя по китайским и другим источникам, 30тысячная аланская конница принимала активное участие во всех военных операциях монголов на востоке, проявив себя как отличные воины. Часть алан (или асуды) была направлена во Внутреннюю Монголию, где они со временем, живя разбросанно среди монгольских племен, ассимилировались, потеряв язык, культуру, религию. После падения монгольской династии Юань (1368), дружина аланасов покинула Китай вместе с последним монгольским императором Тогонтимуром. Tragic consequences of the TatarMongolian invasion into Alania, along with the destruction of the statehood resulted in the subsequent waves of migration of the survived population, which contributed to the establishment and growth of large Alanian settlements both in the west and in the east of Eurasia. The Alans,who migrated to the territory of Hungary, are quite wellknown in the historical science, which is not the case with the part of the Alanswho moved to China and Mongolia for whatever reasons. In the early ХIIIth century the Mongolians taking over the Northern China faced the following challenges: conquering Southern China and arranging administration for this huge territory. For these purposes they used representatives of the conquered peoples, among themAlans, as military force. Being in the state of feudal disunity, the Alanian princes were not able to unite in the fight against a common enemy in fact, part of them, for various reasons, defected to the enemy, others subjected to their authorityafter the occupation of Alania by Mongolians. The article gives a large number of examples of Alanian princes defection to the enemy with theirdependents and their participation in wars on the side of Mongolian khans to protect the interests of the Yuan Dynasty. The Alanian cavalrymens movement to the east was carried out in three stages: after the defeat of the Alans in 1222, before Batu Khans conquest and after the final conquest of Alania in 1239. According to the Chinese and other sources, Alanian cavalry, totaling to approximately 30000 warriors, was actively involved in all military operations of the Mongols in the east, where they proved to be great warriors. Part of the Alans (or Asuds) had been sent to the Inner Mongolia, where dispersed among Mongolian tribes, they were being assimilated losing their language, culture and religion. After the fall of the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty (1368), the Alanian retinue left China with the last Mongolian emperor Toghontemr.

В статье на основе сведений, представленных в повествовании Марко Поло и в китайской «Истории Юань», исследуется вопрос о месте убийства аланских воинов, случившемся в правление великого хана Хубилая при занятии монгольскими войсками одного из городов империи Южная Сун. Изучение данного вопроса представляется актуальным, поскольку указанные источники, одинаковым образом передавая общую канву этих событий, расходятся в некоторых деталях, к которым, среди прочих, относится и передача названия города, где эти события происходили. Приводится краткая характеристика использованных источников и сопоставление представленных в них сведений, а также историография вопроса, которая, будучи основана на разных сведениях, имеющихся в источниках, дает противоречивые указания на место рассматриваемых событий. Проведенное исследование позволяет утверждать, что имеются четыре повествования, содержащие сведения о гибели аланских воинов при завоевании монголами империи Южная Сун: три из них содержатся в жизнеописаниях асских тысячников Атачи и Юйваши, а также асского владетеля Ханхусы и его потомков, представленных в «Истории Юань», а одно — в повествовании Марко Поло, дошедшем до нас в различных редакциях. На основе сопоставления данных указанных источников можно полагать, что указание Марко Поло на город Чанчжоу как место рассматриваемых событий является ошибочным, поскольку в жизнеописаниях асских военачальников, представленных в «Истории Юань», этот город назван Чжэньчао. В настоящее время город Чжэньчао представляет собой городской уезд Чаоху, входящий в городской округ Хэфэй, являющийся административным центром провинции Аньхой. The issue of Alanic warriors slaughter that occurred in the time of the rule of the Great Khan Kubilai during the occupation of one of the cities of the Southern Song Empire by the Mongolian troops is investigated in the article on the basis of information presented in Marco Polo’s narrative and in Chinese «History of Yuan». The study of this issue seems relevant since these sources giving the general outline of these events in the same way, differ in some details namely differently spelling the name of the city, where these events took place. A brief description of these sources and a comparison of the information presented in them are adduced as well as the historiography of this issue containing contradictory location of the events being based on the varied information about this issue available in these sources. The study maintains that there are four narratives containing information about the death of Alanic warriors during the Mongols’ conquest of the Southern Song Empire: three of them are contained in the biographies of the As chiliarchs Adachi and Yuwashi and of the As ruler Hanghusi’s and his descendants presented in «The History of Yuan», and the fourth is contained in Marco Polo’s narration which has come down to us in various editions. Comparison of the information on this issue provided by these sources allows to suppose that Marco Polo’s designation of the city of Changzhou as the location of the events is erroneous since the city is named Zhenchao in the biographies of the As military leaders presented in the Yuan History. At present the city of Zhenchao is a city county of Chaohu that is part of prefectural municipality of Hefei, the center of Anhui Province.

This article researches on the life of Zahiriddin Muhammad Babur and his contribution to the development of literature, science, art and so on. In this case, various opinions of Uzbek writers about Babur are also revealed. KEYWORDS: Zahiriddin Muhammad Babur, scholar, warrior, writer, king, dynasty, Timurids, scientist, translator.

Tsiang, Sarah. Warriors and Wailers: One Hundred Ancient Jobs You Might Have Relished or Reviled. Illus. M. Newbigging. Toronto: Annick Press, 2012. Print. I did not confirm that there really are 100 jobs in this colourful and well-illustrated little book but there certainly are many, and a wide variety. The index does list the title’s “wailer” but not “warrior.” In fact, there are several warrior-ish jobs such as watchtower guard, female warrior, military service-conscripted, Shaolin warrior monk, and even a few illegal warrior-like positions (e.g., assassin, pirate admiral, and rebel leader). This book is one in a series of “jobs in history” books by Annick Press but is not merely a formulaic adaptation. These really are ancient Chinese jobs and many probably did not exist elsewhere (e.g., pearl maker, jade worker, lacquer worker, acupuncturist, or bone diviner). It also seems the jobs are arranged in an appropriate order, reflecting decreasing rank and honour from the Emperor and imperial jobs, through scholars and servants, to peasant farmers, then artisans and craftspeople, and finally, merchants who did not grow or make anything (with some illegal jobs at the end). The short introductions to the Chinese dynastic method of counting years, education, rank and honour, religion and schools of thought are really helpful in providing context to a culture that is quite different for most readers. If I could suggest one addition, it would be a consideration of how we know today about jobs that existed between the Han and Tang dynasties (206 BCE to 907 CE) more than 1000 years ago. The answers (presumably a combination of the ancients’ meticulous record keeping and desire for meaningful artistic ornament, combined with conscientious preservation, and modern skills in the humanities and social sciences) would shed further light on interesting jobs, careers, and intellectual pursuits for today’s students. There may be a few, minor short-comings. One is a subtle, underlying theme suggesting more individual choice of careers than there actually was. Another is some job “descriptions” refer to something that maybe happened only once in history – not really an everyday job. Also, the examples of Chinese script, while illustrative, seem to be just a little off in terms of balance or correct stroke order. But these are minor. Overall, this book is a wonderful introduction to Ancient China that should stimulate further exploration into the fascinating study of History. Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: David SulzDavid is a Public Services Librarian at University of Alberta and liaison librarian to Economics, Religious Studies, and Social Work. He has university studies in Library Studies, History, Elementary Education, Japanese, and Economics; he formerly taught in schools and museums. His interests include physical activity, music, home improvements, and above all, things Japanese.

The curtain rose. The howling of desert wind filled the performance hall in the Shanghai Grand Theatre. Into the center stage, where a scenic construction of a mountain cliff and a desert landscape was dimly lit, entered the character of the Daoist priest Wang Yuanlu (1849–1931), performed by Chen Yizong. Dressed in a worn and dusty outfit of dark blue cotton, characteristic of Daoist priests, Wang began to sweep the floor. After a few moments, he discovered a hidden chambre sealed inside one of the rock sanctuaries carved into the cliff.Signaled by the quick, crystalline, stirring wave of sound from the chimes, a melodious Chinese ocarina solo joined in slowly from the background. Astonished by thousands of Buddhist sūtra scrolls, wall paintings, and sculptures he had just accidentally discovered in the caves, Priest Wang set his broom aside and began to examine these treasures. Dawn had not yet arrived, and the desert sky was pitch-black. Priest Wang held his oil lamp high, strode rhythmically in excitement, sat crossed-legged in a meditative pose, and unfolded a scroll. The sound of the ocarina became fuller and richer and the texture of the music more complex, as several other instruments joined in.Below is the opening scene of the award-winning, theatrical dance-drama Dunhuang, My Dreamland, created by China’s state-sponsored Lanzhou Song and Dance Theatre in 2000. Figure 1a: Poster Side A of Dunhuang, My Dreamland Figure 1b: Poster Side B of Dunhuang, My DreamlandThe scene locates the dance-drama in the rock sanctuaries that today are known as the Dunhuang Mogao Caves, housing Buddhist art accumulated over a period of a thousand years, one of the best well-known UNESCO heritages on the Silk Road. Historically a frontier metropolis, Dunhuang was a strategic site along the Silk Road in northwestern China, a crossroads of trade, and a locus for religious, cultural, and intellectual influences since the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.). Travellers, especially Buddhist monks from India and central Asia, passing through Dunhuang on their way to Chang’an (present day Xi’an), China’s ancient capital, would stop to meditate in the Mogao Caves and consult manuscripts in the monastery's library. At the same time, Chinese pilgrims would travel by foot from China through central Asia to Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, playing a key role in the exchanges between ancient China and the outside world. Travellers from China would stop to acquire provisions at Dunhuang before crossing the Gobi Desert to continue on their long journey abroad. Figure 2: Dunhuang Mogao CavesThis article approaches the idea of “abroad” by examining the present-day imagination of journeys along the Silk Road—specifically, staged performances of the various Silk Road journey-themed dance-dramas sponsored by the Chinese state for enhancing its cultural and foreign policies since the 1970s (Kuang).As ethnomusicologists have demonstrated, musicians, choreographers, and playwrights often utilise historical materials in their performances to construct connections between the past and the present (Bohlman; Herzfeld; Lam; Rees; Shelemay; Tuohy; Wade; Yung: Rawski; Watson). The ancient Silk Road, which linked the Mediterranean coast with central China and beyond, via oasis towns such as Samarkand, has long been associated with the concept of “journeying abroad.” Journeys to distant, foreign lands and encounters of unknown, mysterious cultures along the Silk Road have been documented in historical records, such as A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (Faxian) and The Great Tang Records on the Western Regions (Xuanzang), and illustrated in classical literature, such as The Travels of Marco Polo (Polo) and the 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West (Wu). These journeys—coming and going from multiple directions and to different destinations—have inspired contemporary staged performance for audiences around the globe.Home and Abroad: Dunhuang and the Silk RoadDunhuang, My Dreamland (2000), the contemporary dance-drama, staged the journey of a young pilgrim painter travelling from Chang’an to a land of the unfamiliar and beyond borders, in search for the arts that have inspired him. Figure 3: A scene from Dunhuang, My Dreamland showing the young pilgrim painter in the Gobi Desert on the ancient Silk RoadFar from his home, he ended his journey in Dunhuang, historically considered the northwestern periphery of China, well beyond Yangguan and Yumenguan, the bordering passes that separate China and foreign lands. Later scenes in Dunhuang, My Dreamland, portrayed through multiethnic music and dances, the dynamic interactions among merchants, cultural and religious envoys, warriors, and politicians that were making their own journey from abroad to China. The theatrical dance-drama presents a historically inspired, re-imagined vision of both “home” and “abroad” to its audiences as they watch the young painter travel along the Silk Road, across the Gobi Desert, arriving at his own ideal, artistic “homeland”, the Dunhuang Mogao Caves. Since his journey is ultimately a spiritual one, the conceptualisation of travelling “abroad” could also be perceived as “a journey home.”Staged more than four hundred times since it premiered in Beijing in April 2000, Dunhuang, My Dreamland is one of the top ten titles in China’s National Stage Project and one of the most successful theatrical dance-dramas ever produced in China. With revenue of more than thirty million renminbi (RMB), it ranks as the most profitable theatrical dance-drama ever produced in China, with a preproduction cost of six million RMB. The production team receives financial support from China’s Ministry of Culture for its “distinctive ethnic features,” and its “aim to promote traditional Chinese culture,” according to Xu Rong, an official in the Cultural Industry Department of the Ministry. Labeled an outstanding dance-drama of the Chinese nation, it aims to present domestic and international audiences with a vision of China as a historically multifaceted and cosmopolitan nation that has been in close contact with the outside world through the ancient Silk Road. Its production company has been on tour in selected cities throughout China and in countries abroad, including Austria, Spain, and France, literarily making the young pilgrim painter’s “journey along the Silk Road” a new journey abroad, off stage and in reality.Dunhuang, My Dreamland was not the first, nor is it the last, staged performances that portrays the Chinese re-imagination of “journeying abroad” along the ancient Silk Road. It was created as one of many versions of Dunhuang bihua yuewu, a genre of music, dance, and dramatic performances created in the early twentieth century and based primarily on artifacts excavated from the Mogao Caves (Kuang). “The Mogao Caves are the greatest repository of early Chinese art,” states Mimi Gates, who works to increase public awareness of the UNESCO site and raise funds toward its conservation. “Located on the Chinese end of the Silk Road, it also is the place where many cultures of the world intersected with one another, so you have Greek and Roman, Persian and Middle Eastern, Indian and Chinese cultures, all interacting. Given the nature of our world today, it is all very relevant” (Pollack). As an expressive art form, this genre has been thriving since the late 1970s contributing to the global imagination of China’s “Silk Road journeys abroad” long before Dunhuang, My Dreamland achieved its domestic and international fame. For instance, in 2004, The Thousand-Handed and Thousand-Eyed Avalokiteśvara—one of the most representative (and well-known) Dunhuang bihua yuewu programs—was staged as a part of the cultural program during the Paralympic Games in Athens, Greece. This performance, as well as other Dunhuang bihua yuewu dance programs was the perfect embodiment of a foreign religion that arrived in China from abroad and became Sinicized (Kuang). Figure 4: Mural from Dunhuang Mogao Cave No. 45A Brief History of Staging the Silk Road JourneysThe staging of the Silk Road journeys abroad began in the late 1970s. Historically, the Silk Road signifies a multiethnic, cosmopolitan frontier, which underwent incessant conflicts between Chinese sovereigns and nomadic peoples (as well as between other groups), but was strongly imbued with the customs and institutions of central China (Duan, Mair, Shi, Sima). In the twentieth century, when China was no longer an empire, but had become what the early 20th-century reformer Liang Qichao (1873–1929) called “a nation among nations,” the long history of the Silk Road and the colourful, legendary journeys abroad became instrumental in the formation of a modern Chinese nation of unified diversity rooted in an ancient cosmopolitan past. The staged Silk Road theme dance-dramas thus participate in this formation of the Chinese imagination of “nation” and “abroad,” as they aestheticise Chinese history and geography. History and geography—aspects commonly considered constituents of a nation as well as our conceptualisations of “abroad”—are “invariably aestheticized to a certain degree” (Bakhtin 208). Diverse historical and cultural elements from along the Silk Road come together in this performance genre, which can be considered the most representative of various possible stagings of the history and culture of the Silk Road journeys.In 1979, the Chinese state officials in Gansu Province commissioned the benchmark dance-drama Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road, a spectacular theatrical dance-drama praising the pure and noble friendship which existed between the peoples of China and other countries in the Tang dynasty (618-907 C.E.). While its plot also revolves around the Dunhuang Caves and the life of a painter, staged at one of the most critical turning points in modern Chinese history, the work as a whole aims to present the state’s intention of re-establishing diplomatic ties with the outside world after the Cultural Revolution. Unlike Dunhuang, My Dreamland, it presents a nation’s journey abroad and home. To accomplish this goal, Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road introduces the fictional character Yunus, a wealthy Persian merchant who provides the audiences a vision of the historical figure of Peroz III, the last Sassanian prince, who after the Arab conquest of Iran in 651 C.E., found refuge in China. By incorporating scenes of ethnic and folk dances, the drama then stages the journey of painter Zhang’s daughter Yingniang to Persia (present-day Iran) and later, Yunus’s journey abroad to the Tang dynasty imperial court as the Persian Empire’s envoy.Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road, since its debut at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on the first of October 1979 and shortly after at the Theatre La Scala in Milan, has been staged in more than twenty countries and districts, including France, Italy, Japan, Thailand, Russia, Latvia, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and recently, in 2013, at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York.“The Road”: Staging the Journey TodayWithin the contemporary context of global interdependencies, performing arts have been used as strategic devices for social mobilisation and as a means to represent and perform modern national histories and foreign policies (Davis, Rees, Tian, Tuohy, Wong, David Y. H. Wu). The Silk Road has been chosen as the basis for these state-sponsored, extravagantly produced, and internationally staged contemporary dance programs. In 2008, the welcoming ceremony and artistic presentation at the Olympic Games in Beijing featured twenty apsara dancers and a Dunhuang bihua yuewu dancer with long ribbons, whose body was suspended in mid-air on a rectangular LED extension held by hundreds of performers; on the giant LED screen was a depiction of the ancient Silk Road.In March 2013, Chinese president Xi Jinping introduced the initiatives “Silk Road Economic Belt” and “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” during his journeys abroad in Kazakhstan and Indonesia. These initiatives are now referred to as “One Belt, One Road.” The State Council lists in details the policies and implementation plans for this initiative on its official web page, www.gov.cn. In April 2013, the China Institute in New York launched a yearlong celebration, starting with "Dunhuang: Buddhist Art and the Gateway of the Silk Road" with a re-creation of one of the caves and a selection of artifacts from the site. In March 2015, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top economic planning agency, released a new action plan outlining key details of the “One Belt, One Road” initiative. Xi Jinping has made the program a centrepiece of both his foreign and domestic economic policies. One of the central economic strategies is to promote cultural industry that could enhance trades along the Silk Road.Encouraged by the “One Belt, One Road” policies, in March 2016, The Silk Princess premiered in Xi’an and was staged at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing the following July. While Dunhuang, My Dreamland and Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road were inspired by the Buddhist art found in Dunhuang, The Silk Princess, based on a story about a princess bringing silk and silkworm-breeding skills to the western regions of China in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) has a different historical origin. The princess's story was portrayed in a woodblock from the Tang Dynasty discovered by Sir Marc Aurel Stein, a British archaeologist during his expedition to Xinjiang (now Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region) in the early 19th century, and in a temple mural discovered during a 2002 Chinese-Japanese expedition in the Dandanwulike region. Figure 5: Poster of The Silk PrincessIn January 2016, the Shannxi Provincial Song and Dance Troupe staged The Silk Road, a new theatrical dance-drama. Unlike Dunhuang, My Dreamland, the newly staged dance-drama “centers around the ‘road’ and the deepening relationship merchants and travellers developed with it as they traveled along its course,” said Director Yang Wei during an interview with the author. According to her, the show uses seven archetypes—a traveler, a guard, a messenger, and so on—to present the stories that took place along this historic route. Unbounded by specific space or time, each of these archetypes embodies the foreign-travel experience of a different group of individuals, in a manner that may well be related to the social actors of globalised culture and of transnationalism today. Figure 6: Poster of The Silk RoadConclusionAs seen in Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road and Dunhuang, My Dreamland, staging the processes of Silk Road journeys has become a way of connecting the Chinese imagination of “home” with the Chinese imagination of “abroad.” Staging a nation’s heritage abroad on contemporary stages invites a new imagination of homeland, borders, and transnationalism. Once aestheticised through staged performances, such as that of the Dunhuang bihua yuewu, the historical and topological landscape of Dunhuang becomes a performed narrative, embodying the national heritage.The staging of Silk Road journeys continues, and is being developed into various forms, from theatrical dance-drama to digital exhibitions such as the Smithsonian’s Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottes at Dunhuang (Stromberg) and the Getty’s Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China's Silk Road (Sivak and Hood). 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This paper argues that illegitimacy is a concept that relates to almost all of the fundamental ways in which Western society has traditionally organised itself. Sex, family and marriage, and the power of the church and state, are all implicated in the various ways in which society reproduces itself from generation to generation. All employ the concepts of legitimacy and illegitimacy to define what is and what is not permissible. Further, the creation of the illegitimate can occur in more or less legitimate ways; for example, through acts of consent, on the one hand; and force, on the other. This paper uses the study of an English Renaissance text, Shakespeare’s Henry V, to argue that these concepts remain potent ones, regularly invoked as a means of identifying and denouncing perceived threats to the good ordering of the social fabric. In western societies, many of which may be constructed as post-marriage, illegitimate is often applied as a descriptor to unlicensed migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. In countries subject to war and conflict, rape as a war crime is increasingly used by armies to create fractures within the subject community and to undermine the paternity of a cohort of children. In societies where extramarital sex is prohibited, or where rape has been used as a weapon of war, the bastard acts as physical evidence that an unsanctioned act has been committed and the laws of society broken, a “failure in social control” (Laslett, Oosterveen and Smith, 5). This paper explores these themes, using past conceptions of the illegitimate and bastardy as an explanatory concept for problematic aspects of legitimacy in contemporary culture.Bastardy was a particularly important issue in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe when an individual’s genealogy was a major determining factor of social status, property and identity (MacFarlane). Further, illegitimacy was not necessarily an aspect of a person’s birth. It could become a status into which they were thrust through the use of divorce, for example, as when Henry VIII illegitimised his daughter Mary after annulling his marriage to Mary’s mother, Catherine of Aragon. Alison Findlay’s study of illegitimacy in Renaissance literature lists over 70 portrayals of illegitimacy, or characters threatened with illegitimacy, between 1588 and 1652 (253–257). In addition to illegitimacy at an individual level however, discussions around what constitutes the “illegitimate” figure in terms of its relationship with the family and the wider community, are also applicable to broader concerns over national identity. In work such as Stages of History, Phyllis Rackin dissected images of masculine community present in Shakespeare’s history plays to expose underlying tensions over gender, power and identity. As the study of Henry V indicates in the following discussion, illegitimacy was also a metaphor brought to bear on issues of national as well as personal identity in the early modern era. The image of the nation as a “family” to denote unity and security, both then and now, is rendered complex and problematic by introducing the “illegitimate” into that nation-family image. The rhetoric used in the recent debate over the Scottish independence referendum, and in Australia’s ongoing controversy over “illegitimate” migration, both indicate that the concept of a “national bastard”, an amorphous figure that resists precise definition, remains a potent rhetorical force. Before turning to the detail of Henry V, it is useful to review the use of “illegitimate” in the early modern context. Lacking an established position within a family, a bastard was in danger of being marginalised and deprived of any but the most basic social identity. If acknowledged by a family, the bastard might become a drain on that family’s economic resources, drawing money away from legitimate children and resented accordingly. Such resentment may be reciprocated. In his essay “On Envy” the scientist, author, lawyer and eventually Lord Chancellor of England Francis Bacon explained the destructive impulse of bastardy as follows: “Deformed persons, and eunuchs, and old men, and bastards, are envious. For he that cannot possibly mend his own case will do what he can to impair another’s.” Thus, bastardy becomes a plot device which can be used to explain and to rationalise evil. In early modern English literature, as today, bastardy as a defect of birth is only one meaning for the word. What does “in everything illegitimate” (quoting Shakespeare’s character Thersites in Troilus and Cressida [V.viii.8]) mean for our understanding of both our own society and that of the late sixteenth century? Bastardy is an important ideologeme, in that it is a “unit of meaning through which the ‘social space’ constructs the ideological values of its signs” (Schleiner, 195). In other words, bastardy has an ideological significance that stretches far beyond a question of parental marital status, extending to become a metaphor for national as well as personal loss of identity. Anti-Catholic polemicists of the early sixteenth century accused priests of begetting a generation of bastards that would overthrow English society (Fish, 7). The historian Polydore Vergil was accused of suborning and bastardising English history by plagiarism and book destruction: “making himself father to other men’s works” (Hay, 159). Why is illegitimacy so important and so universal a metaphor? The term “bastard” in its sense of mixture or mongrel has been applied to language, to weaponry, to almost anything that is a distorted but recognisable version of something else. As such, the concept of bastardy lends itself readily to the rhetorical figure of metaphor which, as the sixteenth century writer George Puttenham puts it, is “a kind of wresting of a single word from his owne right signification, to another not so natural, but yet of some affinitie or coueniencie with it” (Puttenham, 178). Later on in The Art of English Poesie, Puttenham uses the word “bastard” to describe something that can best be recognised as being an imperfect version of something else: “This figure [oval] taketh his name of an egge […] and is as it were a bastard or imperfect rounde declining toward a longitude.” (101). “Bastard” as a descriptive term in this context has meaning because it connects the subject of discussion with its original. Michael Neill takes an anthropological approach to the question of why the bastard in early modern drama is almost invariably depicted as monstrous or evil. In “In everything illegitimate: Imagining the Bastard in Renaissance Drama,” Neill argues that bastards are “filthy”, using the term as it is construed by Mary Douglas in her work Purity and Danger. Douglas argues that dirt is defined by being where it should not be, it is “matter in the wrong place, belonging to ‘a residual category, rejected from our normal scheme of classifications,’ a source of fundamental pollution” (134). In this argument the figure of the bastard aligns strongly with the concept of the Other (Said). Arguably, however, the anthropologist Edmund Leach provides a more useful model to understand the associations of hybridity, monstrosity and bastardy. In “Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse”, Leach asserts that our perceptions of the world around us are largely based on binary distinctions; that an object is one thing, and is not another. If an object combines attributes of itself with those of another, the interlapping area will be suppressed so that there may be no hesitation in discerning between them. This repressed area, the area which is neither one thing nor another but “liminal” (40), becomes the object of fear and of fascination: – taboo. It is this liminality that creates anxiety surrounding bastards, as they occupy the repressed, “taboo” area between family and outsiders. In that it is born out of wedlock, the bastard child has no place within the family structure; yet as the child of a family member it cannot be completely relegated to the external world. Michael Neill rightly points out the extent to which the topos of illegitimacy is associated with the disintegration of boundaries and a consequent loss of coherence and identity, arguing that the bastard is “a by-product of the attempt to define and preserve a certain kind of social order” (147). The concept of the liminal figure, however, recognises that while a by-product can be identified and eliminated, a bastard can neither be contained nor excluded. Consequently, the bastard challenges the established order; to be illegitimate, it must retain its connection with the legitimate figure from which it diverges. Thus the illegitimate stands as a permanent threat to the legitimate, a reminder of what the legitimate can become. Bastardy is used by Shakespeare to indicate the fear of loss of national as well as personal identity. Although noted for its triumphalist construction of a hero-king, Henry V is also shot through with uncertainties and fears, fears which are frequently expressed using illegitimacy as a metaphor. Notwithstanding its battle scenes and militarism, it is the lawyers, genealogists and historians who initiate and drive forward the narrative in Henry V (McAlindon, 435). The reward of the battle for Henry is not so much the crown of France as the assurance of his own legitimacy as monarch. The lengthy and legalistic recital of genealogies with which the Archbishop of Canterbury proves to general English satisfaction that their English king Henry holds a better lineal right to the French throne than its current occupant may not be quite as “clear as is the summer sun” (Henry V 1.2.83), but Henry’s question about whether he may “with right and conscience” make his claim to the French throne elicits a succinct response. The churchmen tell Henry that, in order to demonstrate that he is truly the descendant of his royal forefathers, Henry will need to validate that claim. In other words, the legitimacy of Henry’s identity, based on his connection with the past, is predicated on his current behaviour:Gracious lord,Stand for your own; unwind your bloody flag;Look back into your mighty ancestors:Go, my dread lord, to your great-grandsire’s tomb,From whom you claim; invoke his warlike spirit…Awake remembrance of these valiant dead,And with your puissant arm renew their feats:You are their heir, you sit upon their throne,The blood and courage that renowned themRuns in your veins….Your brother kings and monarchs of the earthDo all expect that you should rouse yourselfAs did the former lions of your blood. (Henry V 1.2.122 – 124)These exhortations to Henry are one instance of the importance of genealogy and its immediate connection to personal and national identity. The subject recurs throughout the play as French and English characters both invoke a discourse of legitimacy and illegitimacy to articulate fears of invasion, defeat, and loss of personal and national identity. One particular example of this is the brief scene in which the French royalty allow themselves to contemplate the prospect of defeat at the hands of the English:Fr. King. ‘Tis certain, he hath pass’d the river Somme.Constable. And if he be not fought withal, my lord,Let us not live in France; let us quit all,And give our vineyards to a barbarous people.Dauphin. O Dieu vivant! shall a few sprays of us,The emptying of our fathers’ luxury,Our scions, put in wild and savage stock,Spirt up so suddenly into the clouds,And overlook their grafters?Bourbon. Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards!...Dauphin. By faith and honour,Our madams mock at us, and plainly sayOur mettle is bred out; and they will giveTheir bodies to the lust of English youthTo new-store France with bastard warriors. (Henry V 3.5.1 – 31).Rape and sexual violence pervade the language of Henry V. France itself is constructed as a sexually vulnerable female with “womby vaultages” and a “mistress-court” (2.4.131, 140). In one of his most famous speeches Henry graphically describes the rape and slaughter that accompanies military defeat (3.3). Reading Henry V solely in terms of its association of military conquest with sexual violence, however, runs the risk of overlooking the image of bastards themselves as both the threat and the outcome of national defeat. The lines quoted above exemplify the extent to which illegitimacy was a vital metaphor within early modern discourses of national as well as personal identity. Although the lines are divided between various speakers – the French King, Constable (representing the law), Dauphin (the Crown Prince) and Bourbon (representing the aristocracy) – the images develop smoothly and consistently to express English dominance and French subordination, articulated through images of illegitimacy.The dialogue begins with the most immediate consequence of invasion and of illegitimacy: the loss of property. Legitimacy, illegitimacy and property were so closely associated that a case of bastardy brought to the ecclesiastical court that did not include a civil law suit about land was referred to as a case of “bastardy speciall”, and the association between illegitimacy and property is present in this speech (Cowell, 14). The use of the word “vine” is simultaneously a metonym for France and a metaphor for the family, as in the “family tree”, conflating the themes of family identity and national identity that are both threatened by the virile English forces.As the dialogue develops, the rhetoric becomes more elaborate. The vines which for the Constable (from a legal perspective) represented both France and French families become instead an attempt to depict the English as being of a subordinate breed. The Dauphin’s brief narrative of the English origins refers to the illegitimate William the Conqueror, bastard son of the Duke of Normandy and by designating the English as being descendants of a bastard Frenchman the Dauphin attempts to depict the English nation as originating from a superabundance of French virility; wild offshoots from a true stock. Yet “grafting” one plant to another can create a stronger plant, which is what has happened here. The Dauphin’s metaphors, designed to construct the English as an unruly and illegitimate offshoot of French society, a product of the overflowing French virility, evolve instead into an emblem of a younger, stronger branch which has overtaken its enfeebled origins.In creating this scene, Shakespeare constructs the Frenchmen as being unable to contain the English figuratively, still less literally. The attempts to reduce the English threat by imagining them as “a few sprays”, a product of casual sexual excess, collapses into Bourbon’s incoherent ejaculation: “Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards!” and the Norman bastard dominates the conclusion of the scene. Instead of containing and marginalising the bastard, the metaphoric language creates and acknowledges a threat which cannot be marginalised. The “emptying of luxury” has engendered an uncontrollable illegitimate who will destroy the French nation beyond any hope of recovery, overrunning France with bastards.The scene is fascinating for its use of illegitimacy as a means of articulating fears not only for the past and present but also for the future. The Dauphin’s vision is one of irreversible national and familial disintegration, irreversible because, unlike rape, the French women’s imagined rejection of their French families and embrace of the English conquerors implies a total abandonment of family origins and the willing creation of a new, illegitimate dynasty. Immediately prior to this scene the audience has seen the Dauphin’s fear in action: the French princess Katherine is shown learning to speak English as part of her preparation for giving her body to a “bastard Norman”, a prospect which she anticipates with a frisson of pleasure and humour, as well as fear. This scene, between Katherine and her women, evokes a range of powerful anxieties which appear repeatedly in the drama and texts of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: anxieties over personal and national identity, over female chastity and masculine authority, and over continuity between generations. Peter Laslett in The World We Have Lost – Further Explored points out that “the engendering of children on a scale which might threaten the social structure was never, or almost never, a present possibility” (154) at this stage of European history. This being granted, the Dauphin’s depiction of such a “wave” of illegitimates, while it might have no roots in reality, functioned as a powerful image of disorder. Illegitimacy as a threat and as a strategy is not limited to the renaissance, although a study of renaissance texts offers a useful guidebook to the use of illegitimacy as a means of polarising and excluding. Although as previously discussed, for many Western countries, the marital status of one’s parents is probably the least meaningful definition associated with the word “illegitimate”, the concept of the nation as a family remains current in modern political discourse, and illegitimate continues to be a powerful metaphor. During the recent independence referendum in Scotland, David Cameron besought the Scottish people not to “break up the national family”; at the same time, the Scottish Nationalists have been constructed as “ungrateful bastards” for wishing to turn their backs on the national family. As Klocker and Dunne, and later O’Brien and Rowe, have demonstrated, the emotive use of words such as “illegitimate” and “illegal” in Australian political rhetoric concerning migration is of long standing. Given current tensions, it might be timely to call for a further and more detailed study of the way in which the term “illegitimate” continues to be used by politicians and the media to define, demonise and exclude certain types of would-be Australian immigrants from the collective Australian “national family”. Suggestions that persons suspected of engaging with terrorist organisations overseas should be stripped of their Australian passports imply the creation of national bastards in an attempt to distance the Australian community from such threats. But the strategy can never be completely successful. Constructing figures as bastard or the illegitimate remains a method by which the legitimate seeks to define itself, but it also means that the bastard or illegitimate can never be wholly separated or cast out. In one form or another, the bastard is here to stay.ReferencesBeardon, Elizabeth. “Sidney's ‘Mongrell Tragicomedy’ and Anglo-Spanish Exchange in the New Arcadia.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10 (2010): 29 - 51.Davis, Kingsley. “Illegitimacy and the Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 45 (1939).John Cowell. The Interpreter. Cambridge: John Legate, 1607.Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. 1980. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.Findlay, Alison. Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009.Hay, Denys. Polydore Vergil: Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952.Laslett, Peter. The World We Have Lost - Further Explored. London: Methuen, 1983.Laslett, P., K. Oosterveen, and R. M. Smith, eds. Bastardy and Its Comparative History. London: Edward Arnold, 1980.Leach, Edmund. “Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse.” E. H. Lennenberg, ed. New Directives in the Study of Language. MIT Press, 1964. 23-63. MacFarlane, Alan. The Origins of English Individualism: The Family Property and Social Transition Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978.Mclaren, Ann. “Monogamy, Polygamy and the True State: James I’s Rhetoric of Empire.” History of Political Thought 24 (2004): 446 – 480.McAlindon, T. “Testing the New Historicism: “Invisible Bullets” Reconsidered.” Studies in Philology 92 (1995):411 – 438.Neill, Michael. Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics and Society in English Renaissance Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.Pocock, J.G.A. Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on English Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936.Reekie, Gail. Measuring Immorality: Social Inquiry and the Problem of Illegitimacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Rowe, Elizabeth, and Erin O’Brien. “Constructions of Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Australian Political Discourse”. In Kelly Richards and Juan Marcellus Tauri, eds., Crime Justice and Social Democracy: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, 2013.Schleiner, Louise. Tudor and Stuart Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.Shakespeare, William. Henry V in The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. S. Greenblatt, W. Cohen, J.E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York and London: Norton, 2008.

Clauss, Martin / Christoph Nübel (Hrsg.), Militärisches Entscheiden. Voraussetzungen, Prozesse und Repräsentationen einer sozialen Praxis von der Antike bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Krieg und Konflikt, 9), Frankfurt a. M. / New York 2020, Campus, 496 S. / Abb., € 52,00. (Jörg Rogge, Mainz) Scheller, Benjamin (Hrsg.), Kulturen des Risikos im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit (Schriften des Historischen Kollegs. Kolloquien, 99), Berlin / Boston 2019, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, IX u. 278 S. / Abb., € 69,95. (Christian Wenzel, Marburg) Eisenbichler, Konrad (Hrsg.)‚ A Companion to Medieval and Early Modern Confraternities (Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition, 83), Leiden / Boston 2019, Brill, XVI u. 475 S. / Abb., € 215,00. (Nikolas Funke, Münster) Das, Nandini / Tim Youngs (Hrsg.), The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, Cambridge [u. a.] 2019, Cambridge University Press, XVIII u. 639 S. / Abb., £ 135,00. 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Høj SteneA monumental ship setting by the Gudenå river Ship settings, or stone ships, in the sense of stones arranged in a regular pointed-oval shape, are known especially from Denmark and Sweden, where some can be dated to the Late Bronze Age, others to the Late Iron Age and Viking Age. Of the latter, so-called monumental ship settings stand out by virtue of having a length in excess of 40 m (fig. 1). A further general feature is that, either singly or in groups, they occupy prominent positions in the landscape, usually by a main traffic route and often in association with barrows; some are found in conjunction with a royal residence – Jelling and Lejre. Insofar as rune stones form an integral part of a ship setting, as is said to be the case at Glavendrup and Bække and is suggested by the circumstances at Jelling, the monument can be dated to the Viking Age. In other cases, the dating of the monuments is less certain, with several possibly deriving from the end of the Late Iron Age. There is also great uncertainty about the function of these monumental ship settings. There has been a general tendency to perceive them as burial structures on a par with the other ship settings. But the preservation conditions at the archaeologically investigated monuments have been poor, and it has therefore not been possible to demonstrate a clear link between monumental ship settings and possible graves. Even so, these monuments can clearly be perceived as a power manifestation by an aristocratic environment, and they can be viewed in conjunction with the ship symbolism that is evident in Late Iron Age boat graves and the spectacular ship burials of the Viking Age. With the aim of addressing these issues, Moesgaard Museum has investigated the site of one of southern Scandinavia’s largest ship settings, located at Vejerslev, close to Gudenå river (fig. 1, no. 1). The monument was demolished more than 150 years ago. The first mention of it in written sources is in 1683 under the name “Højs Steen”, located on the western fields of the village of Vejerslev, which run down towards the Gudenå. A written source from 1768 states that the ship setting extends between two small barrows standing about 100 paces apart. A report submitted to the National Museum of Denmark around 1850 contains valuable information about the ship setting as the detailed text is accompanied by a survey of the ship setting’s ground plan. It is stated that the monument was c. 88 m long and 13 m wide in the middle. The drawing shows 16 preserved stones. These stood 2-4 m apart and were c. 1.9-2.5 m high (fig. 4). But the stone at the northern stem/stern, which was c. 4.5 m in length, lay toppled on the northern barrow. The distance from the Gudenå river is given as just less than 100 m. A written source from 1877 states that the final remaining stones were removed in 1852. In 2014 and 2016, systematic geophysical surveys were undertaken of the area between the mound that could be the northern barrow and the remains of the presumed southern barrow. Collectively, the geophysical surveys sketched a picture of an extended pointed-oval formation between the two barrows (fig. 6). The structure had been c. 82 m long and 14 m wide at its broadest point. This concurs well with the dimensions given in the report to the National Museum around 1850. The ship setting was oriented NNW-SSE and lay almost parallel with the Gudenå, c. 130 m distant from it. It was located on the edge of a level sandy plain that rises above the riverbed. An archaeological investigation was undertaken in 2016, with an excavation trench measuring c. 18 x 9 m being positioned across the southern part of the ship setting, in a place where the geophysical surveys had demonstrated stone traces or possibly stones (fig. 6). Of the four anomalies evident on the geophysical surveys that fitted with an arrangement of gunwale stones, it proved possible to locate three in the archaeological investigation. A further investigation was undertaken at the site in 2017, when a trench measuring c. 18 x 13 m was placed across the middle of the ship setting (fig. 6). This demonstrated a good agreement between the excavated stone traces and those evident from the geophysical surveys (fig. 12). During the investigation in 2017, several metal objects were found by metal detector in the soil layer located over the central part of the ship setting. These were primarily melted fragments of gold and bronze objects, as well as a silver arte­fact and one of iron. The gold objects comprise a fragment of band-like gold foil with animal ornamentation (fig. 14), two small rings of beaded wire (fig. 15a-b), a small band-like ring (fig. 16), a fragment of an edge fitting of gold foil (fig. 17), two partially melted fragments of lugs (?) (fig. 18), four unidentifiable fragments of gold foil and ten melted gold lumps. The bronze finds comprise a strap buckle (fig. 21), two possible fragments of brooches (fig. 19 and 20), a fragment of a bronze arte­fact with vaulted upper surface (fig. 22), six unidentified fragments and 44 melted bronze lumps. The silver object is a small rivet, and there is a small fragment of a thin iron sheet. As is evident from the above description, most of the metal finds from the ship setting are heavily fragmented and partially melted, which makes dating difficult. The finds are interpreted as remains from a cremation grave that has been placed on the surface of the central part of the ship setting. The most remarkable find is the ornamented gold foil (fig. 14), which can be assigned to the second half of the 6th century AD; the early part of Salin’s style II. As for the two gold rings (fig. 15), similar rings are employed on brooches and swords from the Late Germanic Iron Age, where they are placed around rivets. The third gold ring (fig. 16) must, due to its tiny diameter, be perceived as decoration that has encircled an object. The strap buckle (fig. 21) is of a type that Mogens Ørsnes dates to phases 1 and 2, i.e. c. AD 550-725. The possible button bow from a button-bow brooch (fig. 19) cannot be identified more closely. Ørsnes classifies button-bow brooches into types E0-6, which collectively can be assigned to the period AD 550-880. The fragment of an equal-armed brooch (fig. 20) cannot, due to its small size, be identified more closely within Ørsnes’ types F1-4, which are all assigned to his phase 1, c. AD 550-650. The most recent research dates the beginning of the dating range for this brooch type to between AD 510 and 545. All in all, the finds can be placed within the second half of the 6th century AD, as also suggested by the ornamented gold foil. A central question is whether the ship setting and the cremation grave are contemporaneous. With regard to the ship setting, a sample was taken for OSL dating from one of the socket stones in A121. The date subsequently obtained by the Nordic Laboratory for Luminescence Dating/DTU Nutech was 1.33±0.13 ka, i.e. 688±130 in calendar years. In other words, the ship setting was constructed in the period AD 558-818. When the OSL date is compared with the archaeological dating of the artefacts, it seems very probable that ship setting and cremation grave are contemporaneous. A further indication that the now vanished grave had a direct link with the ship setting is the distribution of the metal finds: These were all found over the central part of the monument. Burial customs in the Late Germanic Iron Age are characterised by local differences, and cremation graves surrounded by stone settings are the dominant form in Jutland. The best-known example is Lindholm Høje at Nørresundby, with ­almost 700 graves marked by various kinds of stone settings, including some that are ship-like in form. At Høj Stene there was nothing to indicate that the cremation had taken place directly on-site. All the evidence suggests that the cremation grave was located so high up that it was disturbed by the cultivation activities of later times. The presumed cremation grave shows some similarities with the situation in Grydehøj at Lejre. The base of this large round barrow, which had been c. 40 m in diameter and up to 4 m in height, was covered by a burnt layer containing charcoal, fragments of burnt bone and artefacts in the form of gold wire, drops of melted gold, melted bronze and burnt iron rivets. These represent the remains of a cremation grave containing the remnants of exceptionally rich grave furnishings that were destroyed in the cremation and, judging by patches of fire-reddened earth, this took place directly on-site. Grydehøj has been 14C dated to the first half of the 7th century AD and is therefore contemporaneous with the early magnate’s settlement at Lejre, with the Høj Stene grave, with similar cremation graves and with closely related boat graves in Sweden that, in addition to magnificent grave goods, were also accompanied by remains of numerous animals. As for the many unanswered questions about monumental ship settings, the local­isation of Høj Stene and the associated investigations have taken us a significant step further towards a better understanding of the chronology and function of these structures. The enormous ship setting is dated to the Late Germanic Iron Age, c. AD 600, and is so far the first example that can be securely assigned to this period. Furthermore, it was constructed as a sepulchral monument for an unusually richly-furnished cremation grave which exhibits many common features with the coeval elite grave in Grydehøj and with Swedish burial monuments. Like other monumental ship settings, Høj Stene occupied a striking location. It was placed by the Gudenå river, which was presumably a major traffic route extending far into the central part of Jutland. The monument must have been impressive seen from the river, and it was also sited close to an ancient traffic junction. Kongensbro lies about 1 km to the southwest, and there has been an actual bridge there since the end of the 14th century, but it could very well have been the location of a crossing place prior to this. Høj Stene’s northern and southern barrows cannot be dated more closely, but they lie together with two other barrows that probably date from the Late Neolithic Single Grave culture or the Bronze Age. It seems remarkable that large ship settings, which had not been built since the Late Bronze Age, suddenly turn up again after a break of a millennium in a totally different cultural context with a very different world of ideas. It is a well-known cultural-historical phenomenon that new and striking monuments sometimes appear formed in the shape of familiar structures from another time. In the case of Høj Stene and other contemporaneous ship settings, these should probably be interpreted as an expression of a contemporary elite’s need clearly to manifest its power. With the emergence of the Frankish Empire, which by AD 600 encompassed large parts of the Continent, Europe had gained a new superpower following the dissolution of the West ­Roman Empire. The northern border of the Frankish Empire ran close to present-day Denmark, and it became important for the people who lived in the lands to the north. Both in Scandinavia and the British Isles petty kingdoms emerged in the 6th and 7th centuries, which mimicked the Frankish warrior aristocracy. Rich burials, such as Sutton Hoo in southern England and related boat burials at Vendel and Valsgärde in Sweden, bear witness to close dynastic connections. The settlement at Lejre, with its large farm complex, the burial in Grydehøj and possible coeval ship settings, are examples which demonstrate that just such an elite existed in eastern Denmark during the 6th century. It is in this perspective that we perceive Høj Stene. We have demonstrated here the largest known ship setting from the Late Iron Age, together with the remains of heavily burnt grave goods reflecting a rich burial. There is therefore much to suggest that we are on the trail of a possible Jutish elite residence equivalent to that in Lejre. Indeed, it may already have been found. In metal-detector surveys on the fields to the north and northeast of Høj Stene in recent years several localities have been recorded with finds from the Late Germanic Iron Age (fig. 24). Seen in relation to the ship setting, the northernmost of these is of greatest interest. At this locality, which lies 2 km from the ship setting, 39 artefacts that can be assigned to the Late Germanic Iron Age have been found within an area of c. 2 ha (fig. 25-27). Moreover, there is also waste from bronze casting and slag from iron smelting. As pointed out by Birgitta Hårdh, clear evidence of high-quality metalworking is found at South Scandinavian central places such as Uppåkra in Scania and Gudme on Funen. A similar situation is suggested by the finds from the site at Borre Skov, with indications of bronze casting and iron smelting as well as a patrix (punch), which bears witness to exquisite craftmanship. The finds are contemporaneous with the ship setting, and they perhaps represent a coeval elite residence.

Introduction: Our current obsession with the lives of others “Biography—that is to say, our creative and non-fictional output devoted to recording and interpreting real lives—has enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance in recent years,” writes Nigel Hamilton in Biography: A Brief History (1). Ian Donaldson agrees that biography is back in fashion: “Once neglected within the academy and relegated to the dustier recesses of public bookstores, biography has made a notable return over recent years, emerging, somewhat surprisingly, as a new cultural phenomenon, and a new academic adventure” (23). For over a decade now, commentators having been making similar observations about our obsession with the intimacies of individual people’s lives. In a lecture in 1994, Justin Kaplan asserted the West was “a culture of biography” (qtd. in Salwak 1) and more recent research findings by John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge affirm that “the undiminished human curiosity about other peoples lives is clearly reflected in the popularity of autobiographies and biographies” (218). At least in relation to television, this assertion seems valid. In Australia, as in the USA and the UK, reality and other biographically based television shows have taken over from drama in both the numbers of shows produced and the viewers these shows attract, and these forms are also popular in Canada (see, for instance, Morreale on The Osbournes). In 2007, the program Biography celebrated its twentieth anniversary season to become one of the longest running documentary series on American television; so successful that in 1999 it was spun off into its own eponymous channel (Rak; Dempsey). Premiered in May 1996, Australian Story—which aims to utilise a “personal approach” to biographical storytelling—has won a significant viewership, critical acclaim and professional recognition (ABC). It can also be posited that the real home movies viewers submit to such programs as Australia’s Favourite Home Videos, and “chat” or “confessional” television are further reflections of a general mania for biographical detail (see Douglas), no matter how fragmented, sensationalized, or even inane and cruel. A recent example of the latter, the USA-produced The Moment of Truth, has contestants answering personal questions under polygraph examination and then again in front of an audience including close relatives and friends—the more “truthful” their answers (and often, the more humiliated and/or distressed contestants are willing to be), the more money they can win. Away from television, but offering further evidence of this interest are the growing readerships for personally oriented weblogs and networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook (Grossman), individual profiles and interviews in periodical publications, and the recently widely revived newspaper obituary column (Starck). Adult and community education organisations run short courses on researching and writing auto/biographical forms and, across Western countries, the family history/genealogy sections of many local, state, and national libraries have been upgraded to meet the increasing demand for these services. Academically, journals and e-mail discussion lists have been established on the topics of biography and autobiography, and North American, British, and Australian universities offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses in life writing. The commonly aired wisdom is that published life writing in its many text-based forms (biography, autobiography, memoir, diaries, and collections of personal letters) is enjoying unprecedented popularity. It is our purpose to examine this proposition. Methodological problems There are a number of problems involved in investigating genre popularity, growth, and decline in publishing. Firstly, it is not easy to gain access to detailed statistics, which are usually only available within the industry. Secondly, it is difficult to ascertain how publishing statistics are gathered and what they report (Eliot). There is the question of whether bestselling booklists reflect actual book sales or are manipulated marketing tools (Miller), although the move from surveys of booksellers to electronic reporting at point of sale in new publishing lists such as BookScan will hopefully obviate this problem. Thirdly, some publishing lists categorise by subject and form, some by subject only, and some do not categorise at all. This means that in any analysis of these statistics, a decision has to be made whether to use the publishing list’s system or impose a different mode. If the publishing list is taken at face value, the question arises of whether to use categorisation by form or by subject. Fourthly, there is the bedeviling issue of terminology. Traditionally, there reigned a simple dualism in the terminology applied to forms of telling the true story of an actual life: biography and autobiography. Publishing lists that categorise their books, such as BookScan, have retained it. But with postmodern recognition of the presence of the biographer in a biography and of the presence of other subjects in an autobiography, the dichotomy proves false. There is the further problem of how to categorise memoirs, diaries, and letters. In the academic arena, the term “life writing” has emerged to describe the field as a whole. Within the genre of life writing, there are, however, still recognised sub-genres. Academic definitions vary, but generally a biography is understood to be a scholarly study of a subject who is not the writer; an autobiography is the story of a entire life written by its subject; while a memoir is a segment or particular focus of that life told, again, by its own subject. These terms are, however, often used interchangeably even by significant institutions such the USA Library of Congress, which utilises the term “biography” for all. Different commentators also use differing definitions. Hamilton uses the term “biography” to include all forms of life writing. Donaldson discusses how the term has been co-opted to include biographies of place such as Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2000) and of things such as Lizzie Collingham’s Curry: A Biography (2005). This reflects, of course, a writing/publishing world in which non-fiction stories of places, creatures, and even foodstuffs are called biographies, presumably in the belief that this will make them more saleable. The situation is further complicated by the emergence of hybrid publishing forms such as, for instance, the “memoir-with-recipes” or “food memoir” (Brien, Rutherford and Williamson). Are such books to be classified as autobiography or put in the “cookery/food & drink” category? We mention in passing the further confusion caused by novels with a subtitle of The Biography such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The fifth methodological problem that needs to be mentioned is the increasing globalisation of the publishing industry, which raises questions about the validity of the majority of studies available (including those cited herein) which are nationally based. Whether book sales reflect what is actually read (and by whom), raises of course another set of questions altogether. Methodology In our exploration, we were fundamentally concerned with two questions. Is life writing as popular as claimed? And, if it is, is this a new phenomenon? To answer these questions, we examined a range of available sources. We began with the non-fiction bestseller lists in Publishers Weekly (a respected American trade magazine aimed at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents that claims to be international in scope) from their inception in 1912 to the present time. We hoped that this data could provide a longitudinal perspective. The term bestseller was coined by Publishers Weekly when it began publishing its lists in 1912; although the first list of popular American books actually appeared in The Bookman (New York) in 1895, based itself on lists appearing in London’s The Bookman since 1891 (Bassett and Walter 206). The Publishers Weekly lists are the best source of longitudinal information as the currently widely cited New York Times listings did not appear till 1942, with the Wall Street Journal a late entry into the field in 1994. We then examined a number of sources of more recent statistics. We looked at the bestseller lists from the USA-based Amazon.com online bookseller; recent research on bestsellers in Britain; and lists from Nielsen BookScan Australia, which claims to tally some 85% or more of books sold in Australia, wherever they are published. In addition to the reservations expressed above, caveats must be aired in relation to these sources. While Publishers Weekly claims to be an international publication, it largely reflects the North American publishing scene and especially that of the USA. Although available internationally, Amazon.com also has its own national sites—such as Amazon.co.uk—not considered here. It also caters to a “specific computer-literate, credit-able clientele” (Gutjahr: 219) and has an unashamedly commercial focus, within which all the information generated must be considered. In our analysis of the material studied, we will use “life writing” as a genre term. When it comes to analysis of the lists, we have broken down the genre of life writing into biography and autobiography, incorporating memoir, letters, and diaries under autobiography. This is consistent with the use of the terminology in BookScan. Although we have broken down the genre in this way, it is the overall picture with regard to life writing that is our concern. It is beyond the scope of this paper to offer a detailed analysis of whether, within life writing, further distinctions should be drawn. Publishers Weekly: 1912 to 2006 1912 saw the first list of the 10 bestselling non-fiction titles in Publishers Weekly. It featured two life writing texts, being headed by an autobiography, The Promised Land by Russian Jewish immigrant Mary Antin, and concluding with Albert Bigelow Paine’s six-volume biography, Mark Twain. The Publishers Weekly lists do not categorise non-fiction titles by either form or subject, so the classifications below are our own with memoir classified as autobiography. In a decade-by-decade tally of these listings, there were 3 biographies and 20 autobiographies in the lists between 1912 and 1919; 24 biographies and 21 autobiographies in the 1920s; 13 biographies and 40 autobiographies in the 1930s; 8 biographies and 46 biographies in the 1940s; 4 biographies and 14 autobiographies in the 1950s; 11 biographies and 13 autobiographies in the 1960s; 6 biographies and 11 autobiographies in the 1970s; 3 biographies and 19 autobiographies in the 1980s; 5 biographies and 17 autobiographies in the 1990s; and 2 biographies and 7 autobiographies from 2000 up until the end of 2006. See Appendix 1 for the relevant titles and authors. Breaking down the most recent figures for 1990–2006, we find a not radically different range of figures and trends across years in the contemporary environment. The validity of looking only at the top ten books sold in any year is, of course, questionable, as are all the issues regarding sources discussed above. But one thing is certain in terms of our inquiry. There is no upwards curve obvious here. If anything, the decade break-down suggests that sales are trending downwards. This is in keeping with the findings of Michael Korda, in his history of twentieth-century bestsellers. He suggests a consistent longitudinal picture across all genres: In every decade, from 1900 to the end of the twentieth century, people have been reliably attracted to the same kind of books […] Certain kinds of popular fiction always do well, as do diet books […] self-help books, celebrity memoirs, sensationalist scientific or religious speculation, stories about pets, medical advice (particularly on the subjects of sex, longevity, and child rearing), folksy wisdom and/or humour, and the American Civil War (xvii). Amazon.com since 2000 The USA-based Amazon.com online bookselling site provides listings of its own top 50 bestsellers since 2000, although only the top 14 bestsellers are recorded for 2001. As fiction and non-fiction are not separated out on these lists and no genre categories are specified, we have again made our own decisions about what books fall into the category of life writing. Generally, we erred on the side of inclusion. (See Appendix 2.) However, when it came to books dealing with political events, we excluded books dealing with specific aspects of political practice/policy. This meant excluding books on, for instance, George Bush’s so-called ‘war on terror,’ of which there were a number of bestsellers listed. In summary, these listings reveal that of the top 364 books sold by Amazon from 2000 to 2007, 46 (or some 12.6%) were, according to our judgment, either biographical or autobiographical texts. This is not far from the 10% of the 1912 Publishers Weekly listing, although, as above, the proportion of bestsellers that can be classified as life writing varied dramatically from year to year, with no discernible pattern of peaks and troughs. This proportion tallied to 4% auto/biographies in 2000, 14% in 2001, 10% in 2002, 18% in 2003 and 2004, 4% in 2005, 14% in 2006 and 20% in 2007. This could suggest a rising trend, although it does not offer any consistent trend data to suggest sales figures may either continue to grow, or fall again, in 2008 or afterwards. Looking at the particular texts in these lists (see Appendix 2) also suggests that there is no general trend in the popularity of life writing in relation to other genres. For instance, in these listings in Amazon.com, life writing texts only rarely figure in the top 10 books sold in any year. So rarely indeed, that from 2001 there were only five in this category. In 2001, John Adams by David McCullough was the best selling book of the year; in 2003, Hillary Clinton’s autobiographical Living History was 7th; in 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton reached number 1; in 2006, Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman was 9th; and in 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8th. Apart from McCulloch’s biography of Adams, all the above are autobiographical texts, while the focus on leading political figures is notable. Britain: Feather and Woodbridge With regard to the British situation, we did not have actual lists and relied on recent analysis. John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge find considerably higher levels for life writing in Britain than above with, from 1998 to 2005, 28% of British published non-fiction comprising autobiography, while 8% of hardback and 5% of paperback non-fiction was biography (2007). Furthermore, although Feather and Woodbridge agree with commentators that life writing is currently popular, they do not agree that this is a growth state, finding the popularity of life writing “essentially unchanged” since their previous study, which covered 1979 to the early 1990s (Feather and Reid). Australia: Nielsen BookScan 2006 and 2007 In the Australian publishing industry, where producing books remains an ‘expensive, risky endeavour which is increasingly market driven’ (Galligan 36) and ‘an inherently complex activity’ (Carter and Galligan 4), the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures reveal that the total numbers of books sold in Australia has remained relatively static over the past decade (130.6 million in the financial year 1995–96 and 128.8 million in 2003–04) (ABS). During this time, however, sales volumes of non-fiction publications have grown markedly, with a trend towards “non-fiction, mass market and predictable” books (Corporall 41) resulting in general non-fiction sales in 2003–2004 outselling general fiction by factors as high as ten depending on the format—hard- or paperback, and trade or mass market paperback (ABS 2005). However, while non-fiction has increased in popularity in Australia, the same does not seem to hold true for life writing. Here, in utilising data for the top 5,000 selling non-fiction books in both 2006 and 2007, we are relying on Nielsen BookScan’s categorisation of texts as either biography or autobiography. In 2006, no works of life writing made the top 10 books sold in Australia. In looking at the top 100 books sold for 2006, in some cases the subjects of these works vary markedly from those extracted from the Amazon.com listings. In Australia in 2006, life writing makes its first appearance at number 14 with convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby’s My Story. This is followed by another My Story at 25, this time by retired Australian army chief, Peter Cosgrove. Jonestown: The Power and Myth of Alan Jones comes in at 34 for the Australian broadcaster’s biographer Chris Masters; the biography, The Innocent Man by John Grisham at 38 and Li Cunxin’s autobiographical Mao’s Last Dancer at 45. Australian Susan Duncan’s memoir of coping with personal loss, Salvation Creek: An Unexpected Life makes 50; bestselling USA travel writer Bill Bryson’s autobiographical memoir of his childhood The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid 69; Mandela: The Authorised Portrait by Rosalind Coward, 79; and Joanne Lees’s memoir of dealing with her kidnapping, the murder of her partner and the justice system in Australia’s Northern Territory, No Turning Back, 89. These books reveal a market preference for autobiographical writing, and an almost even split between Australian and overseas subjects in 2006. 2007 similarly saw no life writing in the top 10. The books in the top 100 sales reveal a downward trend, with fewer titles making this band overall. In 2007, Terri Irwin’s memoir of life with her famous husband, wildlife warrior Steve Irwin, My Steve, came in at number 26; musician Andrew Johns’s memoir of mental illness, The Two of Me, at 37; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography Infidel at 39; John Grogan’s biography/memoir, Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog, at 42; Sally Collings’s biography of the inspirational young survivor Sophie Delezio, Sophie’s Journey, at 51; and Elizabeth Gilbert’s hybrid food, self-help and travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything at 82. Mao’s Last Dancer, published the year before, remained in the top 100 in 2007 at 87. When moving to a consideration of the top 5,000 books sold in Australia in 2006, BookScan reveals only 62 books categorised as life writing in the top 1,000, and only 222 in the top 5,000 (with 34 titles between 1,000 and 1,999, 45 between 2,000 and 2,999, 48 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 33 between 4,000 and 5,000). 2007 shows a similar total of 235 life writing texts in the top 5,000 bestselling books (75 titles in the first 1,000, 27 between 1,000 and 1,999, 51 between 2,000 and 2,999, 39 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 43 between 4,000 and 5,000). In both years, 2006 and 2007, life writing thus not only constituted only some 4% of the bestselling 5,000 titles in Australia, it also showed only minimal change between these years and, therefore, no significant growth. Conclusions Our investigation using various instruments that claim to reflect levels of book sales reveals that Western readers’ willingness to purchase published life writing has not changed significantly over the past century. We find no evidence of either a short, or longer, term growth or boom in sales in such books. Instead, it appears that what has been widely heralded as a new golden age of life writing may well be more the result of an expanded understanding of what is included in the genre than an increased interest in it by either book readers or publishers. What recent years do appear to have seen, however, is a significantly increased interest by public commentators, critics, and academics in this genre of writing. We have also discovered that the issue of our current obsession with the lives of others tends to be discussed in academic as well as popular fora as if what applies to one sub-genre or production form applies to another: if biography is popular, then autobiography will also be, and vice versa. If reality television programming is attracting viewers, then readers will be flocking to life writing as well. Our investigation reveals that such propositions are questionable, and that there is significant research to be completed in mapping such audiences against each other. This work has also highlighted the difficulty of separating out the categories of written texts in publishing studies, firstly in terms of determining what falls within the category of life writing as distinct from other forms of non-fiction (the hybrid problem) and, secondly, in terms of separating out the categories within life writing. Although we have continued to use the terms biography and autobiography as sub-genres, we are aware that they are less useful as descriptors than they are often assumed to be. In order to obtain a more complete and accurate picture, publishing categories may need to be agreed upon, redefined and utilised across the publishing industry and within academia. This is of particular importance in the light of the suggestions (from total sales volumes) that the audiences for books are limited, and therefore the rise of one sub-genre may be directly responsible for the fall of another. Bair argues, for example, that in the 1980s and 1990s, the popularity of what she categorises as memoir had direct repercussions on the numbers of birth-to-death biographies that were commissioned, contracted, and published as “sales and marketing staffs conclude[d] that readers don’t want a full-scale life any more” (17). Finally, although we have highlighted the difficulty of using publishing statistics when there is no common understanding as to what such data is reporting, we hope this study shows that the utilisation of such material does add a depth to such enquiries, especially in interrogating the anecdotal evidence that is often quoted as data in publishing and other studies. Appendix 1 Publishers Weekly listings 1990–1999 1990 included two autobiographies, Bo Knows Bo by professional athlete Bo Jackson (with Dick Schaap) and Ronald Reagan’s An America Life: An Autobiography. In 1991, there were further examples of life writing with unimaginative titles, Me: Stories of My Life by Katherine Hepburn, Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography by Kitty Kelley, and Under Fire: An American Story by Oliver North with William Novak; as indeed there were again in 1992 with It Doesn’t Take a Hero: The Autobiography of Norman Schwarzkopf, Sam Walton: Made in America, the autobiography of the founder of Wal-Mart, Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton, Every Living Thing, yet another veterinary outpouring from James Herriot, and Truman by David McCullough. In 1993, radio shock-jock Howard Stern was successful with the autobiographical Private Parts, as was Betty Eadie with her detailed recounting of her alleged near-death experience, Embraced by the Light. Eadie’s book remained on the list in 1994 next to Don’t Stand too Close to a Naked Man, comedian Tim Allen’s autobiography. Flag-waving titles continue in 1995 with Colin Powell’s My American Journey, and Miss America, Howard Stern’s follow-up to Private Parts. 1996 saw two autobiographical works, basketball superstar Dennis Rodman’s Bad as I Wanna Be and figure-skater, Ekaterina Gordeeva’s (with EM Swift) My Sergei: A Love Story. In 1997, Diana: Her True Story returns to the top 10, joining Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and prolific biographer Kitty Kelly’s The Royals, while in 1998, there is only the part-autobiography, part travel-writing A Pirate Looks at Fifty, by musician Jimmy Buffet. There is no biography or autobiography included in either the 1999 or 2000 top 10 lists in Publishers Weekly, nor in that for 2005. In 2001, David McCullough’s biography John Adams and Jack Welch’s business memoir Jack: Straight from the Gut featured. In 2002, Let’s Roll! Lisa Beamer’s tribute to her husband, one of the heroes of 9/11, written with Ken Abraham, joined Rudolph Giuliani’s autobiography, Leadership. 2003 saw Hillary Clinton’s autobiography Living History and Paul Burrell’s memoir of his time as Princess Diana’s butler, A Royal Duty, on the list. In 2004, it was Bill Clinton’s turn with My Life. In 2006, we find John Grisham’s true crime (arguably a biography), The Innocent Man, at the top, Grogan’s Marley and Me at number three, and the autobiographical The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama in fourth place. Appendix 2 Amazon.com listings since 2000 In 2000, there were only two auto/biographies in the top Amazon 50 bestsellers with Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not about the Bike: My Journey Back to Life about his battle with cancer at 20, and Dave Eggers’s self-consciously fictionalised memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius at 32. In 2001, only the top 14 bestsellers were recorded. At number 1 is John Adams by David McCullough and, at 11, Jack: Straight from the Gut by USA golfer Jack Welch. In 2002, Leadership by Rudolph Giuliani was at 12; Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro at 29; Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper by Patricia Cornwell at 42; Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative by David Brock at 48; and Louis Gerstner’s autobiographical Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance: Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround at 50. In 2003, Living History by Hillary Clinton was 7th; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson 14th; Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How President Bill Clinton Endangered America’s Long-Term National Security by Robert Patterson 20th; Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer 32nd; Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life by Queen Noor of Jordan 33rd; Kate Remembered, Scott Berg’s biography of Katharine Hepburn, 37th; Who’s your Caddy?: Looping for the Great, Near Great and Reprobates of Golf by Rick Reilly 39th; The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship about a winning baseball team by David Halberstam 42nd; and Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong 49th. In 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton was the best selling book of the year; American Soldier by General Tommy Franks was 16th; Kevin Phillips’s American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush 18th; Timothy Russert’s Big Russ and Me: Father and Son. Lessons of Life 20th; Tony Hendra’s Father Joe: The Man who Saved my Soul 23rd; Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton 27th; Cokie Roberts’s Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised our Nation 31st; Kitty Kelley’s The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty 42nd; and Chronicles, Volume 1 by Bob Dylan was 43rd. In 2005, auto/biographical texts were well down the list with only The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion at 45 and The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeanette Walls at 49. In 2006, there was a resurgence of life writing with Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman at 9; Grisham’s The Innocent Man at 12; Bill Buford’s food memoir Heat: an Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany at 23; more food writing with Julia Child’s My Life in France at 29; Immaculée Ilibagiza’s Left to Tell: Discovering God amidst the Rwandan Holocaust at 30; CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters and Survival at 43; and Isabella Hatkoff’s Owen & Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship (between a baby hippo and a giant tortoise) at 44. In 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8; Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe 13; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography of her life in Muslim society, Infidel, 18; The Reagan Diaries 25; Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI 29; Mother Teresa: Come be my Light 36; Clapton: The Autobiography 40; Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles 45; Tony Dungy’s Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices & Priorities of a Winning Life 47; and Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant at 49. Acknowledgements A sincere thank you to Michael Webster at RMIT for assistance with access to Nielsen BookScan statistics, and to the reviewers of this article for their insightful comments. Any errors are, of course, our own. References Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). “About Us.” Australian Story 2008. 1 June 2008. ‹http://www.abc.net.au/austory/aboutus.htm>. 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