Nomads have often been relegated to the margins in the histories of “civilizations,” their failures attributed to their adherence to nomadic traditions and their successes credited to their adoption of a sedentary lifestyle. Instead, Pamela Kyle Crossley presents a sweeping study of nomads, weaving their influence into the fabric of Eurasian civilization across space and time. Diverging from the common approach of treating Eurasian history as a collective of histories separated by region, in Hammer and Anvil, Crossley cuts across established civilizational borders to address the nomadic imprint on modernity. The application of the nomadic diaspora to the understanding of the transition from the medieval to early modern world is ambitious, but persuasive and original. Turkic and Mongol nomads take center stage in this book as Crossley delves into religious beliefs, traditions, technologies, and governance to argue how many sedentary political and cultural transformations originated from their nomadic rule....

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