Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim

Anna Akasoy

Charles S. F. Burnett

Astrology and Medicine, East and West

Astro-Medicine

List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Transliterations and Abbreviations Introduction: Medical Encounters along the Silk Roads -- 1. Narrating Eurasian Origins of Medical Knowledge -- 2. Of Dice and Medicine: Interactions in Central Asian 'Contact Zones' -- 3. Myrobalans: The Making of a Eurasian Panacea -- 4. Tibetan Moxa-Cautery from Dunhuang: Practices and Images on the Move -- 5. Medicine of the Bakhshis: Cross-Pollinations in Buddhist Iran Afterword Bibliography Index.

Encounters Along the Silk Roads

ReOrienting Histories of Medicine

Charles Burnett

The first encounters between the Islamic world and Tibet took place in the course of the expansion of the Abbasid Empire in the eighth century. Military and political contacts went along with an increasing interest in the other side. Cultural exchanges and the transmission of knowledge were facilitated by a trading network, with musk constituting one of the main trading goods from the Himalayas, largely through India. From the thirteenth century onwards the spread of the Mongol Empire from the Western borders of Europe through Central Asia to China facilitated further exchanges. The significance of these interactions has been long ignored in scholarship. This volume represents a major contribution to the subject, bringing together new studies by an interdisciplinary group of international scholars. They explore for the first time the multi-layered contacts between the Islamic world, Central Asia and the Himalayas from the eighth century until the present day in a variety of fields, including geography, cartography, art history, medicine, history of science and education, literature, hagiography, archaeology, and anthropology.

Islam and Tibet – Interactions along the Musk Routes

It is rarely appreciated how much of the history of Eurasian medicine in the premodern period hinges on cross-cultural interactions and knowledge transmissions. Using manuscripts found in key Eurasian nodes of the medieval world – Dunhuang, Kucha, the Cairo Genizah and Tabriz – the book analyses a number of case-studies of Eurasian medical encounters, giving a voice to places, languages, people and narratives which were once prominent but have gone silent. This is an important book for those interested in the history of medicine and the transmissions of knowledge that have taken place over the course of global history.

Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim

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