In the Mongol Empire, the interfaith court provided a contested arena for a performance of the Mongol ruler’s sacred kingship, and the debate was fiercely ideological and religious. At the court of the newly established Ilkhanate, Muslim administrators, Buddhist monks, and Christian clergy all attempted to sway their imperial overlords, arguing fiercely over the proper role of the king and his government, with momentous and far-reaching consequences. Focusing on the famous but understudied figure of the grand vizier Rashid al-Din, a Persian Jew who converted to Islam, Jonathan Z. Brack explores the myriad ways Rashid al-Din and his fellow courtiers investigated, reformulated, and transformed long-standing ideas of authority and power. Out of this intellectual ferment of accommodation, resistance, and experimentation, they developed a completely new understanding of sacred kingship. This new ideal, and the political theology it subtends, would go on to become a central justification in imperial projects across Eurasia in the centuries that followed. An Afterlife for the Khan offers a powerful cultural and intellectual history of this pivotal moment for Islam and empire in the Middle East and Asia.
Rather than being an isolated, primitive body of knowledge the Jewish calendar tradition of 364 days constituted an integral part of the astronomical science of the ancient world. This tradition—attested in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the Pseudepigrapha—stands out as a coherent, novel synthesis, representing the Jewish authors’ apocalyptic worldview. The calendar is studied here both “from within”—analyzing its textual manifestations —and “from without”—via a comparison with ancient Mesopotamian astronomy. This analysis reveals that the calendrical realm constituted a significant case of inter-cultural borrowing, pertinent to similar such cases in ancient literature. Special attention is given to the “Book of Astronomy” (1 Enoch 72-82) and a variety of calendrical and liturgical texts from Qumran.
The most terrifying novel you will read this year... There are twenty-seven bones in the human hand. And there are three dead bodies on the island of St. Luke - each victim missing a hand. It's the strangest, most disturbing series of murders the Caribbean has ever known - and one of the few crimes that could pull FBI Special Agent E.L. Pender out of retirement. In all of his years, he's never faced such a diabolical underworld drenched in superstition. At the heart of this darkness is a husband-and-wife team with a perverse plan so powerfully consuming, so brilliantly evil, that Pender can only watch and wait...as the grisly hand of fate reaches out for its next victim. ‘Explosive’ San Francisco Chronicle ‘Move over, Hannibal Lecter’ Scottish Daily Record ‘A first-rate thriller’ Boston Globe
Paris and London have long held a mutual fascination, and never more so than in the period 1750–1914, when they vied to be the world's greatest city. Each city has been the focus of many books, yet Jonathan Conlin here explores the complex relationship between them for the first time. The reach and influence of both cities was such that the story of their rivalry has global implications. By borrowing, imitating and learning from each other Paris and London invented the true metropolis. Tales of Two Cities examines and compares five urban spaces—the pleasure garden, the cemetery, the apartment, the restaurant and the music hall—that defined urban modernity in the nineteenth century. The citizens of Paris and London first created these essential features of the modern cityscape and so defined urban living for all of us.
One of the new forms of prose fiction that emerged in the eighteenth century was the first-person narrative told by things such as coins, coaches, clothes, animals, or insects. This is an ambitious new account of the context in which these "it narratives" became so popular. What does it mean when property declares independence of its owners and begins to move and speak? Jonathan Lamb addresses this and many other questions as he advances a new interpretation of these odd tales, from Defoe, Pope, Swift, Gay, and Sterne, to advertisements, still life paintings, and South Seas journals. Lamb emphasizes the subversive and even nonsensical quality of what things say; their interests are so radically different from ours that we either destroy or worship them. Existing outside systems of exchange and the priorities of civil society, things in fact advertise the dissident obscurity common to slave narratives all the way from Aesop and Phaedrus to Frederick Douglass and Primo Levi, a way of meaning only what is said, never saying what is meant. This is what Defoe's Roxana calls "the Sense of Things," and it is found in sounds, substances, and images rather than conventional signs. This major work illuminates not only "it narratives," but also eighteenth-century literature, the rise of the novel, and the genealogy of the slave narrative.
This easy-to-read textbook/reference presents an essential guide to object-oriented C++ programming for scientific computing. With a practical focus on learning by example, the theory is supported by numerous exercises. Features: provides a specific focus on the application of C++ to scientific computing, including parallel computing using MPI; stresses the importance of a clear programming style to minimize the introduction of errors into code; presents a practical introduction to procedural programming in C++, covering variables, flow of control, input and output, pointers, functions, and reference variables; exhibits the efficacy of classes, highlighting the main features of object-orientation; examines more advanced C++ features, such as templates and exceptions; supplies useful tips and examples throughout the text, together with chapter-ending exercises, and code available to download from Springer.
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