Travel, Thought and Trade from Khorasan to Khotan: Indo-Iranian Heritage During Late Antiquity

Speaker: Dr. Burzine Waghmar, currently a Senior Library Assistant at SOAS and formerly editor of the Circle of Inner Asian Art newsletter. He is a research fellow of the European Foundation for South Asian Studies, The Hague, Netherlands

 

Chair: Dr. Romila Thapar

 

A millennial appreciation of daily life among the sedentary and transient peoples domiciled in what was an Indo-Iranian cultural zone stretching from the Persian plateau to the Indian peninsula is surveyed here during late antiquity (AD 200-800). This shared Indo-Iranian heritage is frequently recognised but relegated to broad cultural correspondences between contemporary dynasts in the heartlands of southwest Iran and northern India. The then known Indo-Iranian world, namely lands Indic at once as Iranic ethno-linguistically, was an era of efflorescence far more eclectic than is conventionally admitted. It was a forerunner of what became the Persianate world ranging from Bosnia to Bengal during the medieval and early modern epochs. But the antecedents of that collective consciousness must be traced to the artistic, mercantile and spiritual legacies of this pre-Islamic period