Nomads as agents of cultural change: The Mongols and their Eurasian predecessors

Nomads As Agents of Cultural Change illuminates and complicates nomadic roles as active promoters of cultural exchange within a vast and varied region. It makes available important original scholarship on the new turn in the study of the Mongol empire and on relations between the nomadic and sedentary worlds. By bringing together a distinguished group of scholars from different disciplines, this book explores the role of nomads in both east and west Asia through ancient and early medieval times. With focus given to the far flung Mongol empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, this comparative process provides a clearer understanding of the key role that Eurasian pastoral nomads played in the history of the Old World and the complex cultural dynamic that existed between nomads and their agricultural and urban neighbors.