Papers by Richard Bulliet
Taking off from an analysis of travel destinations transiting Nishapur and Gorgan, I suggest refi... more Taking off from an analysis of travel destinations transiting Nishapur and Gorgan, I suggest refinements in identifying Silk Road routes in Iran and present arguments for Arab caravan merchants playing a role in shaping the ethos of early Islam.
I propose that the language we know as New Persian, or Farsi, evolved as the workaday pidgin used... more I propose that the language we know as New Persian, or Farsi, evolved as the workaday pidgin used by caravans traversing the stretch of the Silk Road between the Oxus River and Mesopotamia.
Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers, 2005
This chapter from my book Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers was a fulfillment of a commitment I ma... more This chapter from my book Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers was a fulfillment of a commitment I made to Prof. Malcolm Bean, the Chair of Columbia's History Department when I was interviewed for a professorship in 1975. I told him that after a quantitative study of conversion to Islam and a subsequent study of how my timetable of conversion suggested a new way of looking at Islamic history, I would write a book on donkeys and religion. But I am posting it now as a prequel to my more recent fictional posting Jackass Memories, not to mention my rarely read novel The One-Donkey Solution
Suggests an approach to making world history more interesting for young people.
Near Eastern Numismatics, Iconography, Epigraphy, and History. Studies in Honor of George C. Miles, 1974
Archaeology, Annales, and Ethnohistory, 1992
Data about the months of death of 928 individuals from the city of Nishapur.
Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1998
I enrolled in Professor Giles Constable's seminar in twelfth-century European history in 1962... more I enrolled in Professor Giles Constable's seminar in twelfth-century European history in 1962, my frst year of graduate study at Harvard. He told us to select a cartulary, which he told us was a term for a collection of medieval documents. We were to write a paper based on what we found there. I selected the cartulary of the Guillem family, the lords of Montpellier in southern France. I realized, given my haphazard memory of the Latin I had taken in high school, that I could not expect to read most of the documents. But I noticed that each document ended with a series of names of witnesses, and, the more important the document, the longer the list. Moreover, the names often included the witness' occupation and the name of his father. So I made the study of major witness families over a sequence of generations the core element of my paper.
Islamisation, 2017
In 1970, I published ‘A Quantitative Approach to Medieval Muslim Biographical Dictionaries’ in th... more In 1970, I published ‘A Quantitative Approach to Medieval Muslim Biographical Dictionaries’ in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient.1 Originally a part of my doctoral thesis, the article sought to derive fluctuations over time in traffic flows along the major caravan routes passing through Nishapur, a major city in north-eastern Iran, from the place names borne by the religious elite of that city during the first Islamic centuries. A second part of my submission was gently rejected by the editor. It dealt with a bell-shaped curve that traced the rise and fall in popularity of the personal names Muhammad, Ahmad, ʿAli, al-Hasan and al-Husain during the same period. Four years later, when I was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, I was still puzzling over the bell-shaped curve of overtly religious Islamic naming.
Middle East Law and Governance, 2017
Middle East Law and Governance, 2015
The causes and processes of the Arab Spring movements are less important for current political de... more The causes and processes of the Arab Spring movements are less important for current political developments than the responses to those movements by states that were not directly involved. After discussing the Turkish, Israeli, Iranian, and American responses, the focus turns to the recently announced military cooperation between Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Did the Saudi government conspire with the Egyptian high command to plot the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Cairo? If so, as seems likely, was the United States aware of the conspiracy? More importantly, what does the linkage between the Egyptian army and Saudi and Gulf financial support for President al-Sisi's regime suggest for the future of stability and legitimate rule in the Arab world?
International Journal of Middle East Studies, Nov 1, 2004
Technology and Culture, 2003
This handsomely produced and illustrated book is much more than a history of the manufacture and ... more This handsomely produced and illustrated book is much more than a history of the manufacture and use of paper in the Islamic world. It introduces the reader to the entire history of papermaking, from its invention in China to the development of modern industrial methods. More intriguingly, however, it argues that paper should be thought of as a revolutionary technology on a par with movable type (and a necessary precursor to it, of course). In developing this argument, Jonathan Bloom takes the reader on a fascinating tour of Muslim culture. The first two chapters deal with the invention and spread of papermaking and include concise but useful discussions of the writing materials that paper supplanted. Sidebars provide succinct technical essays on papyrus, parchment, felt (as a precursor technology), Japanese paper, mills, milling (the use of trip-hammers), molds, body linen (as a source of fiber), zigzags, and watermarks. The myth that papermaking came into the Islamic world by way of Chinese prisoners captured at the Battle of the Talas River in Central Asia in 751 collapses before convincing evidence that paper was in use somewhat before that date. Bloom does show, however, that Central Asia, and Samarkand in particular, played an important role in the technology’s spread. The next three chapters explore the cultural consequences of having access to an increasingly abundant and inexpensive writing medium. Here Bloom catalogs a series of cultural impacts that amount to a Gutenberg-like revolution, the sort of technological paradigm shift that has hitherto been ascribed only to Western Europe, Song China, and Meiji Japan. Just as historians devote less attention to the technical accomplishments of Guten-
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Papers by Richard Bulliet