Shadows in the Desert.

[ratmmjess]

Comments

[immlass]

You had me at hello!

[ratmmjess]

Of *course* you're a Kool Kid! Who says otherwise? I'll murdalize da bum!

[tfbretz]

I actually knew of the Alans in Britain, but not much detail. Now, I need to know more about the Gok!

[richardthinks]

Of course you know V V Barthol'd's magisterial "Turkestan down to the Mongol invasion"? Full of delightful incident and offhand commentary.

The 7 volume UNESCO history of Central Asia is also not bad, but sounds less fun than your book. Firdawsi's always worth reading, but if you're interested in these matters the Baburnameh is just incredible, now retranslated by I think McChesney.

[ratmmjess]

I, um, did not, but I've ILLed it now and am looking forward to it. Thanks for the pointer!

[princeofcairo]

Littleton and Malcor are, to put it gently, not to be entirely relied upon. But yes, they are fun with a capital F-N.

(And if you're scoring at home, I didn't know about the Chionites, Kidarites, or Gok.)

[ratmmjess]

I figured as much.

"Special pleading" isn't quite the right term for the book--I know it has a specific meaning as a logical fallacy, and what I was looking for was a pithy way of describing the tendency to claim that subject X, when written about by writer Y, is actually the source of A, B, C, D, and E, despite A-E being widely separated in time and space--so the Persians are the source of Arthurian myth--that sort of thing.

[womzilla]

"Jumping at similarities".

[womzilla]

Or "jumping to connections".