The Battle of Talas

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Battle of Talas, a significant encounter between Arab and Chinese forces which took place in central Asia in 751 AD. It brought together two mighty empires, the Abbasid Caliphate and the Tang Dynasty, and although not well known today the battle had profound consequences for the future of both civilisations. The Arabs won the confrontation, but the battle marks the point where the Islamic Empire halted its march eastwards, and the Chinese stopped their expansion to the west. It was also a point of cultural exchange: some historians believe that it was also the moment when the technology of paper manufacture found its way from China to the Western world.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Hilde de Weerdt 6 episodes
  Professor of Chinese History at Leiden University
• Michael Hockelmann No other episodes
  British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at King's College London
• Hugh Kennedy 11 episodes
  Professor of Arabic at SOAS, University of London

Reading list

• Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present
  Christopher I. Beckwith (Princeton University Press, 2011) Google Books →
• Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times
  Jerry H. Bentley (Oxford University Press, 1993) Google Books →
• Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World
  Jonathan Bloom (Yale University Press, 2001) Google Books →
• Warfare in Inner Asian History (500-1800)
  Nicola Di Cosmo (ed.) (Brill, 2001) Google Books →
• Tang China and the Collapse of the Uighur Empire: A Documentary History
  Michael R. Drompp (Brill, 2004) Google Books →
• Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road
  Johan Elverskog (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) Google Books →
• The Silk Road: A New History
  Valerie Hansen (Oxford University Press, 2012) Google Books →
• The Great Arab Conquests: How The Spread Of Islam Changed The World We Live In
  Hugh Kennedy (Phoenix Books, 2007) Google Books →
• The Silk Road in World History
  Xinru Liu (Oxford University Press, 2010) Google Books →
• Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds: Cross-Cultural Exchange in Pre-Modern Asia
  Hyunhee Park (Cambridge University Press, 2012) Google Books →
• Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors: Culture, Power and Connections, 580-800
  Jonathan Karam Skaff (Oxford University Press, 2012) Google Books →

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Programme ID: b04kf8ps

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04kf8ps

Auto-category: 950 (History of Asia)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. In the steppes of Central Asia, in a remote setting near the border between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, is a river called the Talas.