Mebold’s Welt-Gemälde Gallerie. Asien 1. China

Title

Mebold’s Welt-Gemälde Gallerie. Asien 1. China

Description

Travel description of the volume "Welt-Gemälde-Gallerie oder Geschichte und Beschreibung aller Länder und Völker, ihrer Religionen, Sitten, Gebräuche u. s. w.". With many pictorial representations of locations of important places, old and new monuments, costumes, implements, art objects, various other objects and maps. Asia. Volume 1. China on 529 pages, an index, an overview of the illustrations (72 pieces) and a folding map of China with Japan. Including a chronological table of all those who ruled in China. Partly browned views. Very decorative binding.

c. 1839

Artist

Schweizerbart E. (1826-)

E. Schweizerbart'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung was founded by Emanuel Schweizerbart in 1826 to publish a historical work. After a short time, the program was transformed to focus on the publication of scientific journals, textbooks, textbooks and scientific monographs, mainly in the fields of earth sciences, environmental sciences, aquatic ecology, anthropology, medicine, zoology and plant sciences.Gebr. Borntraeger Verlagsbuchhandlung was founded by J. Nicolovius in Königsberg, Prussia in 1790. Gebr. Borntraeger has an active publishing program in earth, plant and environmental sciences. Later the publishing house moved to Berlin until 1968 when it became a sister publishing house of E. Schweizerbart and moved its business operations to Stuttgart.

Historical Description

Asia is Earth's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the Eastern and Northern Hemispheres. The history of Asia can be seen as the distinct histories of several peripheral coastal regions: East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, linked by the interior mass of the Central Asian steppes. The coastal periphery was home to some of the world's earliest known civilizations, each of them developing around fertile river valleys. The civilizations in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and the Yellow River shared many similarities. These civilizations may well have exchanged technologies and ideas such as mathematics and the wheel. Other innovations, such as writing, seem to have been developed individually in each area. Cities, states and empires developed in these lowlands. The central steppe region had long been inhabited by horse-mounted nomads who could reach all areas of Asia from the steppes. The earliest postulated expansion out of the steppe is that of the Indo-Europeans, who spread their languages into the Middle East, South Asia, and the borders of China, where the Tocharians resided. The northernmost part of Asia, including much of Siberia, was largely inaccessible to the steppe nomads, owing to the dense forests, climate and tundra. These areas remained very sparsely populated. The center and the peripheries were mostly kept separated by mountains and deserts. The Caucasus and Himalaya mountains and the Karakum and Gobi deserts formed barriers that the steppe horsemen could cross only with difficulty. While the urban city dwellers were more advanced technologically and socially, in many cases they could do little in a military aspect to defend against the mounted hordes of the steppe. However, the lowlands did not have enough open grasslands to support a large horsebound force; for this and other reasons, the nomads who conquered states in China, India, and the Middle East often found themselves adapting to the local, more affluent societies.