부산대학교 도서관

[Inner] Region of the Asian land mass. Largely through its location, topography and hydrology, it has served for millennia as the carrier of human communications between the societies and civilizations of south, west, north and east Asia. Its position at the junction of these lines of communication and the favourable environmental conditions for the establishment and maintenance of settled societies there produced a region with a distinct identity, amalgamating the various intellectual, artistic, political and ethnic currents that flowed through it and fashioning a comparatively pluralistic and syncretistic civilization. In historical thought and writing from Herodotus (5th century bc) onwards, the region is often depicted simultaneously as a frontier—the region where West encountered East (from Medean and Achaemenid times onwards), where oasal city met the steppe, the civilized the barbarian, the farmer the nomad, and the monotheistic and pantheistic religions of West and South Asia encountered animism and shamanism—and as connector and link (...