Christoph Baumer

“Magnificent [and] wondrous.” The Spectator "Rich and illuminating." Literary Review "Phenomenally accurate." History Today "Stunning." The Morning Star "Sweeping." The New European"A wonderful book." Current World Archaeology "In a class of its own." The Caspian Post A landscape of high mountains and narrow valleys stretching from the Black to the Caspian Seas, the Caucasus region has been home to human...

In the Shadow of Great Powers is the second volume of Christoph Baumer’s History of the Caucasus. It covers the period from the Seljuk domination of the Southern Caucasus around 1050 CE to the present day. After the Kingdom of Georgia’s golden age of independent power and cultural blossoming in the 12th and early 13th centuries, the Caucasus was overrun...

For more than a hundred years, Central Asia was the heartland of the mightiest military power on the planet. But after the fragmentation of the all-conquering Mongol polity, the region began a steep decline which rendered this former domain of horse lords peripheral to world affairs. The process of deterioration reached its nadir in the second half of the nineteenth...

The Age of the Silk Roads (c 200 BC - c 900 AD) shaped the course of the future. The foundation by the Han dynasty of an extensive network of interlinking trade routes, collectively known as the Silk Road, led to an explosion of cultural and commercial transactions across Central Asia that had a profound impact on civilization. In this...

The epic plains and arid deserts of Central Asia have witnessed some of the greatest migrations, as well as many of the most transformative developments, in the history of civilisation. The History of Central Asia by Christoph Baumer is an ambitious four-volume treatment of the region that charts the 3000-year drama of Scythians and Sarmatians; Soviets and transcontinental Silk Roads;...

Rock art is mankind’s oldest artistic expression. The first creation of rock carvings (petroglyphs) and rock paintings (pictographs) by Homo sapiens represented a quantum leap in mental performance. In Rock Art and its Legacy in Myth and Art, Christoph Baumer tells the story of these remarkable creations of early human imagination in Eurasia, Arabia, and the Sahara. Petroglyphs not only...