Middle east architectural traditions in golden horde mansion construction

The article deals with the largest mansion-type buildings in the Golden Horde towns of the Lower Volga region. These buildings had many rooms and walls made of hard-burned and adobe bricks. A large ceremonial hall was located at the center of the building; vestibule premises were located adjacent to the hall on the northern and southern sides; residential and utility rooms occupied the eastern and the western wings. Golden Horde mansions are compared with the palaces and mansions of China, Mongolia, and the countries of the Middle East. The infl uence of the architectural traditions of these countries led to the emergence of an original building type based both on a typical Western Central Asian layout, and principles of organizing space borrowed from Eastern Central Asia.     

The Jewish Communities of Central Asia in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods

When the Jews first settled in Central Asia is uncertain, but circumstantial evidence clearly indicates that this happened at least two and a half thousand years ago. In the first millennium AD, the Jews lived only in cities no farther than 750?km east of the Caspian sea (in the eighth–eleventh centuries the sea was called Khazarian). Only later did they migrate to the central part of the region, to cities like Samarkand and Bukhara. It is possible that Jews from Khazaria joined them, since they already had tight trade connections with Central Asia and China. There is no trace of evidence regarding the existence of Jews in the entirety of Central Asia in the early sixteenth century. At the very end of the sixteenth century Bukhara became the new ethnoreligious center of the Jews in that region. In the first half of the nineteenth century, thanks to European travelers visiting Central Asia at that time, the term “Bukharan Jews” was assigned to this sub-ethnic Jewish group. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary source materials, this article aims to prove that the presence of Jews in Central Asia was not continuous, and therefore the modern Bukharan Jews are not descendants of the first Jewish settlers there. It also attempts to determine where Central Asia’s first Jewish population disappeared to.