THE STUDY OF CULTURAL LIFE UNDER THE CHAGHATAI ULUS IN 21ST-CENTURY HISTORIOGRAPHY: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW
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Objective: This article systematically reviews 21st-century historiography on the cultural life of Mawarannahr under the Chaghatai Ulus (13th–14th centuries), a topic that, despite a measurable revival of scholarly interest, still lacks an integrated treatment as a coherent civilizational object. Method: Drawing on a comparative survey of Western, Russian, Eastern (Turkish, Mongolian, and broader Asian) and Central Asian / Uzbek scholarship, the study (i) maps the institutional and methodological landscape of contemporary research, (ii) classifies the existing corpus into four scholarly traditions and seven thematic clusters, and (iii) identifies the gaps that prevent a synthetic cultural history of the period. Results: The findings show that political and religious history dominate the literature (≈60% of attention combined), while material culture, music, language, and gender remain peripheral; crucially, no work to date treats cultural life as an integrated civilizational system. Novelty: The article proposes a five-pillar agenda — religion and spirituality, knowledge and education, material and artistic culture, language and literature, and society and everyday life — anchored in comparative source criticism, interdisciplinarity, and a civilizational framing. The principal contribution is a structured roadmap that reframes Chaghatai-Ulus studies from a fragmented set of monographs into a coherent research programme.
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