Etienne_de_la_Vaissière
Étienne de la Vaissière
French historian and academic (born 1969)
Étienne de La Vaissière (born 5 November 1969 in Dijon) is a French historian, professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, in Paris.[1] He is teaching economic and social history of early medieval Central Asia, before and after the arrival of Islam. He is a specialist of the Sogdian culture, its traders and nobility, and also of the nomadic invasions of the 4th-5th centuries. Some of his theories are:
- a depiction of the network which gave to the image of "Silk Road" its only historical reality during the Early Middle Ages[2]
- the textual proof that the Huns and the Xiongnu are indeed synonymous
- a shift of two centuries in the history of Eastern Manichaeism (it arrived in China in the 6th century)
- a reinterpretation of Abbasid 9th century political history pushing the birth of the mamluk phenomenon to the 860s-870s