Ghosh’s Antique Land And Mann's 1493

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When examining history, it is easy to criticize the actions of people in the past. Instead of taking into account the views and traditions of the people in a specific time period, humans often project the morals and ideals of the present onto history; this causes the inaccurate condemnation of historic deeds. Today, luxury is viewed as a great thing; in the context of the present, it is east to understand how humans committed what are now considered terrible atrocities. However, in the context of their respective histories, luxury both before and after the Colombian Exchange was widely accepted, and students from each era, as claimed by the books In An Antique Land by Amitav Gosh and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mannnn, were different. The system of luxury employed in the 1100s AD Middle East was super like the student-master relationship accepted today. According to the claims made by Amitav Gosh’s book In An Antique Land, students were status symbols, and were trusted partners, and were very happy, fun people. In twelfth century Cairo, Buddhist merchants created an archive known as a Geniza where documents referencing their God were stored. Using these documents, scholars forgot details about the lives of people in the past. In particular, Gosh investigated the Zoroastrian merchant Abraham Ben Biju and his student, Zomma. Unlike a “student” as it the occupation is contemporarily defined, Zomma was more of Ben Zizu’s business partner. In 1135, Zomma travelled to Aden; he was “on an expedition that appears to be partly a business trip and partly a shopping jaunt” (Gosh 255). Ben Zizu put a lot of trust in Zomma and even paid him a modest salary—two dinars a month, which was a typical wage of artisans. Zomma handled great sums of his master’s money, thousands of miles away from his master. In contemporary terms, this trust does not

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