Urban Bathhouse in the Islamic Far East

Abstract

While the bathhouses of Rome and Byzantium have received a great deal of academic attention in the West, the baths of the Islamic world, particularly those in the far Islamic East in Central Asia, have been largely overlooked and much scholarly research in this region has only been published in Russian. This paper is an attempt to readdress this regional bias by presenting an overview of medieval bathhouses in Kazakhstan, based largely on the results of a recent upsurge in commercial archaeological excavations in the country. Ten bathhouses are described, and the significant features of Kazakh baths are highlighted.