Ethnicity and Foreigners in Ancient Greece and China

Ethnicity and Foreigners in Ancient Greece and China PDF Author: Hyunjin Kim
Publisher: Bristol Classical Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Argues that Greece was an integral part of the wider Eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern civilization and that this had a major impact on the ways in which the Greeks chose to represent foreigners in their literature.

Ethnicity and Foreigners in Ancient Greece and China

Ethnicity and Foreigners in Ancient Greece and China PDF Author: Hyunjin Kim
Publisher: Bristol Classical Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Argues that Greece was an integral part of the wider Eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern civilization and that this had a major impact on the ways in which the Greeks chose to represent foreigners in their literature.

Ancient Greece and China Compared

Ancient Greece and China Compared PDF Author: G. E. R. Lloyd
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107086663
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
A pioneering, methodologically sophisticated set of studies describing and analysing key features of ancient Greek and Chinese civilisations, including issues in philosophy and religion, in art and literature, in mathematics and the life sciences, in agriculture, city planning and institutions. Provides a model for collaborative, comparative work on ancient civilisations.

Rulers and Ruled in Ancient Greece, Rome, and China

Rulers and Ruled in Ancient Greece, Rome, and China PDF Author: Hans Beck
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108485774
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
A comparative study of the ancient Mediterranean and Han China, seen through the lens of political culture.

Rome, China, and the Barbarians

Rome, China, and the Barbarians PDF Author: Randolph B. Ford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108596606
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
This book addresses a largely untouched historical problem: the fourth to fifth centuries AD witnessed remarkably similar patterns of foreign invasion, conquest, and political fragmentation in Rome and China. Yet while the Western Roman Empire was never reestablished, China was reunified at the end of the sixth century. Following a comparative discussion of earlier historiographical and ethnographic traditions in the classical Greco-Roman and Chinese worlds, the book turns to the late antique/early medieval period, when the Western Roman Empire 'fell' and China was reconstituted as a united empire after centuries of foreign conquest and political division. Analyzing the discourse of ethnic identity in the historical texts of this later period, with original translations by the author, the book explores the extent to which notions of Self and Other, of 'barbarian' and 'civilized', help us understand both the transformation of the Roman world as well as the restoration of a unified imperial China.

Rome and China

Rome and China PDF Author: Walter Scheidel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199714290
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Transcending ethnic, linguistic, and religious boundaries, early empires shaped thousands of years of world history. Yet despite the global prominence of empire, individual cases are often studied in isolation. This series seeks to change the terms of the debate by promoting cross-cultural, comparative, and transdisciplinary perspectives on imperial state formation prior to the European colonial expansion. Two thousand years ago, up to one-half of the human species was contained within two political systems, the Roman empire in western Eurasia (centered on the Mediterranean Sea) and the Han empire in eastern Eurasia (centered on the great North China Plain). Both empires were broadly comparable in terms of size and population, and even largely coextensive in chronological terms (221 BCE to 220 CE for the Qin/Han empire, c. 200 BCE to 395 CE for the unified Roman empire). At the most basic level of resolution, the circumstances of their creation are not very different. In the East, the Shang and Western Zhou periods created a shared cultural framework for the Warring States, with the gradual consolidation of numerous small polities into a handful of large kingdoms which were finally united by the westernmost marcher state of Qin. In the Mediterranean, we can observe comparable political fragmentation and gradual expansion of a unifying civilization, Greek in this case, followed by the gradual formation of a handful of major warring states (the Hellenistic kingdoms in the east, Rome-Italy, Syracuse and Carthage in the west), and likewise eventual unification by the westernmost marcher state, the Roman-led Italian confederation. Subsequent destabilization occurred again in strikingly similar ways: both empires came to be divided into two halves, one that contained the original core but was more exposed to the main barbarian periphery (the west in the Roman case, the north in China), and a traditionalist half in the east (Rome) and south (China). These processes of initial convergence and subsequent divergence in Eurasian state formation have never been the object of systematic comparative analysis. This volume, which brings together experts in the history of the ancient Mediterranean and early China, makes a first step in this direction, by presenting a series of comparative case studies on clearly defined aspects of state formation in early eastern and western Eurasia, focusing on the process of initial developmental convergence. It includes a general introduction that makes the case for a comparative approach; a broad sketch of the character of state formation in western and eastern Eurasia during the final millennium of antiquity; and six thematically connected case studies of particularly salient aspects of this process.

Rome, China, and the Barbarians

Rome, China, and the Barbarians PDF Author: Randolph B. Ford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108473954
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
An exploration of ethnological thought in Greece, Rome, and China and its articulation during 'barbarian' invasion and conquest.

A Cultural History of Race in Antiquity

A Cultural History of Race in Antiquity PDF Author: Denise Eileen McCoskey
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350299987
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The era generally referred to as antiquity lasted for thousands of years and was characterized by a diverse range of peoples and cultural systems. This volume explores some of the specific ways race was defined and mobilized by different groups-including the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Persians, and Ethiopians- as they came into contact with one another during this period. Key to this inquiry is the examination of institutions, such as religion and politics, and forms of knowledge, such as science, that circumscribed the formation of ancient racial identities and helped determine their meanings and consequences. Drawing on a range of ancient evidence-literature, historical writing, documentary evidence, and ancient art and archaeology-this volume highlights both the complexity of ancient racial ideas and the often violent and asymmetrical power structures embedded in ancient racial representations and practices like war and the enslavement of other persons. The study of race in antiquity has long been clouded by modern assumptions, so this volume also seeks to outline a better method for apprehending race on its own terms in the ancient world, including its relationship to other forms of identity, such as ethnicity and gender, while also seeking to identify and debunk some of the racist methods and biases that have been promulgated by classical historians themselves over the last few centuries.

Sophist Kings

Sophist Kings PDF Author: Vernon L. Provencal
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 178093534X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Sophist Kings: Persians as Other sets forth a reading of Herodotus' Histories that highlights the consistency with which the Persians are depicted as sophists and Persian culture is infused with a sophistic ideology. The Persians as the Greek 'other' have a crucial role throughout Herodotus' Histories, but their characterisation is far divorced from historical reality. Instead, from their first appearance at the beginning of the Histories, Herodotus presents the Persians as adept in the argumentation of Greek sophists active in mid-5th century Athens. Moreover, Herodotus' construct of the Sophist King, in whom political reason serves human ambition, is used to explain the Achaemenid model of kingship whose rule is grounded in a theological knowledge of cosmic order and of divine justice as the political good. This original and in-depth study explores how the ideology which Herodotus ascribes to the Persians comes directly from fifth-century sophists whose arguments served to justify Athenian imperialism. The volume connects the ideological conflict between panhellenism and imperialism in Herodotus' contemporary Greece to his representation of the past conflict between Greek freedom and Persian imperialism. Detecting a universal paradigm, Sophist Kings argues that Herodotus was suggesting the Athenians should regard their own empire as a betrayal of the common cause by which they led the Greeks to victory in the Persian wars.

Other Natures

Other Natures PDF Author: Clara Bosak-Schroeder
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520974816
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Ancient Greek ethnographies—descriptions of other peoples—provide unique resources for understanding ancient environmental thought and assumptions, as well as anxieties, about how humans relate to nature as a whole. In Other Natures, Clara Bosak-Schroeder examines the works of seminal authors such as Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus to persuasively demonstrate how non-Greek communities affected and were in turn deeply affected by their local animals, plants, climate, and landscape. She shows that these authors used ethnographies of non-Greek peoples to explore, question, and challenge how Greeks ate, procreated, nurtured, collaborated, accumulated, and consumed. In recuperating this important strain of ancient thought, Bosak-Schroeder makes it newly relevant to vital questions and ideas being posed in the environmental humanities today, arguing that human life and well-being are inextricable from the life and well-being of the nonhuman world. By turning to such ancient ethnographies, we can uncover important models for confronting environmental crisis.

Ancient Ethnography

Ancient Ethnography PDF Author: Eran Almagor
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472537599
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
Ethnographic writing has become all but ubiquitous in recent years. Although now considered a thoroughly modern and increasingly indispensable field of study, Ethnography's roots go all the way back to antiquity. This volume brings together eleven original essays exploring the wider intellectual and cultural milieux from which ancient ethnography arose, its transformation and development in antiquity, and the way in which 19th century receptions of ethnographic traditions helped shape the modern study of the ancient world. Finally, it addresses the extent to which all these themes remain inextricably intertwined with shifting and often highly contested notions of culture, power and identity. Its chapters deal with the origins of the term 'barbarian', the role of ethnography in Tacitus' Germania, Plutarch's Lives, Xenophon's Anabasis, and Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae, Herodotean storytelling, Henry and George Rawlinson, and Megasthenes' treatise on India. At a time when modern ethnographies are becoming increasingly prevalent, wide-ranging, and experimental in their approach to describing cultural difference, this book encourages us to think about ancient ethnography in new and interesting ways, highlighting the wealth of material available for study and the complexities underpinning ancient and modern notions of what it meant to be Greek, Roman or 'barbarian'.