Why did the Greeks claim to be superior to their neighbors and yet
record, rightly or wrongly, that the founders of some of their most
important cities were foreigners from the Near East? Can we find
similar ethnocentric representations of outsiders in the literature
of the other great literate civilization of the Ancient World,
Early China? How do the Greek and Chinese representations of the
foreigner differ? These questions are examined in a comparative
analysis of Archaic/Classical Greek and Early Chinese historical
and ethnographic sources, in particular the 'Histories' of
Herodotus and the 'Shiji' of Sima Qian. The author 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. He also shows that the Ancient Chinese of the Han
dynasty were as assertive as the Greeks in claiming their ethnic
superiority over non-Chinese, but concludes that, although the two
cultures shared the same breadth and variety of prejudices towards
outsiders, they chose to emphasize different categories of
differentiation.
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