The world's first known empires took shape in Mesopotamia between
the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf,
beginning around 2350 BCE. The next 2,500 years witnessed sustained
imperial growth, bringing a growing share of humanity under the
control of ever-fewer states. Two thousand years ago, just four
major powers--the Roman, Parthian, Kushan, and Han empires--ruled
perhaps two-thirds of the earth's entire population. Yet despite
empires' prominence in the early history of civilization, there
have been surprisingly few attempts to study the dynamics of
ancient empires in the western Old World comparatively. Such grand
comparisons were popular in the eighteenth century, but scholars
then had only Greek and Latin literature and the Hebrew Bible as
evidence, and necessarily framed the problem in different, more
limited, terms. Near Eastern texts, and knowledge of their
languages, only appeared in large amounts in the later nineteenth
century. Neither Karl Marx nor Max Weber could make much use of
this material, and not until the 1920s were there enough
archaeological data to make syntheses of early European and west
Asian history possible. But one consequence of the increase in
empirical knowledge was that twentieth-century scholars generally
defined the disciplinary and geographical boundaries of their
specialties more narrowly than their Enlightenment predecessors had
done, shying away from large questions and cross-cultural
comparisons. As a result, Greek and Roman empires have largely been
studied in isolation from those of the Near East. This volume is
designed to address these deficits and encourage dialogue across
disciplinary boundaries by examining thefundamental features of the
successive and partly overlapping imperial states that dominated
much of the Near East and the Mediterranean in the first millennia
BCE and CE.
A substantial introductory discussion of recent thought on the
mechanisms of imperial state formation prefaces the five newly
commissioned case studies of the Neo-Assyrian, Achaemenid Persian,
Athenian, Roman, and Byzantine empires. A final chapter draws on
the findings of evolutionary psychology to improve our
understanding of ultimate causation in imperial predation and
exploitation in a wide range of historical systems from all over
the globe. Contributors include John Haldon, Jack Goldstein, Peter
Bedford, Josef Wiesehofer, Ian Morris, Walter Scheidel, and Keith
Hopkins, whose essay on Roman political economy was completed just
before his death in 2004.
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