{"product_id":"the-dynamics-of-ancient-empires-state-power-from-assyria-to-byzantium-oxford-studies-in-early-empires","title":"The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium (Oxford Studies in Early Empires)","description":"\u003cp\u003eTranscending 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.  The worlds 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 earths 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 the fundamental 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 Goldstone  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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44946822529077,"sku":"ByrdShop_0199758344","price":76.17,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780199758340.jpg?v=1769967909","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-dynamics-of-ancient-empires-state-power-from-assyria-to-byzantium-oxford-studies-in-early-empires","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}