Asian and Middle Eastern History: BCE to 500CE

This book is dedicated to the political economy of one of the major states of the Hellenistic world, the Attalid kingdom of Pergamon in north-western Asia Minor. In the third century bc, the Attalid dynasts of Pergamon were relatively minor players in Hellenistic great-power politics. In 188 bc, after Rome's victory over the Seleukid king Antiochos III, the Attalids were granted the lion's share of the former Seleukid territories in western and inner Anatolia; at a stroke, the Attalids were elevated to the status of one of the major powers of the eastern Mediterranean. But this new-found prominence came at a price. Since the vast expanse of Attalid Asia Minor had been won not by conquest, but by gift of the Roman senate, the ideological and bureaucratic structures through which the second-century Attalid rulers administered their kingdom differed sharply from those of the other major Hellenistic dynasties. The late Attalid monarchs were forced to develop a new non-charismatic royal style and ideology. A full reassessment of the character of Attalid Asia Minor is long overdue. This book is chiefly concerned with the political economy of the second-century Attalid kingdom, and in particular the three major themes of money, international relations, and the functioning of the state.

The reign of Emperor Basil II is usually considered the high-water mark of medieval Byzantium. During Basil's reign, Byzantine political authority extended from southern Italy to the Euphrates. With the conversion of the Rus to Orthodoxy in 988, the empire's cultural influence stretched still further. Basil portrayed himself as a soldier emperor who was as implacable towards his domestic opponents as against his foreign neighbours. His brutal conquests later earned him the sobriquet ‘Bulgar-slayer’. This book considers the problems inherent in governing such a large, multi-ethnic empire; it examines the solutions that Basil adopted particularly on the Byzantine frontiers. It explains how the extant sources make unmasking the political realities of this period so difficult, and demonstrates that a convincing picture of Basil's reign only emerges once these sources are understood in their original contexts. Particular attention is paid to the impact that the Synopsis Historion (also known as the Synopsis Historiarum) of John Skylitzes, a little-studied text from the reign of Emperor Alexios Komnenos (1081-1118), has on our understanding of Basil. As the late 11th-century context in which Skylitzes operated is exposed, so the political, military, and administrative history of Basil's reign is reconstructed. Basil's Byzantium is revealed as a state where the rhetoric of imperial authority became reality through the astute manipulation of force and persuasion.

This book examines the relationship between the Roman Empire, the Empire of Sasanian Iran, and their Arab clients, the Jafnids, Nasrids, and Hujrids, at the end of antiquity. Building on recent work in the field, it offers new conclusions about the role played by these two empires in the development of Arab political and cultural identity before Islam, and places the Jafnids, Nasrids, and Hujrids within the framework of current debates on the history and culture of Late Antiquity. Exploring three distinct areas — religious and cultural life (particularly Christianity), political activity, and the role of Old Arabic, the work traces the increasing political and cultural visibility of Arab elites at the edges of the Roman and Sasanian empires, and explains these changes from the perspective of the effects and influences of imperial alliance. In its exploration of how some aspects important for the later development of Muslim Arab identity were embedded in the context provided by the two empires of Rome and Sasanian Iran, the study emphasises the importance of the world of Late Antiquity for the our understanding of Arab history and identity.

This book offers a study of the calendars of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, Gaul, and all other parts of the Mediterranean and the Near East, from the origins up to and including Jewish and Christian calendars in late Antiquity. Particular attention is given to the structure of calendars and their political context. Most ancient calendars were set and controlled by political rulers; they served as expressions of political power, as mechanisms of social control, and sometimes, on the contrary, as assertions of political independence and dissidence. Ancient calendars were very diverse, but they all shared a common history, evolving on the whole from flexible, lunar calendars to fixed, solar schemes. The Egyptian calendar played an important role in this process, most notably inspiring the institution of the Julian calendar in Rome, the forerunner of our modern Gregorian calendar. In this book it is argued that the rise of fixed calendars was not the result of scientific or technical progress, but of major political and social changes that transformed the ancient world under the great Near Eastern, Hellenistic, and Roman Empires. The institution of standard, fixed calendars served the administrative needs of these extensive empires, but also contributed to their cultural and political cohesion. This ultimately led, conversely, to late antique perceptions of calendar diversity as an expression of heresy and cause of social schism.

This book is an historical-critical study of Jewish slavery in antiquity, comparing the Jewish discourse on slavery with Graeco-Roman and Christian attitudes, and the first comprehensive analysis of Jewish attitudes towards slavery in Hellenistic and Roman times. It subverts many traditional views of Jews and slavery in antiquity; for example, showing against the traditional opinion that after the Babylonian Exile Jews refrained from employing slaves, that slavery remained a significant phenomenon of ancient Jewish everyday life, and generated a discourse which resembled Graeco-Roman and early Christian views while at the same time preserving specifically Jewish nuances. It examines the impact of domestic slavery on the ancient Jewish household and on family relationships, discusses the perceived advantages of slaves over other types of labor, and evaluates their role within the ancient Jewish economy. The ancient Jewish experience of slavery seems to have been so pervasive that slave images also entered theological discourse. Like their Graeco-Roman and Christian counterparts, ancient Jewish intellectuals did not advocate the abolition of slavery, but they used the biblical tradition and their own judgements to ameliorate the status quo.

In 14th century BC, the Hittites became the supreme political and military power in the Near East. How did they achieve their supremacy? How successful were they in maintaining it? What brought about their collapse and disappearance? This book,which describes the Hittite kingdom, seeks to answer these questions. Hittitology is a relatively new discipline in the field of Near Eastern studies. Little more than a century ago, when important advances had already been and were continually being made in the study of the Bronze Age civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Hittites were regarded as no more than a small Canaanite tribe living somewhere in Palestine — an assumption based on a few scattered biblical references. We now know that Hatti, the kingdom of the Hittites, was one of the great powers of the Late Bronze Age, rivalling and eventually surpassing in the 14th century its two most powerful contemporaries, the kingdoms of Mitanni and Egypt. From their capital Hattusa in central Anatolia, the kings of the Land of Hatti controlled a widespread network of vassal states, which at the height of Hittite political and military development in the 14th and 13th centuries extended from the Aegean coast of Anatolia in the west through northern Syria to Damascus in the south, to the western fringes of Mesopotamia in the east.

Transport has been seen as one of the greatest failures of ancient technology. Land transport especially, due to its cost, restricted growth in the Roman economy. This book challenges these views, using the evidence of papyri from Roman Egypt, and argues that land transport, even in a country so dominated by a river which provided a natural highway, was an essential part of a system of transport that allowed for vigorous trading activity, but provided the Roman state with valuable resources which, through careful management, it could use for its own transport requirements: supplying the Roman army, transporting tax profits, and transporting bulk commodities such a stone for imperial building projects. It explores the economics of animal ownership, the role of transport in the agricultural and commercial economies of Egypt, state bureaucracy and the organization of transport. It examines the complex relationship between the state and private individuals and seeks to show that transport by land formed a vital part of everyday economic activity in Egypt. It contributes to our understanding of the economy of a Roman province and argues for a positive view of the role of transport in the ancient economy.

This book explores the history of medieval Nubia through the Old Nubian documentary archives excavated at Qasr Ibrim in southern Egypt. It focuses in particular on a single archive of land sales from the late twelfth century ad. It argues that the evidence from this archive alters our understanding of medieval Nubian society and economy. We should no longer see medieval Nubia as an isolated society with a primitive, demonetized economy. Nubian sales and accounts show wide levels of monetization. The accounts reveal gold-to-silver exchange rates in keeping with those of neighboring Egypt, thus tying Nubia’s economy to the wider Mediterranean. The documents from Qasr Ibrim also reveal medieval Nubia’s deep ties to Roman and Byzantine civilization. Old Nubian land sales have Greco-Roman Egyptian land sales as their historical basis. These land sales also suggest the existence of land purchase for investment by high-ranking officials who carried the expenses of the state, much like late antique landholders in Egypt. But the documents from Qasr Ibrim also reveal Nubian cultural practices along side this Roman cultural inheritance. In particular, we see evidence for public feasts as a widespread practice: Communal eating is a way for medieval Nubians to confirm the legitimacy of their legal transactions and their social hierarchies. Thus our records for medieval Nubia reveal a hybrid civilization with African and Byzantine characteristics.

This book challenges readers to reconsider China’s relations with the rest of Eurasia. Investigating interstate competition and cooperation between the successive Sui and Tang dynasties and Turkic states of Mongolia from 580 to 800, this book upends the notion that inhabitants of China and Mongolia were irreconcilably different and hostile to each other. Rulers on both sides deployed strikingly similar diplomacy, warfare, ideologies of rulership, and patrimonial political networking to seek hegemony over each other and the peoples living in the pastoral borderlands between them. The book particularly disputes the supposed uniqueness of imperial China’s tributary diplomacy by demonstrating that similar customary norms of interstate relations existed in a wide sphere in Eurasia as far west as Byzantium, India, and Iran. These previously unrecognized cultural connections, therefore, were arguably as much the work of Turko-Mongol pastoral nomads traversing the Eurasian steppe as the more commonly recognized Silk Road monks and merchants.