Ancient Empires

Eric H. Cline is Associate Professor and the Chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at The George Washington University. The author of more than eighty articles, his most recent books include Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction and From Eden to Exile: Unravelling Mysteries of the Bible. Mark W. Graham is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Grove City College, Pennsylvania. He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and has contributed chapters to several books including Encyclopedia of Greece and the Hellenic Tradition and Encyclopedia of the Empires of the World. He is the author, most recently, of News and Frontier Consciousness in the Late Roman Empire.

• Introduction: what is an (ancient) empire?; 1. Prelude to the Age of Ancient Empires; 2. The rise of the Age of Ancient Empires; 3. Dealing with empires: varieties of responses; 4. Beyond the Near East: the Neo-Babylonian and early Achaemenid Persian empires; 5. The crucible of history: east meets west; 6. Democracy and empire between Athens and Alexander; 7. 'Spear-won' empires: the Hellenistic synthesis; 8. The western Mediterranean and the rise of Rome; 9. Imperium sine fine: Roman imperialism and the end of the old order; 10. The new political order: the foundations of the principate; 11. Ruling and resisting the Roman Empire; 12. Imperial crisis and recovery; 13. Universal empires and their peripheries in Late Antiquity; 14. The formation of the Islamic world empire.

'… this is a stimulating essay, one that rewards a careful reader with new insights into a variety of issues. The maps are useful and readable; other illustrative material is always clearly integrated into the narrative and appropriately placed in the text … Ancient Empires should assist academic readers, in general not just specialists in the ancient world, in posing better questions in their own work. Better questions, like those raised in [this book], yield better research.' Thomas Burns, Ancient History Bulletin