Kim Hyun Jin, Vervaet Frederik Juliaan, Adali Selim Ferruh (eds.). Eurasian Empires in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Contact and Exchange between the Graeco-Roman World, Inner Asia and China

Cambridge University Press, 2017. — 346 p.The great empires of the vast Eurasian continent have captured the imagination of many. Awe-inspiring names such as ancient Rome, Han and Tang China, Persia, Assyria, the Huns, the Kushans and the Franks have been the subject of countless scholarly books and works of literature. However, very rarely, if at all, have these vast pre-industrial empires been studied holistically from a comparative, interdisciplinary and above all Eurasian perspective. This collection of studies examines the history, literature and archaeology of these empires and others thus far treated separately as a single inter-connected subject of inquiry. It highlights in particular the critical role of Inner Asian empires and peoples in facilitating contacts and exchange across the Eurasian continent in antiquity and the early Middle Ages.Hyun Jin Kim is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Melbourne. His publications include Ethnicity and Foreigners in Ancient Greece and China (2009), The Huns, Rome and the Birth of Europe (Cambridge, 2013) and The Huns (2015).Frederik Juliaan Vervaet is Associate Professor of Ancient History at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of The High Command in the Roman Republic (2014), and co-editor of Despotism and Deceit in the Greco-Roman World (2010) and The Roman Republican Triumph (2014).Selim Ferruh Adali is Assistant Professor of History at the Ankara Sosyal Bilimler Üniversitesi. He is the author of The Scourge of God: The Umman-manda and its Significance in the First Millennium BC (2011) and of papers on the Assyrian Empire, the role of climate change in the Near East and new editions of Mesopotamian cuneiform texts.