Raaflaub Kurt A. (ed.). War and Society in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds: Asia, Mediterranean, Europe and Mesoamerica

Harvard University Press, 1999. — 491 p.This social history of war from the third millennium BCE to the 10th-century CE in the Mediterranean, the Near East and Europe (Egypt, Achaemenid Persia, Greece, the Hellenistic World, the Roman Republic and Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the early Islamic World and early Medieval Europe) with parallel studies of Mesoamerica (the Maya and Aztecs) and East Asia (ancient China, medieval Japan). The volume offers a broadly based, comparative examination of war and military organization in their complex interactions with social, economic and political structures, as well as cultural practices.