Antiquity in Global Context – serie

This book examines the construction of space and place in early China and the ancient Mediterranean through the lens of performances conducted in specific locations. It highlights conceptions of place and performance, seeing both as crucial to the production of cultural meaning and communal cohesion, and as heavily dependent on the prevailing political culture. Whether urban or rural, global or local, central or fringe, public or private, real or imagined, theatrical or ritual, the places and performances highlighted serve to show both commonalities and differences between the ancient Mediterranean and early China. The range of places of comparison is also very diverse, including roads, gardens, neighbourhoods, hydraulic infrastructures, funerary performance, spectacles at court, and the everyday display of authority through clothing and fashion. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Leaders abounded in the ancient world, from kings, pharaohs, emperors, tyrants, politicians, and orators to generals, minor officials and intellectuals. This book opens fresh perspectives on leadership by examining under-explored topics, posing new questions and revisiting old concepts. In particular, it seeks to shift attention from constitutional issues stricto sensu (such as kingship, monarchy, tyranny, etc.) or, more productively, to prompt a re-examination of these issues through the lens of leadership. The volume includes chapters on a range of cultures from across the ancient world in order to promote comparative reflection. Key questions include whether some models of good and bad leadership were universal among ancient cultures or exhibited differences? Why did a certain culture emphasise one leadership quality while another insisted on another? Why did only some cultures develop a theoretical discourse on leadership? How did each culture appropriate, define, redefine (or react) to existing concepts of leadership?

The Pioneer Kingdoms of Macedon and Qin critically compares the cultures of Ancient Greece and Early China in the first millennium BC through following the histories of two of its peripheral cases: Argead Macedon and Qin. Emerging from being fringe states to producing Alexander the Great and the First Emperor of China, then rapidly collapsing, these polities had a unique parallel historical experience, though vastly separated by the political developments brought on by the unique features of Greek and Zhou culture within which they operated. Jordan Thomas Christopher undertakes a holistic comparison of these states from their earliest origins through to the reigns of Alexander the Great and the First Emperor, which receive an extended and multi-layered analysis. He thereby highlights the particularities of Greek and Zhou cultures that often go underappreciated as causal factors in history.

Scholarly texts and the popular imagination often analogize the state as a person that is concrete and independent in its actions. This Leviathan, the state-as-person analogical framing, pervades our interpretations of the past. The framing is deeply misleading, both narrowing the possibilities of past governance for large-scale collectives and distorting our understanding of how important decisions were made. This book uses the assemblage approach and other related theories to develop an alternative framework that views these polities as dynamic assemblages of human and other-than-human agents brought together through ongoing projects of incorporation and coordination. Leaders try, and often fail, to shape these assemblages through their actions. Five case studies illustrate the benefits of this approach for understanding past politics-from Chaco Canyon, the Andean Wari, Shang China, Ilé-IfẹÌ in Nigeria, and ancient Athens. This is a Flip it Open title and may be available open access on Cambridge Core.