This book examines the highly problematic politics of the past surrounding the archaeology of ancient empires in Iran. Discussing their personal and professional experiences, the authors exemplify the real, ethical dilemmas that archaeologists confront in the Middle East, calling for reflectivity and awareness among the archaeologists of the region

This book examines the highly problematic politics of the past surrounding the archaeology of ancient empires in Iran. Discussing their personal and professional experiences, the authors exemplify the real, ethical dilemmas that archaeologists confront in the Middle East, calling for reflectivity and awareness among the archaeologists of the region

The articles of this comprehensive edited volume offer a multidisciplinary, global and comparative approach to the history of empires. They analyze their ends over a long spectrum of humankind’s history, ranging from Ancient History through Modern Times. As the main guiding question, every author of this volume scrutinizes the reasons for the decline, the erosion, and the implosion of individual empires. All contributions locate and highlight different factors that triggered or at least supported the ending or the implosion of empires. This overall question makes all the contributions to this volume comparable and allows to detect similarities, differences as well as inconsistencies of historical processes.

The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Destruction presents a comprehensive view on the destruction of cultural heritage and offers insights into this multifaceted, interdisciplinary phenomenon; the methods scholars have used to study it; and the results these various methods have produced. By juxtaposing theoretical and legal frameworks and conceptual contexts alongside a wide distribution of geographical and temporal case studies, this book throws light upon the risks, and the realizations, of art and heritage destruction. Exploring the variety of forces that drive the destruction of heritage, the volume also contains contributions that consider what forms heritage destruction takes and in which contexts and circumstances it manifests. Contributors, including local scholars, also consider how these drivers and contexts change, and what effect this has on heritage destruction, and how we conceptualise it. Overall, the book establishes the importance of the need to study the destruction of art and cultural heritage within a wider framework that encompasses not only theory but also legal, military, social, and ontological issues. The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Destruction will contribute to the development of a more complete understanding and analysis of heritage destruction. The Handbook will be useful to academics, students, and professionals with interest in heritage, conservation and preservation, history and art history, archaeology, anthropology, philosophy, and law.

A collection of essays by social theorists, historical sociologists and area specialists in classical, biblical and Asian studies. The contributions deal with cultural transformations in major civilizational centres during the "Axial Age," the middle centuries of the last millennium BCE, and their long-term consequences.

This is the first world history of empire, reaching from the third millennium BCE to the present. By combining synthetic surveys, thematic comparative essays, and numerous chapters on specific empires, its two volumes provide unparalleled coverage of imperialism throughout history and across continents, from Asia to Europe and from Africa to the Americas. Only a few decades ago empire was believed to be a thing of the past; now it is clear that it has been and remains one of the most enduring forms of political organization and power. We cannot understand the dynamics and resilience of empire without moving decisively beyond the study of individual cases or particular periods, such as the relatively short age of European colonialism. The history of empire, as these volumes amply demonstrate, needs to be drawn on the much broader canvas of global history. Volume Two: The History of Empires tracks the protean history of political domination from the very beginnings of state formation in the Bronze Age up to the present. Case studies deal with the full range of the historical experience of empire, from the realms of the Achaemenids and Asoka to the empires of Mali and Songhay, and from ancient Rome and China to the Mughals, American settler colonialism, and the Soviet Union. Forty-five chapters detailing the history of individual empires are tied together by a set of global synthesizing surveys that structure the world history of empire into eight chronological phases.

The organization and characteristics of early and ancient states have become the focus of a renewed interest from archaeologists, ancient historians and anthropologists in recent years. On the one hand, neo-evolutionary schemas of political transformation find it difficult to define some of their most basic concepts, such as ‘chiefdom’, ‘complex chiefdom’ and ‘state’, not to mention the transition between them. On the other hand, teleological interpretations based on linear dynamics, from less to increasingly more complex political structures, in successive steps, impose biased and too rigid views on the available evidence. In fact, recent research stresses the existence of other forms of socio-political organization, less vertically integrated and more heterarchical, that proved highly successful and resilient in the long term in tying together social groups. What is more, such forms quite often represented the basic blocks on which states were built and that managed to survive once states collapsed. Finally, nomadic, maritime and mountain populations provide fascinating examples of societies that experienced alternative forms of political organization, sometimes on a seasonal basis. In other cases, their consideration as ‘marginal’ populations that cultivated specialized skills ensured them a certain degree of autonomy when living either within or at the borders of states. This book explores such small-scale socio-political organizations, their potential and the historical trajectories they stimulated. A selection of historical case studies from different regions of the world may help rethink current concepts and views about the emergence and organization of political complexity and the mechanisms that prevented, occasionally, the emergence of solid polities. They may also cast some light over trajectories of historical transformation, still poorly understood as are the limits of effective state power. This book explores the importance of comparative research and long-term historical perspectives to avoid simplistic interpretations, based on the characteristics of modern Western states abusively used retrospectively.

With Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) the soci0logist ?mile Durkheim formulated the most influential social-science theory of religion to date. Pivotal are the paired concepts ?sacred / profane?, the notion of ?collective representations?, and the hypothesis that through such religious symbols, society compels its members to venerate herself i.e. to submit to the social as an irreducible instance in its own right. Having grappled with this Durkheimian inheritance for half a century, the anthropologist of religion and intercultural philosopher Wim van Binsbergen in this book traces his own steps in confront_ing Durkheim's sacred, through theoretical criticism, through ethnographic application (to popular Islam in the segmentary social organisation of the highlands of Northwestern Tunisia), and by state-of-the-art long-range methods of linguistic and comparative mythological analysis. Thus, much to his surprise, he demonstrates the continued validity of Durkheim's insights in religion.