The world's first known empires took shape in Mesopotamia between the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf, beginning around 2350 BCE. The next 2,500 years witnessed sustained imperial growth, bringing a growing share of humanity under the control of ever-fewer states. Two thousand years ago, just four major powers--the Roman, Parthian, Kushan, and Han empires--ruled perhaps two-thirds of the earth's entire population. Yet despite empires' prominence in the early history of civilization, there have been surprisingly few attempts to study the dynamics of ancient empires in the western Old World comparatively. Such grand comparisons were popular in the eighteenth century, but scholars then had only Greek and Latin literature and the Hebrew Bible as evidence, and necessarily framed the problem in different, more limited, terms. Near Eastern texts, and knowledge of their languages, only appeared in large amounts in the later nineteenth century. Neither Karl Marx nor Max Weber could make much use of this material, and not until the 1920s were there enough archaeological data to make syntheses of early European and west Asian history possible. But one consequence of the increase in empirical knowledge was that twentieth-century scholars generally defined the disciplinary and geographical boundaries of their specialties more narrowly than their Enlightenment predecessors had done, shying away from large questions and cross-cultural comparisons. As a result, Greek and Roman empires have largely been studied in isolation from those of the Near East. This volume is designed to address these deficits and encourage dialogue across disciplinary boundaries by examining the fundamental features of the successive and partly overlapping imperial states that dominated much of the Near East and the Mediterranean in the first millennia BCE and CE.A substantial introductory discussion of recent thought on the mechanisms of imperial state formation prefaces the five newly commissioned case studies of the Neo-Assyrian, Achaemenid Persian, Athenian, Roman, and Byzantine empires. A final chapter draws on the findings of evolutionary psychology to improve our understanding of ultimate causation in imperial predation and exploitation in a wide range of historical systems from all over the globe. Contributors include John Haldon, Jack Goldstone, Peter Bedford, Josef Wieseh?fer, Ian Morris, Walter Scheidel, and Keith Hopkins, whose essay on Roman political economy was completed just before his death in 2004.

世界上最早的已知帝国是在地中海东岸和波斯湾之间的美索不达米亚形成的，大约从公元前2350年开始。接下来的2500年见证了帝国的持续增长，使人类越来越多的地方处于越来越少的国家的控制之下。两千年前，只有四个大国--罗马帝国、帕提亚帝国、贵霜帝国和汉帝国--统治着地球上大约三分之二的人口。然而，尽管帝国在早期文明史上占有突出地位，但令人惊讶的是，很少有人试图对西方旧世界的古代帝国的动态进行比较研究。这种宏大的比较在18世纪很流行，但当时的学者只有希腊和拉丁文献以及希伯来圣经作为证据，而且必然以不同的、更有限的术语来框定这个问题。近东文献和其语言知识在十九世纪后期才大量出现。卡尔-马克思和马克斯-韦伯都无法利用这些材料，而且直到20世纪20年代才有足够的考古学数据，使欧洲和西亚早期历史的综合成为可能。但经验知识的增加带来的一个后果是，二十世纪的学者普遍比他们的启蒙运动前辈更狭隘地界定了他们专业的学科和地理界限，对大型问题和跨文化比较避之不及。因此，希腊和罗马帝国在很大程度上被孤立于近东帝国之外进行研究。本卷旨在解决这些缺陷，并鼓励跨学科的对话，研究在公元前和公元前一千年统治近东和地中海大部分地区的连续和部分重叠的帝国国家的基本特征。在对新亚述帝国、阿契美尼德波斯帝国、雅典帝国、罗马帝国和拜占庭帝国的五个新委托的案例研究之前，对最近关于帝国国家形成机制的想法进行了实质性的介绍。最后一章借鉴了进化心理学的研究成果，以提高我们对全球各种历史体系中帝国掠夺和剥削的最终因果关系的理解。作者包括John Haldon、Jack Goldstone、Peter Bedford、Josef Wieseh?fer、Ian Morris、Walter Scheidel和Keith Hopkins，后者关于罗马政治经济的文章是在他2004年去世之前完成。