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Although they existed more than a millennium apart, the great civilizations of New Kingdom Egypt (ca. 1548-1086 BCE) and Han dynasty China (206 BCE-220 CE) shared intriguing similarities. Both were centered around major, flood-prone rivers-the Nile and the Yellow River-and established complex hydraulic systems to manage their power. Both spread their territories across vast empires that were controlled through warfare and diplomacy and underwent periods of radical reform led by charismatic rulers-the \"heretic king\" Akhenaten and the vilified reformer Wang Mang. Universal justice was dispensed through courts, and each empire was administered by bureaucracies staffed by highly trained scribes who held special status. Egypt and China each developed elaborate conceptions of an afterlife world and created games of fate that facilitated access to these realms. This groundbreaking volume offers an innovative comparison of these two civilizations. Through a combination of textual, art historical, and archaeological analyses, Ancient Egypt and Early China reveals shared structural traits of each civilization as well as distinctive features.

The history of China is a history of warfare. Rarely in its 3,000-year existence has the country not been beset by war, rebellion, or raids. Warfare was a primary source of innovation, social evolution, and material progress in the Legendary Era, Hsia dynasty, and Shang dynasty--indeed, war was the force that formed the first cohesive Chinese empire, setting China on a trajectory of state building and aggressive activity that continues to this day.InAncient Chinese Warfare, a preeminent expert on Chinese military history uses recently recovered documents and archaeological findings to construct a comprehensive guide to the developing technologies, strategies, and logistics of ancient Chinese militarism. The result is a definitive look at the tools and methods that won wars and shaped culture in ancient China.

Extreme drought events can impact human health, notably triggering epidemics that impose significant global health and economic burdens. Understanding these effects and developing response strategies is crucial. However, there is limited epidemiological evidence on how climate change influenced ancient epidemics before large-scale urbanization and frequent population movements. In this study, we utilized the Reconstructed East Asian Climate Historical Encoded Series (REACHES) climate database and the self-constructed ancient Chinese epidemics database to examine extreme drought events in ancient China from 1784–1787 CE. We analyzed factors like grain prices, population density, and socioeconomic conditions to explore the temporal and spatial mechanism and influence the degree of extreme drought events on epidemics outbreaks. The results show that there is a clear positive link between drought and the spread of epidemics, with a notable one-year lag effect of drought. Drought impacts epidemics directly and indirectly through locust plague, famine, crop failure, and social turmoil, with famine being the most crucial factor. Official disaster management can mitigate epidemics. This study intuitively shows the relationship between extreme drought events and epidemics in ancient China and offering insights into the climate change-epidemic relationship. Placing the conclusions of this paper in a broader context has global implications, providing historical experience for polycrisis and modern challenges.

The frequency of droughts and heatwaves both increased in the context of climate change. However, due to their different time scales, the impacts, as well as the responses of human systems will vary accordingly. Reconstructions of historical extreme events can help understand the mechanisms of human–environment interactions. From a perspective of human–environment system and based on various historical documents, this study examined the quantity, spatial characteristics, and timeframe of the impacts and government response records of the drought and heatwave in 1743. The results are as follows. (1) The impacts of drought propagated hierarchically, with attenuation across different levels of the human–environment system and a shrinking spatial scale; while the heatwave mainly affected the human system; (2) Government responses to drought were diverse and targeted, involving regional interactions and off-site mitigation measures, whereas responses to heatwave were less diverse and mainly on-site; (3) The impact of drought can be transmitted to higher levels of the social system through food security, with serious consequences, the impacts of heatwave end in human systems. This is why governments treat them differently. Technological conditions further limit response behavior to high temperatures.

As the globe has witnessed the pandemic, epidemic diseases exert a strong impact on human beings and ecosystems. Since the Sun is the primary energy source of the Earth, some scientific pioneers attempted to search for the discernible relation between solar activity and the incidence of epidemics. In this study, the periodic changes and trends of ancient Chinese epidemic data were analyzed in comparison with those of sunspot numbers, a solar activity proxy. The results show that the epidemic and solar activity changes are in good agreement to a certain extent, especially during the Gleissberg and the de Vries cycles. The wavelet coherence shows that the frequency of the epidemic data and sunspot numbers are highly associated. In addition, results from the ensemble empirical mode decomposition illustrate consistent variations in low-frequency decompositions. This study has important implications for further understanding of the potential impact of solar activity on Earth’s biosphere, the underlying mechanism of which needs further exploration.

Why would dictators purge members of their ruling coalition? Some argue that doing so can minimize the risk to dictators’ political survival, while others contend that dictators who mount purges are motivated by the desire to share resources with fewer allies. In this study, we analyze an original dataset, compiled from biographical data on the subordinates of the founding emperors of seven ancient Chinese imperial dynasties. Analyzing the data with competing risks models, we find that military experience is a strong predictor of political purges. Emperors were less likely to execute officers who had fought in more battles, but more likely to execute commanders, especially those who had established military credentials prior to the founding of an empire. In addition, the incidence of political purges heightened toward the end of an emperor’s life, which implies that the founding emperors were concerned about the security threats against their designated successors. Potential challengers came not only from the military, but also from the aristocracy. Indeed, we find that the blood relatives of the emperors were more likely to experience a mild form of purges: deprivation of titles. These findings suggest that dictators are more likely to use purges to reduce existential threats.

Most recently, two distinctions—echoing the cross-disciplinary critique of the teleological and “quantitative” approach of human arts and sciences at the expanse of the “qualitative”—have been foregrounded by Amzallag (Philosophy and Technology 34, 785–809, 2021) and Crease (2011), respectively, between the modern understanding of “technology” (as technopraxis) and the “forgotten dimension/phase of technology” (called technopoiesis) and between the ontic and ontological measurement. Pace gently the denotation of technopoiesis as a juvenile phase of technological development and the “ontological measurements” as logical and practical impossibility in the modern, mathematized metroscape, the paper reexamines the relevancy of the distinctions (ontic/ontological and po[i]etic/practical, both recalling Heidegger’s “hermeneutical” critique of Husserl’s phenomenology) in non-Platonic/Aristotelian contexts and, in the process, seeks to refine the vital notion of technopoiesis by looking at the intersection of these fuzzy domains. In particular, the ancient Chinese measurements and their understudied onto-poietic dimension in the shifting econ-political contexts may offer an alternative approach to the otherwise elusive presence of technopoiesis and its ontological roots. Arguing that the techno-onto-poiesis does not necessarily belong to the foregone Arcadian past, the paper proposes refined “signals” for recognizing the technopoietic as well as new “forms” of its presence—“interactive emergence” (the cross-stimulating agonistic interactions between techniques of different “stages”) and “poietic clusters” (poietic ideas and/or implements that survive as “cluster” into the future), calling for future investigation of technical inventiveness (even in modern times) that reveal the process of how technopoietic elements enter the lives of technology through least expected embodiment.

Empress Dowager Cixi, the supreme ruler of China’s Qing Dynasty, along with Imperial Concubine Jin, may have suffered from goiter. Our suspicions were aroused by two interesting historical photographs. Herein, we provide a medical interpretation of these historical images in an attempt to present the cases of these two historical figures.

This study identifies historical extreme events and analyzes their impacts on social vulnerability, stability, and resilience in ancient China. We reconstructed extreme event sequences, simulated social resilience response using our proposed Cascade Catastrophe-Resilience Dynamic Model, and discussed interaction of social vulnerability and stability. We found the following conclusions. First, historical extreme events had cyclic and periodic fluctuations, and usually led to cascade disasters. Cascade disasters enhanced risk and greatly reduced societal stability, while three types of disaster chains were observed: climatic extremes (flood/drought)-famines-wars (uprising/invasions)-epidemic plagues; climatic extremes (flood/drought)-famines -migrations; and droughts-locust plagues-famines. A climate extreme-earthquake chain was also recorded although the mechanism remains unknown. Second, extreme events were synchronous with dynastic changes, although strong social resilience enhanced the opportunity for dynastic survival and modified the stochastic magnitude–frequency relationship between extreme events and social vulnerability. The high frequency of extreme events is consistent with high hazard indices, declining population, high levels of social vulnerability, and low levels of social stability and resilience. However, the strong correlation between high levels of social vulnerability and high frequency of extreme events occurred at the end of dynasties but not when dynasties were thriving. Third, quick response to disasters, efficient disaster relief systems, and sufficient food supplies were essential parts of social resilience to disasters. Extreme events play important roles in shaping agricultural production, and thus food supply. Population fluctuation and migration, economic center shifts, and social and economic structure changes contributed to cascade disasters, which often led to societal instability throughout Chinese history.

In ancient China, after a technology developed to a certain height, it often fell into stagnation, and even gradually degenerated in the long-term stagnation. This phenomenon was very prominent in military technology. This paper focuses on analyzing the development of crossbow and firearms in ancient China, makes a preliminary discussion on the reasons why stagnation and degeneration would ensue when the military technology reached a certain height, and puts forward the concept of \"satisfaction point\" to discuss the intrinsic cause and critical point of the turning from development to stagnation and degeneration.