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The bird and the blade
As a slave in the Kipchak Khanate, Jinghua has lost everything: her home, her family, her freedom. She becomes an unlikely conspirator in the escape of Prince Khalaf and his father from their enemies across the vast Mongol Empire. Jinghua hatches a scheme to use the Kipchaks' exile to return home. Her feelings evolve into a hopeless love, as Khalaf seeks to restore his kingdom by forging a marriage alliance with Turandokht, the daughter of the Great Khan. All suitors must solve three impossible riddles to win her hand-- and if they fail, they die. -- adapted from jacket.
Book
The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity
There was racism in the ancient world, after all. This
groundbreaking book refutes the common belief that the ancient
Greeks and Romans harbored \"ethnic and cultural,\" but not racial,
prejudice. It does so by comprehensively tracing the intellectual
origins of racism back to classical antiquity. Benjamin Isaac's
systematic analysis of ancient social prejudices and stereotypes
reveals that some of those represent prototypes of racism--or
proto-racism--which in turn inspired the early modern authors who
developed the more familiar racist ideas. He considers the
literature from classical Greece to late antiquity in a quest for
the various forms of the discriminatory stereotypes and social
hatred that have played such an important role in recent history
and continue to do so in modern society.
Magisterial in scope and scholarship, and engagingly written,
The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity further
suggests that an understanding of ancient attitudes toward other
peoples sheds light not only on Greco-Roman imperialism and the
ideology of enslavement (and the concomitant integration or
non-integration) of foreigners in those societies, but also on the
disintegration of the Roman Empire and on more recent imperialism
as well. The first part considers general themes in the history of
discrimination; the second provides a detailed analysis of
proto-racism and prejudices toward particular groups of foreigners
in the Greco-Roman world. The last chapter concerns Jews in the
ancient world, thus placing anti-Semitism in a broader context.
eBook
'But They Were a Race of Whites': Race and the Making of Ancient Slavery in the Anglophone World, 1785–1980
Today, few ancient historians believe that Greek and Roman slavery had anything to do with race or racism. But when histories of ancient slavery were first written in the 1780s, the connection was assumed. This article explores how and why race and racism persisted in Anglophone historiography on ancient slavery into the twentieth century, only disappearing in the 1950s. I argue that it might be time to reopen the book on whether ancient slavery was a racialized institution. Adopting insights from premodern critical race studies (PCRS), I argue that the real differences between ancient and Atlantic-world slaveries should not be seen in terms of discontinuity and rupture. Rather, I see the question through what Margo Hendricks calls a \"bidirectional gaze,\" by which social arrangements of the past few centuries might bear uncanny resemblance to institutions of the ancient past.
Journal Article
Athenian Economy and Society
In this ground-breaking analysis of the world's first private banks, Edward Cohen convincingly demonstrates the existence and functioning of a market economy in ancient Athens while revising our understanding of the society itself. Challenging the \"primitivistic\" view, in which bankers are merely pawnbrokers and money-changers, Cohen reveals that fourth-century Athenian bankers pursued sophisticated transactions. These dealings--although technologically far removed from modern procedures--were in financial essence identical with the lending and deposit-taking that separate true \"banks\" from other businesses. He further explores how the Athenian banks facilitated tax and creditor avoidance among the wealthy, and how women and slaves played important roles in these family businesses--thereby gaining legal rights entirely unexpected in a society supposedly dominated by an elite of male citizens.
Special emphasis is placed on the reflection of Athenian cognitive patterns in financial practices. Cohen shows how transactions were affected by the complementary opposites embedded in the very structure of Athenian language and thought. In turn, his analysis offers great insight into daily Athenian reality and cultural organization.
eBook
Greek and Roman Slavery
Greek and Roman Slavery brings together fresh English translations of 243 texts and inscriptions on slavery from fifth and fourth century Greece and Rome. The material is arranged thematically, offering the reader a comprehensive review of the idea and practice of slavery in ancient civilization. In addition, a thorough bibliography for each chapter, as well as an extensive index, make this a valuable source for scholars and students.
eBook
Status in classical athens
Ancient Greek literature, Athenian civic ideology, and modern classical scholarship have all worked together to reinforce the idea that there were three neatly defined status groups in classical Athens--citizens, slaves, and resident foreigners. But this book--the first comprehensive account of status in ancient democratic Athens--clearly lays out the evidence for a much broader and more complex spectrum of statuses, one that has important implications for understanding Greek social and cultural history. By revealing a social and legal reality otherwise masked by Athenian ideology, Deborah Kamen illuminates the complexity of Athenian social structure, uncovers tensions between democratic ideology and practice, and contributes to larger questions about the relationship between citizenship and democracy.
Each chapter is devoted to one of ten distinct status groups in classical Athens (451/0-323 BCE): chattel slaves, privileged chattel slaves, conditionally freed slaves, resident foreigners (metics), privileged metics, bastards, disenfranchised citizens, naturalized citizens, female citizens, and male citizens. Examining a wide range of literary, epigraphic, and legal evidence, as well as factors not generally considered together, such as property ownership, corporal inviolability, and religious rights, the book demonstrates the important legal and social distinctions that were drawn between various groups of individuals in Athens. At the same time, it reveals that the boundaries between these groups were less fixed and more permeable than Athenians themselves acknowledged. The book concludes by trying to explain why ancient Greek literature maintains the fiction of three status groups despite a far more complex reality.
eBook
The Prestige Makers: Greek Slave Women in Ancient India
In the ancient Mediterranean, slavers targeted women. Many of these enslaved women went to regional markets but some were shipped to India where they could be used to access markets that supplied the Eastern luxury products profitable back in the West. Women, labeled yavani (Ionic Greek) in India, could have been from the Persian conquests of the Eastern Mediterranean, Alexander's Hellenistic colonies in Bactria, Indo-Greeks, or eventually, women captured anywhere in the Roman Empire. Greek slaves proved to be popular in India, appearing in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Tamil, and Syriac texts in three main roles. First, lists of attendants in royal harems include yavani as early as the fifth century B.C. in Bihar. Second, dramas and poetry in late antiquity brand Greeks as the preferred female bodyguards of royals. Third, multiple sources identify Western women working as courtesans, barmaids, and \"flute girls\" in the robust sex/entertainment careers of ancient India. Foreign slaves provided prestige and demonstrated the imperial reach of those who possessed them. The desire for foreign exotica by the elite in a wealthy region like India increased the danger of enslavement and long-distance displacement for the women of the ancient Mediterranean, a risk that has not disappeared for those in vulnerable places today.
Journal Article
The athenian nation
Challenging the modern assumption that ancient Athens is best understood as apolis, Edward Cohen boldly recasts our understanding of Athenian political and social life. Cohen demonstrates that ancient sources referred to Athens not only as apolis, but also as a \"nation\" (ethnos), and that Athens did encompass the characteristics now used to identify a \"nation.\" He argues that in Athens economic, religious, sexual, and social dimensions were no less significant than political and juridical considerations, and accordingly rejects prevailing scholarship's equation of Athens with its male citizen body.
In fact, Cohen shows that the categories of \"citizen\" and \"noncitizen\" were much more fluid than is often assumed, and that some noncitizens exercised considerable power. He explores such subjects as the economic importance of businesswomen and wealthy slaves; the authority exercised by enslaved public functionaries; the practical egalitarianism of erotic relations and the broad and meaningful protections against sexual abuse of both free persons and slaves, and especially of children; the wide involvement of all sectors of the population in significant religious and local activities. All this emerges from the use of fresh legal, economic, and archaeological evidence and analysis that reveal the social complexity of Athens, and the demographic and geographic factors giving rise to personal anonymity and limiting personal contacts--leading to the creation of an \"imagined community\" with a mutually conceptualized identity, a unified economy, and national \"myths\" set in historical fabrication.
eBook
Broken bodies and broken bones: Biocultural approaches to ancient slavery and torture
This chapter looks at the forms of violence through a biocultural lens by investigating two contexts wherein trauma was identified on the remains of ancient indigenous communities from the American Southwest. It focuses on systems of culturally sanctioned violence that relied upon slavery and torture as part of everyday activities. In one context, a subgroup of adult females had been thrown into and buried in abandoned structures; their bones revealed a life of beatings and hard work. Applying the biocultural approach to investigate why these women had been so abused yielded an interpretation of structural violence whereby some groups practiced raiding for women. A second case study focuses on the remains of 33 individuals who were not only massacred but also tortured; perimortem pathologies on bones of the feet revealed that they had had their feet cut and beaten in such a way that they were hobbled and could not run away.
Book Chapter
Slavery in the Americas
This chapter contains sections titled:
Conditions of Slavery
Resistance to Slavery
Bibliography
Book Chapter