Ethnic Constructs in Antiquity: The Role of Power and Tradition

This bold and original volume explores themes of ethnicity and ethnogenesis in the societies of the ancient world. It starts with a current view held by many in the social and historical sciences, namely that ethnicity is a subjective concept shaped through an interaction with the ethnic other. The thirteen essays collected here analyze historical, epigraphic, and archaeological source material in order to consider the dynamic nature of ethnic formations over time, and range thematically from archaic Greece to early medieval Western Europe.