Earn Ethnicity And Foreigners In Ancient Greece And China Executed By Hyun Jin Kim Kindle

an update on the Greek 'invention of the barbarian' see Edith Hall, sitelinkInventing the Barbarian: Greek SelfDefinition Through Tragedy, and a search for the historical circumstances behind similarities and contrasts with China's invention of barbarians.
Greece and China change

from an archaic lack of discrimination seen in Homer, bless him to a more fixed ideological position, but Greece based more in physiology because they had neighbours equal in material and intellectual culture.


The core is an examination of the historians Herodotus on Scythians and Sima Qian on Xiongnu these are often put side by side for their ethnographies of steppe peoples, but Kim's is the most indepth and wellconsidered discussion I know.
Excellent, rarely done comparative history of the ancient world, Why did the Greeks claim to be superior to their neighbors and yet record, rightly or wrongly, that the founders of some of their most important cities were foreigners from the Near East Can we find similar ethnocentric representations of outsiders in the literature of the other great literate civilization of the Ancient World, Early China How do the Greek and Chinese representations of the foreigner differ These questions are examined in a comparative analysis of Archaic/Classical Greek and Early Chinese historical and ethnographic sources, in particular the 'Histories' of Herodotus and the 'Shiji' of Sima Qian.
The author argues that Greece was an integral part of the wider Eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern civilization and that this had a major impact on the ways in which the Greeks chose to represent foreigners in their literature.
He also shows that the Ancient Chinese of the Han dynasty were as assertive as the Greeks in claiming their ethnic superiority over nonChinese, but concludes that, although the two cultures shared the same breadth and variety of prejudices towards outsiders, they chose to emphasize different categories of differentiation.
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