Ancient Ethnography New Approaches

By providing a platform for scholars working in a variety of fields, this volume presents cutting-edge research dealing with various aspects of ancient ethnographic thought: its formation and devlopment, its intellectual and cultural milieux, the later reception of ethnographic traditons, and the extent to which these represent major constitutive elements of shifting notions of culture, power and identity.

Eran Almagor is Lecturer at Ben Gurion University of the Negev
Joseph Skinner teaches ancient history at the University of Liverpool, UK.

Introduction: Ancient Ethnography Through the Ages
Eran Almagor (Ben Gurion University of the Negev) and Joseph Skinner (University of Liverpool, UK)

Part One: Beginnings

The Invention of the 'Barbarian' in Late Sixth-century BC
Ionia Hyun Jin Kim (University of Sydney, Australia)

The Stories of the Others: Storytelling and inter-cultural Communication in the Herodotean Mediterranean
Kostas Vlassopoulos (University of Nottingham, UK)

Part Two: Responses

An Achaemenid Ethnography? Dress, Costume, and Race on the Apadana Reliefs at Persepolis
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Looking at the other: Vision, Travel and Greek Identity in Xenophon's Anabasis
Rosie Harman (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)

From the Indus to the Ganges: Apology and Analogy in Megasthenes' Indica
Paul J. Kosmin (Harvard University, USA)

Monstrous Aetolians and Aetolian Monsters - a Politics of Ethnography?
Jacek Rzepka (Warsaw University, Poland)

The Ethnographic Map in Early Rabbinic Literature
Eyal Ben Eliyahu (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)

Part Three: Transformations

Ethnographic Digressions in Plutarch's Lives
Eran Almagor (Ben Gurion University of the Negev)

Ethnography and the Gods in Tacitus' Germania
Greg Woolf (University of St. Andrews, UK)

Ethnography and Authorial Voice in Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae
Katerina Oikonomopoulou (University of Patras, Greece)

Part Four: Receptions

From Imagined Ethnographies to Invented Ethnicities: The Example of the Homeric
Halyzones Anca Dan (Institute of Neohellenic Research, Greece)

Imperial Visions, Imagined Pasts: Ethnography and identity on India's North-west Frontier
Joseph Skinner (University of Liverpool, UK)

A Tale of Two Rawlinsons
Thomas Harrison (University of Liverpool, UK)

Postscript: The Past and Future of Ancient Ethnography
Emma Dench (Harvard University, USA)

Index