Conceiving the empire China and Rome compared (Oxford University Press, 2008)
Includes bibliographical references and indexes
pt. I. The birth of the imperial order. A. The idea of 'empire' : its genesis before and its unfolding after the emergence of the empire. City and empire / Albrecht Dihle -- Interlude : kingship and empire / Zhu Weizheng -- The rhetoric of 'empire' in the classical era in China / Michael Nylan -- B. Historiography and the emerging empire. Imagining the empire? Concepts of 'primeval unity' in pre-imperial historiographic tradition / Yuri Pines -- The emergence of empire : Rome and the surrounding world in historical narratives from the late third century BC to the early first century AD / Huang Yang and Fritz-Heiner Mutschler -- pt. II. The firmly established empire. A. Imperial grandeur and historiography à la grande. The problem of 'imperial historiography' in Rome / Fritz-Heiner Mutschler -- Forging legacy : the pact between empire and historiography in ancient China / Achim Mittag --
- B. The spatial dimension of the unified world : imperial geography and cartographical representations. Diagram (tu) and text (wen) : mapping the Chinese world / Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer -- Text and image : mapping the Roman World / Katherine Clarke -- C. Self-image and the formation of imperial rhetorics. Announcements from the mountains : the stele inscriptions of the Qin First Emperor / Martin Kern -- The Res Gestae Divi Augusti and the Roman Empire / Christian Witschel -- D. The power of images : imperial order and imperial aura as represented in art and architecture. Image and empire : the shaping of Augustan Rome / Rolf Michael Schneider -- Imperial aura and the image of the other in Han art / Michèle Pirazzoli-t'Serstevens -- pt. III. The waning of the imperial order. A. History-writing in the face of crisis. The impact of the empire's crises on historiography and historical thinking in late antiquity / Hans Armin Gärtner and Ye Min --
- Empire on the brink : Chinese historiography in the post-Han period / Achim Mittag and Ye Min -- B. When the imperial order disintegrates : rethinking the 'empire' under religious auspices. New tendencies, religious and philosophical, in the Roman Empire of the third to early fifth centuries / Gerard O'Daly -- New tendencies, religious and philosophical, in the Chinese world of the third through sixth centuries / Thomas Jansen
The essays in Conceiving the Empire explore the mental images, ideas, and symbolical representations of 'empire' which developed in the two most powerful political entities of antiquity: China and Rome. While the central focus is on historiography, other related fields are also explored: geography and cartography, epigraphy, art and architecture, and, more generally, political thought and the history of ideas. Written by a collaborative team of experts in Sinology and Classical Studies, the volume focuses the attention of the emerging discipline of East-West cross-cultural studies on an essential feature of the ancient Mediterranean and Chinese worlds: the emergence of 'empire' and the enduring influence of the 'imperial' order