This book focuses on prehistoric East Asian maritime cultures that pre-dated the Maritime Silk Road, the "Four Seas" and "Four Oceans" navigation system recorded in historical documents of ancient China. Origins of the Maritime Silk Road can be traced to prosperous Neolithic and Metal Age maritime-oriented cultures dispersed along the coastlines of prehistoric China and Southeast Asia. The topics explored here include Neolithisation and the development of prehistoric maritime cultures during the Neolithic and early Metal Age; the expansion and interaction of these cultures along coastlines and across straits; the "two-layer" hypothesis for explaining genetic and cultural diversity in south China and Southeast Asia; prehistoric seafaring and early sea routes; the paleogeography and vegetation history of coastal regions; Neolithic maritime livelihoods based on hunting/fishing/foraging adaptations; rice and millet cultivation and their dispersal along the coast and across the open sea; and interaction between farmers and maritime-oriented hunter/fisher/foragers. In addition, a series of case studies enhances understanding of the development of prehistoric navigation and the origin of the Maritime Silk Road in the Asia-Pacific region.

The focus of Richard Zgusta’s The Peoples of Northeast Asia through Time is the formation of indigenous and cultural groups of coastal northeast Asia, including the Ainu, the “Paleoasiatic” peoples, and the Asiatic Eskimo. Most chapters begin with a summary of each culture at the beginning of the colonial era, which is followed by an interdisciplinary reconstruction of prehistoric cultures that have direct ancestor-descendant relationships with the modern ones. An additional chapter presents a comparative discussion of the ethnographic data, including subsistence patterns, material culture, social organization, and religious beliefs, from a diachronic viewpoint. Each chapter includes maps and extensive references.

In Maritime Disputes in Northeast Asia: Regional Challenges and Cooperation, Suk Kyoon Kim provides an important multidisciplinary perspective on maritime disputes in one of the most dynamic areas of the world: Northeast Asia, a region of divergent political and economic systems where the legacy of a tumultuous past continues to overshadow current events. The text highlights maritime issues on the Korean Peninsula and extends an analytical eye to neighboring China, Japan and Russia. Kim explores in-depth the factors and issues at stake with complex maritime disputes, focusing on maritime boundary delimitation, territory, energy resources, fishery, marine pollution, and security and safety. This volume provides a timely international law perspective informed by an intricate historical, political, and socio-economic context, while offering a vision for future cooperation.

In this revisionist history of early modern China, Evelyn Rawski challenges the notion of Chinese history as a linear narrative of dynasties dominated by the Central Plains and Hans Chinese culture from a unique, peripheral perspective. Rawski argues that China has been shaped by its relations with Japan, Korea, the Jurchen/Manchu and Mongol States, and must therefore be viewed both within the context of a regional framework, and as part of a global maritime network of trade. Drawing on a rich variety of Japanese, Korean, Manchu and Chinese archival sources, Rawski analyses the conflicts and regime changes that accompanied the region's integration into the world economy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Early Modern China and Northeast Asia places Sino-Korean and Sino-Japanese relations within the context of northeast Asian geopolitics, surveying complex relations which continue to this day.

LEXICON AND ATLAS OF THE MODERN WORLD COINCIDING WITH THE ANCIENT GREEK WORLD From Solon of the sixth century BCE to Alexander the Great of the fourth century BCE, the Ancient Greek World covered about six percent of our Modern World, but in this small inhabited territory many of the greatest deeds of history were accomplished in places whose names remained the same to this day or changed with the subsequent civilizations. In order to retrieve from this book some brief information about nearly four thousand of these places the researchers can approach it by their names in either the Modern world or the Ancient Greek World. For the Ancient Greeks, the earth was a flat oval sphere surrounded by a huge Ocean, longer from west to east than from north to south. In addition to Hellas (Greece), their world encompassed the lands of Southern Europe, North Africa and Egypt, and West and Central Asia. In relation to the Modern World, it covered from the British Isles and Gibraltar in the west to western China and India in the east and from southern Germany, the Ukraine and Kazakhstan in the north to north Africa, Ethiopia and the Arabian Sea in the south. In this publication, cities, islands, mountains, regions, rivers and seas are listed alphabetically with a brief description in the Lexicon and a reference to their locations on forty-two maps in the Atlas. They are all listed again by groups in the Index. Between the monumental publications about the geography of the Ancient Greek World and the specialized ones, there remained between them a gap to be filled in by an instrument providing a fairly comprehensive and always brief, clear and easy-to-handle listing of places. Filling in this gap with such an instrument is the purpose of this publication addressed primarily to the busy readers and writers of all types. http://www.greekancienthistory.com/