Rome and the Worlds Beyond Its Frontiers examines interactions between those within and those beyond the boundaries of Rome, with an eye to the question of contested identities and identity formations.

Do the Romans have anything to teach us about the way that they saw the world, and the way they ran their empire? How did they deal with questions of frontiers and migration, so often in the news today? This collection of ten important essays by C. R. Whittaker, engages with debates and controversies about the Roman frontiers and the concept of empire. Truly global in its focus, the book examines the social, political and cultural implications of the Roman frontiers in Africa, India, Britain, Europe, Asia and the Far East, and provides a comprehensive account of their significance.

Ancestral North: Spirituality and Cultural Imagination in Nordic Ritual Folk Music offers a detailed exploration of Nordic ritual folk music, a music scene focused on the revival of ancient folkways and archaic music that has found remarkable popularity around the globe. Once the domain of Viking reenactors and neopagan practitioners, the niche sonic and visual aesthetics of this music have found widespread visibility through a new generation of popular films, television series, and video games. The authors argue that many of these musical and media products connect with longstanding cultural attitudes about the Nordic region that conceive of it as wild, exotic, and dangerous, while also being a place of honor, community, and virtue. As such, the Nordic region and its music often becomes a vessel for reactionary escapes from all manner of modern discontentment. However, the authors also posit that spending time re-creating the music of an imaginary past offers participants the possibility for engagement and re-enchantment in the multicultural present.

In the Roman world, landscapes became legal and institutional constructions, being the core of social, political, religious, and economic life. The Romans developed ambitious urban transformations, seeking to equate civic monumentality and legal status. The built environment becomes the axis of the legal, administrative, sacred, and economic system and the main element of dissemination of imperial ideology. This volume follows the modern trend of a multifaceted, composite, multi-layered Roman world, but at the same time reduces its complexity. It views ‘Roman’ not only in the sense of power politics, but also in a cultural context. It highlights ‘landscapes’ and puts into the shadow important administrative and legal structures, i.e., individuals viz. local and imperial members of the elites living in cities, which ran the Roman world.

Presents results from the Finnish-Swedish Archaeological Project in Mesopotamia (FSAPM) pilot study of Tūr Abdin, Turkey. Aiming to record and document sites in this endangered area to save its cultural heritage, the sites consist of fortified remains in an ancient border zone between the Graeco-Roman/Byzantine world and Parthia/Persia.

This volume demonstrates the wide array of topics in ancient warfare currently studied by researchers around the world. Arranged chronologically in Greek and Roman history sections, the book takes readers through all manner of current research topics on ancient warfare, from traditional battle narratives or strategic analyses of campaigns, through the logistical considerations of armies in the field, to the ideology of women in war and mythology. The study of ancient war deals with a myriad of different topics and deals with themes in all types of history: social, cultural, economic, religious, literary, numismatical, epigraphical, ethnographical, topographical, prosopographical, and mythical, as well as the usual political and military. The study of ancient war is a field that is growing in popularity and continues to surprise us with many innovative new ideas, as shown in this collection of papers by established academics and current graduate students.

The East Romans of Byzantium and the Sasanian Persians competed as geopolitical rivals for over four centuries between 224 to 628 AD. Through a series of intractable conflicts these two great empires would develop a dual hierarchy that sought to divide the known world between them. Despite competing claims to universal rule, mutual spheres of interest arose as both empires sought to create rules, norms, and standard practices of diplomatic behaviour to regulate their inter-imperial rivalry. Defined by contemporaries as the 'Two Eyes' of the Earth, this suzerain order aimed to hierarchically organize those considered as 'barbarians'. This period of late antiquity is rarely considered within the discipline of International Relations (IR) but, through an English School approach, Blachford examines the diverse suzerain order of late antiquity as 'barbarous' nomadic tribes challenged the hierarchical ambitions of two rival empires who both claimed a unique role in the maintenance of world order.