Browse

This study examines a pivotal period in the history of Europe and the Near East. Spanning the ancient and medieval worlds, it investigates the shared ideal of sacred kingship that emerged in the late Roman and Persian empires. This shared ideal, while often generating conflict during the four centuries of the empires' coexistence (224–642), also drove exchange, especially the means and methods Roman and Persian sovereigns used to project their notions of universal rule—elaborate systems of ritual and their cultures' visual, architectural, and urban environments. The book explores the artistic, ritual, and ideological interactions between Rome and Iran under the Sasanian dynasty, the last great Persian dynasty before Islam. It analyzes how these two hostile systems of sacred universal sovereignty not only coexisted, but fostered cross-cultural exchange and communication, despite their undying rivalry. Bridging the traditional divide between classical and Iranian history, this book brings to life the dazzling courts of two global powers that deeply affected the cultures of medieval Europe, Byzantium, Islam, South Asia, and China.

This book asks the reader to consider the lives of the mothers, wives, concubines, entertainers, attendants, officials, maids, and drudges of the dynasties of history. By offering the first comparative view of the women who lived, worked, and served in royal courts around the globe, this book opens a new perspective on the monarchies that have dominated much of human history. Written by historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists, the chapters in this book take us from Mayan states to twentieth-century Benin in Nigeria, to the palace of Japanese Shoguns, the Chinese imperial courts, eighteenth-century Versailles, Mughal India, and beyond. Together they investigate how women's roles differed, how their roles changed over time, and how their histories can illuminate the structures of power and the societies in which they lived. This work also furthers our understanding of how royal courts, created to project the authority of male rulers, maintained themselves through the reproductive and productive powers of women.