They rather introduce "Eurasian late antiquity" as an ancillary perspective, an interpretive instrument, to be employed to locate Rome and China like within transcontinental processes beyond their control—and often beyond their knowledge—that nevertheless shaped their respective destinies in the same centuries, circa 250-750. The contributors to the volume demonstrate the unambiguous utility of the instrument and set a historiographical agenda encompassing once disparate fields, in a manner reminiscent of the original Late Antiquity of the 1970s and 1980s.

Nicola Di Cosmo and Michael Maas, eds. Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity: Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppe, ca. 250-750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

From Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR). Review by Richard Payne, University of Chicago