Preface

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Extract this is the first volume of the Oxford History of the Ancient Near East; four more volumes of similar length will follow over the course of the next few years. The five volumes will cover the long period from the first settled communities in Western Asia and Egypt to the conquests of Alexander of Macedon (d. 323 bc), but with a particular focus on the three millennia starting in the late fourth millennium bc, when the emergence of the first complex states profoundly changed human societies and cultural norms across the region. In deciding on the cutoff point for the first volume, we had to take into account the physical constraints of bookbinding as well as the expectations of the readers. On balance, matching the Old Kingdom of Egypt with the much shorter-lived Akkad state and using the detailed discussion of these influential pathfinder polities as the endpoint of the first volume’s narrative is satisfactory for logistical as well as conceptual and intellectual reasons. The absolute and relative chronology of the third millennium bc is still not securely anchored, so we must leave it to future generations of scholars to establish whether we should have included Egypt’s First Intermediate period or the kingdom of the Third Dynasty of Ur in this volume after all or were justified in reserving those chapters for the second volume. The chart on pp. x–xi presents a concise overview of the chronological coverage of the present volume.