Herodotus and Sima Qian: History's Anthropological Turn in Ancient Greece and China

Herodotus and Sima Qian: History and the Anthropological Turn in Ancient Greece and Han
China
Author(s): Siep Stuurman
Source: Journal of World History, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Mar., 2008), pp. 1-40
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press
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Herodotus and Sima Qian: History and
the Anthropological Turn in Ancient
Greece and Han China*
SIEP STUURMAN
Erasmus University Rotterdam
History aspolitical
edge and a critical account
enlightenment of the invented
was independently past and
in a means
two civilizations in ancient Eurasia: China and Greece. It received its
two best-known canonical formulations in the Shiji (Records of the
Scribe, written ca. 100-90 b.c.e.) of Sima Qian (Ssu-ma Ch'ien) in
the former Han dynasty in China, and in Herodotus s Histories (Inqui
ries, written ca. 450-425 b.c.e.) in the Greek communities of the east
ern Mediterranean after the Persian Wars. The Greek city-states were
vibrant newcomers to the established world of the ancient civilizations
of western Eurasia, while China was the most advanced civilization of
eastern Eurasia. The independent development of history in two Eur
asian civilizations provides us with a fascinating comparative case in
the world history of ideas.
History represented a new way for a society to reflect on itself, com
* Part of the research for this article was done when I was a member of the School of
Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. I wish to thank Jonathan
Israel, Joseph McDermott, and Carol Gluck for enlightening conversations about European
and Asian history. I owe a special debt to Nicola di Cosmo for sharing his vast knowledge of
Chinese-Xiongnu relations with me. I also want to thank the Leiden sinologist Axel Sch
neider for valuable advice. Finally, I am grateful to my Rotterdam colleague Maria Grever
and to the anonymous reader of the Journal of World History for their helpful comments on
previous versions of this essay.
Journal of World History, Vol. 19, No. 1

? 2008 by University of Hawai'i Press
2 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 20o8
peting with older religious, poetic, and philosophical modes of self

understanding. More than those older genres, history investigated the
contingencies of time and place. It made it possible to explore frontiers
and to reflect on the differences between one's own way of life and the
customs of foreigners. It is surely significant that in Greece as well as
in China, the new discourse of history comprised a large amount of
geography and ethnography. My comparison of Herodotus and Sima
Qian focuses on the ethnographic parts of their histories, in particular
on Herodotus s description of the Scythians and Sima Qian's treatment
of the Xiongnu (Hsiung-nu). In both cases, historians belonging to a
sedentary civilization confronted the nomadic culture of the north
ern peoples inhabiting the great band of steppe lands that traverses
Eurasia from west to east. I will discuss their nomadic ethnographies
in the context of their views of empire and cultural difference, as well
as in connection with the temporalities underpinning their historical
narrative.
The dialectic of empire, ethnography, and history powerfully frames
these histories. The writing of history is always an exercise in self-defi
nition. More than anything else, it is the confrontation with others
that compels people to question their own identity. That is what makes
imperialism so central to my comparison, whether empire is a menace
from without, as in Herodotus, or a perilous course the fate of one's
own civilization depends on, as in Sima Qian. Both Herodotus and
Sima Qian were fascinated by the conditions and morality of empires,
giving much thought to cultural difference, and trying out formula
tions akin to what we today call cultural relativism. The problematic
of empire incited both historians to compose a history of "the known
world." Their societies had reached a stage when it was no longer pos
sible to understand one's civilization without taking the measure of its
wider environment. This, then, is the problematic that will guide my
comparative investigation.
A few theoretical observations may be useful at this point. The
ethnographies in the Histories and the Shiji are instances of what we
may call the anthropological turn. Our historians inform their readers
about the way of life of "others" living in foreign lands. The anthro
pological turn happens when they attempt to understand those others
"from within," examining the functioning of their culture, instead of
merely compiling a list of weird and outlandish customs. Now, the type
of ethnography we encounter in Herodotus and Sima Qian has fre
quently been labeled under the generic notions of "othering" and "Ori
entalism" ("Occidentalism" would be more appropriate in Sima Qian's
case). In an influential book, Fran?ois Hartog has analyzed Herodotus's
Stuurman: Herodotus and Sima Qian 3
Scythian ethnography as an exemplary case of othering, while Owen

Lattimore has long ago deplored Sima Qian's "strongly conventional"
ideas about the steppe nomads.1 Over the past decades, the diagnosis of
"othering" has been made about virtually every European text discuss
ing non-European cultures, and there is no good reason why a similar
evaluation could not apply to Chinese accounts of "barbarians."
The problem with such readings is not that they are "untrue." There
obviously ?5 a great deal of "othering" in these texts. My objection to an
overly exclusive focus on "othering" is that it makes us miss the signifi
cance of the anthropological turn. To get the problem in sharper focus
we must realize that there was a way of looking at foreigners before
the anthropological turn. The German Egyptologist Jan Assmann has
called our attention to the habit of the Egyptians of the Old and Middle
Kingdom of "calling all non-Egyptians Vile enemies,' even when there
were bonds of amity?established by treaties or political marriages?
with the ethnic groups thus designated." The Egyptians equated Egypt
with the meaningfully ordered world. Beyond its borders lived "abso
lute aliens with whom any relations would be unthinkable."2 Against
this background, much of what is called "othering" represents a real
accomplishment. That Herodotus and Sima Qian typify the compo
nents of other cultures in a series of contrasts with their own way of
life is not in itself very significant. It could hardly be otherwise. Any
account of remote lands seeks to understand the unknown by compar
ing it with the known. What is significant is that they investigate the
functionality of other cultures as interlocking systems, and inquire how
the others "look back" at the civilized "center." That is a new approach.
Even when these ethnographies contain negative judgments and ste
reotypical representations, they present us with the first step toward an
appraisal of the rationality of foreign ways.
In this connection, it is of vital importance to see frontiers as zones
of creative interaction, and not just as sites of hostility and prejudice.
The widespread adoption of "othering" as a theoretical framework in
intellectual history has led to an underestimation of the critical and
universalistic impulses in "frontier texts." The mutual awareness that
is a necessary prelude to reflecting upon the nature and value of other
cultures makes for the thinkability of a common humanity transcend
1 Fran?ois Hartog, Le miroir d'H?rodote: Essai sur la repr?sentation de l'autre (Paris: Gal
limard, 1991); Owen Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962),
p. 448.
2 Jan Assmann, The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs (New
York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), p. 151.
4 journal of world history, march 2008
ing cultural boundaries. The frontier, taken in this sense, is the real
or imagined locus of rejection and acceptance, incomprehension and
mutual understanding. We should bear in mind that this is not an
all-or-nothing game. The denial of other peoples' humanity and the
recognition of their equality represent two extreme cases. Much, and
perhaps most, of history is played out on the continuum between the
two extremes.
Two "Fathers of History"
With some justification, both Herodotus and Sima Qian have been
called "fathers of history" in their respective civilizations, but, as Grant
Hardy observes, comparative studies of Greek and Chinese historiog
raphy are rare.3 The Histories, written in the late fifth century b.c.e.,
and the Shiji, written at the beginning of the first century b.c.e., were
among the most influential books of history ever written. The Shiji
stands at the beginning of the long Chinese tradition of historiography
that continued through the entire imperial era. Subsequent Chinese
historians, beginning with Ban Gu (Pan Ku) in the later Han dynasty,
have frequently voiced criticisms of Sima Qian, but, as Burton Watson
observes, they, as well as their readers, have always read, studied, and
admired the Shiji.4 The case of Herodotus is different. He was widely
read, and frequently criticized, in antiquity, but was not well known in
3 Grant Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo: Sima Qian s Conquest of History (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 261 n. 2, mentions S. Y. Teng, "Herodotus and
Ssu-ma Ch'ien: Two Fathers of History," East and West 12 (1961): 233-40, and N. I. Konrad,
"Polybius and Ssu~Ma Ch'ien," Soviet Sociology 5 (1967): 37-58, to which must now be
added David Schaberg, "Travel, Geography, and the Imperial Imagination in Fifth-Century
Athens and Han China," Comparative Literature 51 (1999): 152-91, and G. E. R. Lloyd,
The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 5-20. Of these, Teng gives a brief introductory
account, Konrad focuses on political cycles, Schaberg mainly compares Sima Qian and
Thucydides, while Lloyd's discussion privileges epistemological concerns.
4 Burton Watson, Ssu-ma Ch'ien: Grand Historian of China (New York: Columbia Uni
versity Press, 1958), p. 38; see also William H. Nienhauser Jr., ed., The Indiana Companion
to Traditional Chinese Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 689; and
Stephen W. Durrant, The Cloudy Mirror: Tension and Conflict in the Writings of Sima Qian
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. xxi. Moreover, historiography has
greatly influenced the evolution of other Chinese literary genres; see Anthony C. Yu, "His
tory, Fiction and the Reading of Chinese Narrative," Chinese Literature: Essays, Arricies,
Reviews 10 (1988-1989): 1-19. Quotations from the Shiji, unless otherwise indicated, are
from Burton Watson's translation: Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian, 3 vols., rev.
ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); references contain Shiji chapter number,
relevant volume (Han I, Han II, Qin), and page.
medieval Europe, only to resume his career with Lorenzo Valla's Latin
translation in the fifteenth century.5 The canonization of Herodotus
has thus not been a continuous process in time, nor did it represent
a geographical or cultural unity. While we can consider Sima Qian a
Chinese historian, who wrote about a Sinocentric world and saw him
self as an inheritor and successor of the Chinese classics, Herodotus
cannot stand for "Europe." He was a historian of the Greek city-states,
the Persian empire, western Asia, and Egypt. In the Histories, Europe is
the name of a continent, but for Herodotus it did not denote a mean
ingful cultural tradition or intellectual canon.6 Insofar as Herodotus's
world had a cultural center, it was the Greek-speaking part of the Med
iterranean. It follows that we must be careful not to project back later
oppositions between China and Europe into our discussion of Herodo
tus and Sima Qian.
The differences between ancient Greece and Han China are unde
niable and important, but so are the instructive parallels between the
two civilizations. We should pay equal attention to both. Moreover,
we must take into account the specificity of intellectual history. The
writings of Herodotus and Sima Qian present us with two varieties of
historiography that originated in the eastern and western regions of
Eurasia. Both were bold, innovative thinkers who conceived of his
tory as a critical, explanatory discourse about political power that went
beyond its traditional annalistic and mnemonic functions. It is thus
entirely possible that we will find methodological and political similari
ties between them that transcend their different cultural backgrounds.
Generic readings in terms of "Greekness" or "Chineseness" easily over
look such similarities.
Herodotus's Histories recount the history of the Greco-Persian Wars
in the early decades of the fifth century b.c.e., against the backdrop of
a history and ethnography of the world of western Asia and northern
Africa. The rise and defeat of Persian imperialism and the maintenance
of Greek independence are the main themes of his history. In the Shiji,
Sima Qian presents a history of China from its mythical beginnings
to the Han empire of his own lifetime, including large swaths of the
5 See Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berke

ley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 50-51.
6 To the Greeks, Europe represented a heterogeneous collection of lands and peoples.
The Histories do not even contain a "synthesizing geographical description of Europe": Wido
Sieberer, Das Bild Europas in den Historien (Innsbruck: Institut fur Sprachwissenschaft der
Universit?t Innsbruck, 1995), p. 29; see also Martin Ninck, Die Entdeckung von Europa durch
die Griechen (Basel: B. Schwabe & Co., 1945).
6 journal of world history, march 2008
history and ethnography of the frontier zones of the empire. The emer
gence of a unified empire out of the Warring States of pre-Qin China,
the consolidation of the former Han, and the relations between the
empire and the surrounding peoples are major themes of his history.
To frame what follows, let us briefly review some elementary facts
about the two historians. Herodotus was born before 480 b.c.e. to a
well-to-do family in Halicarnassus on the southwestern coast of Asia
Minor. It has been suggested that the family was of mixed Greek
and Carian descent, but that is not certain.7 He received a thorough
grounding in poetry, drama, and philosophy. At some point, he left for
the island of Samos, then part of the Athenian confederacy, possibly
because his family was expelled from Halicarnassus by the tyrant Lyg
damis. He later returned to his place of birth, which had deposed its
tyrant and joined the Athenian confederacy. In the 440s, Herodotus
spent some years in Athens. Probably in 443, he moved to the newly
founded Athenian colony at Thurii in southern Italy. There he died
between 430 and 424. Herodotus's places of residence thus covered a
great part of the Greek world. Moreover, he traveled extensively, and
in the Histories he frequently refers to firsthand oral and visual evidence
of many lands. He claimed to have visited Egypt, Cyrenaica, Babylon,
Phoenicia, and Scythia, but some students of Herodotus do not accept
all of those claims.
Though well connected, Herodotus seems never to have belonged
to the inner circles of the political elite in any of the cities in which he
resided. In a broad way, Herodotus sympathized with the Greeks, which
is hardly surprising since the successful resistance of the Greek cities
against Persian imperialism is his main subject, but he was not a par
tisan of any Greek city, not even of Athens, which he greatly admired
for its paramount role in defeating the Persians. Several commentators
have argued that his insistence on the hubris and inevitable decline
of empires implied a censure of Athenian maritime imperialism that
probably was not lost on his Greek readers who were living through the
Peloponnesian War when Herodotus finished his work.8 Herodotus,
then, was a man keenly interested in politics but not directly attached
to state power. Accordingly, he wrote the Histories for the literate citi
7 See James Romm, Herodotus (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), p.
49.
8 See, e.g., Charles W Fornara, Herodotus: An Interpretative Essay (Oxford: Cleren
don Press, 1971), pp. 46-58; John Moles, "Herodotus and Athens," in Brill's Companion
to Herodotus, ed. Egbert J. Bakker, Irene J. F. de Jong, and Hans van Wees (Leiden: Brill,
2002), pp. 50-52.
zenry in the Greek world, and not at the behest of any particular city
or prince.
Contrasting with Herodotus's relative political independence, the
career of Sima Qian was from start to finish intertwined with the politics
of the Han state under the ambitious and severe emperor Wu (r. 141-87
b.c.e.). He was born in 145 b.c.e., near Longmen ("Dragon Gate") on
the Yellow River in North China. When he was five, his father, Sima
Tan, obtained the position of Grand Astrologer at the imperial court
in the Han capital Chang'an. However, neither Sima Tan nor his son
was an official imperial historiographer. They had access to the palace
archives, but Sima Tan's historical work was a self-imposed, "private"
project. And so it was with his son, who, complying with his father's
last wish, continued the latter's history of China.9 In his youth, Sima
Qian got a thorough education in the classics. "At the age of ten," he
later recalled, "he could read the old writings."10 At twenty-one he
took up service as a gentleman of the palace. Like Herodotus, Sima
Qian traveled widely, within China as well as in the borderlands to
the south and north of the Han territories. In no, he accompanied
emperor Wu on an inspection tour of the northern frontier, a region
of intermittent clashes and skirmishes with China's most redoubtable
enemies, the nomadic Xiongnu. Besides, he collected much knowledge
about distant lands and people by interrogating travelers.11 In 108, he
succeeded his father as Grand Astrologer, and in 104 he assisted the
emperor with the reform of the calendar.12 Five years later, however,
he suffered disgrace because he had spoken in defense of general Li
Ling, who had surrendered to the Xiongnu after a heroic battle against
numerically superior forces. Sima's punishment was death for "defaming
the emperor," but the sentence was eventually commuted to castration.
In such cases, the code of honor prescribed suicide. Sima Qian, how
ever, continued to work on his history, living in shame and humilia
tion, but fulfilling his filial duty to his father and hoping for recognition
in future ages. Rehabilitated and appointed Prefect Palace Secretary in
96, he managed to finish the history before he died in 86, a year after
emperor Wu. The Shiji is a work of inordinate length, comprising 130
9 See Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo, pp. 16-18.

10 Shiji 130, quoted in Watson, Ssu-ma Ch'ien, p. 48.
11 See Nicola di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in
East Asian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 268-69.
12 See Christopher Cullen, "Motivations for Scientific Change in Ancient China:
Emperor Wu and the Grand Inception Astronomical Reforms of 104 b.c.," Journal for the
History of Astronomy 24 (1993): 185-203.
chapters. It recounts the entire history of China up to the historian's

time. Like Herodotus's Histories, the Shiji contains a sizable amount of
geography and ethnography, in particular of the "barbarian lands" to
the west and north of the Han empire.
On the face of it, Sima Qian's relation to political power appears as
almost the opposite of Herodotus's. As a loyal servant of the emperor,
one would expect him to write a history endorsing the Han empire. To
some extent, he lived up to such expectations, justifying the order and
unity of the empire and contributing to the new Confucian canon that
informed the Han vision of Chinese history. For all that, Sima Qian
envisaged the task of the historian as an eminently critical one. Attrib
uting his own views to Dong Zhongshu's (Tung Chung-shu) exegesis
of Confucius's explanation of the message of the Spring and Autumn
Annals, he declared in the concluding chapter of his work that "Confu
cius realized that his words were not being heeded, nor his doctrine put
into practice. So he made a critical judgment of the rights and wrongs
of a period of two hundred and forty-two years in order to provide a
standard of rules and ceremonies for the world. He criticized the emper
ors, reprimanded the feudal lords, and condemned the high officials in
order to make known the business of a true ruler."13 Sima Qian's invo
cation of the authority of the great sage to justify his view of history as
critique was in line with the Confucian view of the double function of
history as the public concern of the ruler and the private duty of the
sage to uphold moral rectitude.14 Here, he is drawing on the authorita
tive commentaries on the Spring and Autumn Annals, in which, accord
ing to David Schaberg, Confucius "becomes the unerring judge of his
tory, the uncrowned king."15 Sima Qian's self-image can be traced back
to the autonomous critical role historical writings had achieved during
the Warring States period.16 Accordingly, the Shiji contains numerous
criticisms of emperors, ministers, and lower officials. Such criticisms,
however, are invariably found in the speeches of personages in the nar
rative rather than in the meta-narrative first-person comments placed
at the end of each chapter. Grant Hardy has characterized the Shiji as
13 Shiji 130, cited in Watson, Ssu-ma Ch'ien, p. 50.

14 See Sarah A. Queen, From Chronicle to Canon: The Hermeneutics of the Spring and
Autumn according to Tung Chung-shu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.
119.
15 David Schaberg, A Patterned Past: Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 308; Sima Qian invokes Confucius
by quoting his older contemporary Tung Chung-shu, the major author involved in the Han
canonization of Confucianism.
16 See Schaberg, Patterned Past, pp. 258-70; Queen, From Chronicle to Canon, pp.
118-19.
"an arena for moral hermeneutics" rather than a straightforward exer

cise in criticism.17 The trope of indirect criticism was long established
in Chinese historiography, and Sima Qian's bitter experiences had
undoubtedly impressed the need for authorial prudence on him. Here,
he differs from Herodotus, who expresses some of his harshest condem
nations of the behavior of rulers in his own authorial voice.
What about the philosophical background? When it moves beyond
the annalistic genre, the writing of history always involves theoretical
notions, however implicit these may be. The important thing to note
here is that both Herodotus and Sima Qian drafted their histories in
a climate of intellectual pluralism and uncertainty about the ultimate
foundations of knowledge and morality. In Greece, this was the age of
the Sophists, who excelled at questioning the validity of traditional
ethics and epistemology. Herodotus's strong formulation of cultural
relativism shows his affinity with Sophistic skepticism.18 In China,
the intellectual strife between the "hundred schools" of the Warring
States period persisted as a living memory in Sima Qian's days. In his
account of his own education he relates that his father explained the
mutually contradictory doctrines of the "six schools" to him.19 Sarah
Queen characterizes the intellectual culture of the early Han as plu
ralistic and syncretistic.20 In the intellectual cultures of fifth-century
Greece and early imperial China traditional knowledge-claims no lon
ger commanded unquestionable authority, so that tradition had to be
shored up or supplemented by "philosophy." Introducing systematic
and interpretative history, Herodotus and Sima Qian experimented,
each after his own fashion, with a new type of knowledge about the
human condition. Both attributed a political function to history, albeit
in widely different political regimes.21 Both conceived of history as a
critical discipline that would enlighten the minds of men in uncertain
and dangerous times.
Finally, they were convinced that their society was passing through
a political crisis caused by its involvement in a wider environment.
Even as Herodotus was writing the history of the momentous colli
17 Grant Hardy, "Form and Narrative in Ssu-ma Ch'ien's Shih chi," Chinese Literature:
Essays, Articles, Reviews 14 (1992-1993): 22.
18 See Rosalind Thomas, Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Per
suasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 11-12.
19 Durrant, Cloudy Mirror, pp. 3-6; Sima Tan was probably the first to classify the
schools according to their intellectual content instead of the names of founders and masters;
see Kidder Smith, "Sima Tan and the Invention of Daoism, 'Legalism,' et cetera," Journal of
Asian Studies 62 (2003): 129-56.
20 Queen, From Chronicle to Canon, pp. 2-3, 22-23.
21 See Lloyd, Ambitions of Curiosity, pp. 18-20.
IO JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 20o8
sion of the Greek city-states with Persian imperialism, he was witness

ing the early stages of the war between Sparta and Athens, and the
first tremors of the decline of the Athenian maritime empire that had
emerged from the Persian Wars. Likewise, Sima Qian was writing when
the Han empire was engaged in a perilous and costly course of impe
rial expansion, a policy he himself deemed misguided and harmful. For
both historians, issues of empire called for a rethinking of the place of
their society in the "known world." Both supplied their readers with
the latest geographical and ethnographical information to enable them
to understand their own history in a broader, "global" framework. In
that sense, we may call them world historians.22
History, the Politics of Empire,

and the Eurasian Frontier
Herodotus and Sima Qian belong to the age Jerry Bentley has called
"the era of the ancient silk roads." The ethnic, linguistic, and religious
boundaries traversed by the far-flung Eurasian trade routes contributed
to their interest in ethnography. Long-distance travel remained excep
tional, but there was enough of it to provide inquisitive minds with
information about remote places and peoples. In particular, the silk
roads cut across the sedentary-nomadic divide. As Bentley observes,
the network of trade routes that sustained east-west communication
across the entire expanse of Eurasia and North Africa was facilitated by
the "political and economic collaboration between settled and nomadic
peoples."23 Collaboration was, however, frequently interrupted by war
fare. The nomads regarded the sedentary societies as targets for raiding
and sources of tribute. The settled peoples, who feared and respected
the military power of the nomads, often had to pay up, but they also
attempted to curb nomadic power by military means.
The encounter between the "civilized" and the "barbarian" affected
the earliest notions of history and culture in the Eurasian world. The
frontier between the sedentary civilizations and the nomadic-pasto
ral societies of the north ran from present-day Moldavia through the
22 See William H. McNeill, "The Changing Shape of World History," History and The
ory 34 (1995): 8: "Historians of the portion of the earth known to the writer are properly
classed as world historians inasmuch as they seek to record the whole significant and know
able past."
23 Jerry H. Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre
Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 32.
Stuurman: Herodotus and Sima Qian ii
entire breadth of western and central Asia, and thence along the series
of defensive mounds and ramparts known as the Chinese "Great Wall"
that reached the Yellow Sea at the base of the Korean peninsula. To the
north of the frontier lay the steppe lands, a vast "sea of grass," as world
historian William McNeill has called it.24 The sea of grass fed the herds
of the nomads and enabled them to migrate and raid over impressive
distances. The zone to the south of the frontier was the locus of the rise
of all the great sedentary urban civilizations, from China, India, and
Iran, to Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The frontier was an
ill-defined intermediate zone, a locus of trade, raiding, and warfare, as
well as confrontations and exchanges between different cultures. The
written sources have overwhelmingly been on the side of the sedentary
cultures. Unsurprisingly, they mostly depict the tensions and struggles
in the frontier zone in terms of an opposition between the "civilized"
and the "barbarian."
The dialectic of the civilized and the barbarian, and of the seden
tary and the nomadic, was an organizing principle of ancient historiog
raphy from its inception in the writings of Herodotus and Sima Qian
to its subsequent development in Hellenism in the west and the later
Han in the east (and, much later, in Ibn Khaldun in medieval Islam).
The Histories range widely across western Eurasia and North Africa.
Book IV is devoted to the Scythians north of the Black Sea, with brief
digressions on other northern peoples. Books I and III contain much
material on Persian culture, while Book II deals with Egypt and north
ern Africa. Sima Qian likewise devotes much space to ethnography,
though not as much as Herodotus. The Shiji contains six chapters on
barbarian peoples.25 One of the longest chapters of the book discusses
the Xiongnu to the north of the Great Wall. The Xiongnu and their
relations with China figure in many other chapters as well. The Shiji
also contains accounts of the southern marchlands of the Han empire,
as well as Korea (Chaoxian), Ferghana (Dayuan), Bactria (Daxia), and
Parthia (Anxi).
The descriptions of the Xiongnu and Ferghana are fairly detailed,
the others are shorter, and about still other regions Sima Qian pos
sessed only bits and pieces of disconnected knowledge.26 About India
24 William H. McNeill, The Shape of European History (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1974), p. 47.
25 See Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo, p. 132.
26 The original version of chapter 123 of the Shiji, which contains the description of
the western lands, is lost, except for the introductory alinea; what we now have is largely
based on an interpolation from the Han Shu by Ban Gu (Pan Ku), which was in turn based
(Shendu) he presents some information the Chinese had obtained

from Bactrian merchants who had visited Indian markets. India, they
told the Han envoys, lies several thousand li (1,000 li is about 415 kilo
meters, or 260 miles) to the southeast of Bactria, the people cultivate
the land, they use elephants in battle, the climate is hot and damp,
and the kingdom is situated on a great river.27 The regions described
by the two historians represent adjacent parts of Eurasia. The eastern
extremities of Herodotus's Scythians border on Sima Qian's western
most nomads, the "great Yuezhi," who live some six hundred miles west
of Ferghana, and whose customs are "like those of the Xiongnu."28 Sima
Qian's remote and little-known Anxi geographically overlaps with
Herodotus's Persia. To both of them, India is a far country at the rim of
the known world, although Sima Qian's information about it is more
matter-of-fact than Herodotus's account of "gold-digging ants."29
They are understandably most interested in knowledge about the
lands and peoples with which Greece and China had entered into com
mercial or political relations. To the Greeks, the Persians were important
as enemies, the Egyptians were important because theirs was the most
ancient of all known civilizations from which a part of Greek culture
was believed to derive, and the Scythians were important because there
were Greek trading colonies on the northern coast of the Black Sea.
Herodotus's interest in Cyrenaica is likewise explained by the presence
of Greek colonies there. Apart from that, Scythia and Ethiopia were of
interest because of the Persians' failure to conquer them. Sima Qian's
geographical focus can be explained in a similar fashion.30 His most
elaborate ethnography concerns the nomadic Xiongnu, with whom the
Han were frequently at war.31 Other geographical and ethnographical
data in the Shiji concern the borderlands of China. In Sima Qian's time,
several border regions had come into the orbit of the ambitious policy
on Sima Qian's text. See A. F. P. Hulsew? and M. A. N. Loewe, China in Central Asia: The
Early Stage: 125 B.c.-A.D. 23. An Annotated Translation of Chapters 61 and 96 of the History
of the Former Han Dynasty (Leiden: Brill, 1979), pp. 14-39.
27 Ibid., pp. 235-36.
28 Ibid., p. 234.
29 Herodotus, III, 102; cited from Herodotus, The Persian Wars, trans. A. D. Godley, 4
vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); all references to Herodotus are
to book and section number.
30 On the strategic background of the ethnographies in Chinese historiography, see
Michel Cartier, "Barbarians through Chinese Eyes: The Emergence of an Anthropological
Approach to Ethnic Differences," Comparaave Civilization Review 6 (1981): 3-4.
31 See Thomas J. Barfield, "The Hsiung-nu Imperial Confederacy: Organization and
Foreign Policy," Journal of Asian Studies 41 (1981-82): 45-61.
of expansion of Emperor Wu. Ferghana (Dayuan) represented a link in

the Chinese trade routes to the west, but its main attraction was the
excellent opportunity it offered to outflank the Xiongnu.32 Around 100
b.c.e., the Han had established garrisons in Dayuan.
As I noted above, frontiers are places of creative interaction. Beyond
"othering" and hostility, they open up the possibility of recognizing the
humaneness and rationality of "others." To make the notion of com
mon humanity thinkable, the first step to take is a negative one: the
abandonment of unreflective ethnocentrism. In his Egyptian ethnog
raphy, Herodotus observes that "the Egyptians call all men of other
languages barbarians."33 In Greek parlance, the term "barbarians"
commonly denoted all non-Greek-speaking peoples, so that Herodo
tus's statement represents a conscious inversion of the standard Greek
discourse on cultural difference. In Sima Qian's ethnography of the
Xiongnu we encounter a similar inversion of the standard Chinese view
of the northern "barbarians." The standard view was, of course, that the
customs of the Han Chinese were in every way superior to those of the
nomads. Sima Qian, however, first explains the functioning of Xiongnu
society in remarkably neutral and unbiased terms, and then has a Chi
nese who has gone over to the side of the Xiongnu explain why the
customs of the nomads are reasonable in the steppe environment, and
in some ways even superior to the ways of the Han.34 The inversion is
not as perfectly symmetrical as Herodotus's Egyptian maxim, but the
rhetorical figure is the same.
It is this inversion that constitutes cultural relativism. To avoid
taking on board too much philosophical overweight I propose to define
cultural relativism in very simple terms: it is the awareness that "others"
look at "us" just as "we" look at "them." As the Greeks regard the Egyp
tians, so the Egyptians regard the Greeks. It is an elementary idea with
momentous consequences: People who realize that they are "others" in
the worldview of those they themselves were accustomed to see as "oth
ers" will not have the same self-image as before. It should be underlined
that cultural relativism does not necessarily entail moral relativism.
Usually it does not. Moral relativism, the conviction that ethical val
ues are entirely contingent on time and place, is hard to find in the his
32 Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China, p. 495; Hulsew? and Loewe, China in Cen
tral Asia, pp. 40-43.
33 Herodotus, II, 158.
34 Shiji, no: Han II, pp. 143-44.
torical sources.35 Both Herodotus and Sima Qian, for example, believe
that it is absolutely wrong to kill an innocent person. Where they differ
from each other, and from us, is in their notions of innocence, guilt,
and the appropriate procedures of justice. Cultural relativism denotes
the modest proposition that it is wise to study a culture in its own terms
(not necessarily on its own terms), to attempt to understand it "from
within," instead of passing a summary verdict on it.
The intellectual and rhetorical move of cultural relativism paves
the way for the thinkability of common humanity. The other intellec
tual origin of the notion of a common humanity is the conviction that
there are attributes shared by all members of the human species. Such
ideas were available in Greek as well as in Chinese intellectual culture.
Homer, the premier canonical author of the Greek world, asserted that
all men need the gods, all men must die, and no one is nameless.36
Likewise, he strongly endorses Zeus's command to treat strangers in a
humane way, thus establishing the notion of a morality common to all
men who are reasonable and heed the gods. Scattered notions of the
unity of humanity were found in Greek thought from the sixth century
onward.37 From the late sixth century, Greek authors amassed a body
of ethnology.38 The Greek world itself was a patchwork of local cul
tures, and through their trade, travels, and colonies, the Greeks were
well aware of the multiplicity of customs and beliefs in the surrounding
lands. Among the sophists, the idea that the laws and moral prescrip
tions of particular cultures are merely human conventions was wide
spread.39 One of them, Antiphon, would later assert that Greeks and
barbarians are the same "by nature." 40
The Chinese notions of ethics and civilized life were grounded in a
cosmic order, and thus presumably absolute. The "barbarians" are often
berated for their failure to understand them, suggesting a clear-cut con
35 Strong moral relativism is a self-contradictory concept, for the elementary reason

that moral rules are, among other things, defined by the fact that they do not depend on
"local preferences"; see John W. Cook, Morality and Cultural Differences (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999).
36 Odyssey, III, 48, 236; VIII, 552-53.
37 See H. C. Baldry, The Unity of Mankind.in Greek Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1965), pp. 24-32.
38 See W. A. Heidel, "Hecataeus and Xenophanes," American Journal of Philology 64
(1943): 264.
39 See John Gibert, "The Sophists," in The Blackwell Guide to Ancient Philosophy, ed.
Christopher Shields (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 39-44.
40 See A. W. H. Adkins, From the Many to the One (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1970), pp. 113-14; Thomas, Herodotus in Context, pp. 131-33.
trast between a homogeneous Chinese "civilized" way of life and "bar

barian" incoherence and confusion. In reality, the preimperial history
of "China" was marked by ethnic and cultural diversity.41 The Han
empire itself was by no means a culturally homogeneous space. Against
this backdrop, the insistence on the cosmic grounding of Chinese civi
lization appears as a discursive means of domesticating diversity rather
than as a confident extrapolation from "reality."
The power of the notion of a human nature common to all men (at
least potentially including "barbarians") is apparent from the fact that
it is shared by philosophers who otherwise sharply disagree. Mengzi
(Mencius), a fourth-century successor of Confucius, presents a well
developed theory of a benevolent human nature.42 However, another
highly influential and original philosopher, Xunzi (Hs?n Tzu), writing
in the third century, rejects Mencius's view, maintaining that man's
nature is evil.43 For his part, the early fourth-century philosopher Mozi
(Mo-Tzu) posits a primordial selfishness "before there were any laws
or government."44 The chief representative of the legalist, or "realist,"
school, the third-century political theorist Han Fei, is distrustful of gen
eral theories but nonetheless maintains that all men can be governed
by means of punishments and rewards.45 Though unable to agree on
what makes people tick, the different schools all seem to subscribe to
the belief that there is such a thing as a universal human nature. Arthur
Waley points out that Confucius himself perhaps tended to limit the
reach of the concept of humaneness to civilized Chinese society, but
that later Confucians used it in a more abstract manner, so that it came
to stand for "human being" and "humaneness" as opposed to "animal"
and "animality."46 In Sima Qian's time, this was the generally accepted
meaning. Chinese philosophers did not develop the stark opposition
between "nature" and "convention" characteristic of Greek thought,
although one statement by Xunzi comes close to it: "Children born
among the Han or Y?e people of the south and among the Mo barbar
41 See Jacques Gernet, Le monde chinois, vol i : De l'?ge de bronze au Moyen ?ge (Paris:
Armand Colin, 2005), pp. 18, 40, 71.
42 Mencius, translated with an introduction by D. C. Lau (London: Penguin Books,
1970), pp. 12-15.
43 See Hs?n Tzu, Basic Writings, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia Univer
sity Press, 1996), pp. 157-59.
44 See Basic Writings of Mo Tzu, Hs?n Tzu, and Han Fei Tzu, trans. Burton Watson
(New York: Columbia University Press, s.d.): Mo Tzu, 34.
45 Ibid., Han Fei Tzu, 30.
46 See The Analects of Confucius, trans, and annotated by Arthur Waley (New York:
Vintage Books, 1989), p. 27.
i6 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 20o8
ians of the north cry with the same voice at birth, but as they grow older
they follow different customs. Education causes them to differ."47
The concepts of common humanity and human nature have intel
lectual as well as political roots. Intellectually, they represent a cogni
tive strategy of explaining plurality in terms of an underlying unity.
Politically, they are a means to deal with cultural diversity, both within
polities and in the marchlands of empires, a strategy of bridging cultural
distances by appealing to higher-order bonds of humanity. What the
intellectual cultures of ancient Greece and Han China have in com
mon, then, are two things: first, a keen interest in foreign lands and a
sizable amount of ethnographic knowledge, making cultural difference
a possible object of investigation; second, generic concepts of human
nature that might be developed into a notion of common humanity.
The combination of these discourses created the intellectual matrix
for the anthropological turn. In the next two sections, Herodotus's and
Sima Qian's deployment of the anthropological turn will be examined
in more detail.
Herodotus: Persians, Scythians, and Greeks
Herodotus's Histories revolve around the new world order created by

the Persian bid for domination of the "known world." The Persians had
extended their power to the borders of India; they ruled Iran, Mesopo
tamia, and Asia Minor; and after their conquest of Egypt they were the
masters of the Levant. To the Greeks this was an awesome and menac
ing empire. Nothing remotely like it had ever been seen.48 Herodotus
recounts the failure of the Persian campaigns to conquer Ethiopia and
Scythia, followed by his much more detailed narrative of the defeat
of their attempts to subdue the Greeks. He offers his reader a dazzling
panorama of the known world, followed by the spellbinding story of
the failure of the first bid for "universal empire." Even though Greek
victory was important and dear to him, his basic subject was Persian
defeat.
In a way, Herodotus already announces his cultural relativism in the
opening statement of the Histories, informing his readers that he has
written down the results of his inquiry so that "the great and marvelous
47 Hs?n Tzu, 15.

48 See James Romm, Herodotus (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998).
deeds done by Greeks and barbarians shall not fall into oblivion."49 The
barbarians, or so it appears, have also accomplished great deeds that are
worth remembering on a par with those of the Greeks. This is not the
language of ethnocentric parochialism. Another Herodotean maxim
in the opening sections of the book likewise conveys a powerful equal
ity effect: "[I will] speak of small and great cities alike. For many states
that were once great have now become small: and those that were great
in my time were small formerly . . . human prosperity never continues
in one stay."50 The transience of greatness, a recurrent theme in the
Histories, seems to preclude the lasting success of any imperial ven
ture. Generally, Herodotus disapproves of the lust for wealth and power
he observes in most rulers. Even the thirst for knowledge, a drive he
otherwise holds in high esteem, becomes corrupted by its instrumental
use for ignoble ends by greedy and prideful kings?that is, by virtually
all kings.51 In this connection it is important to note that Herodotus's
most powerful and explicit statement of cultural relativism comes in
the course of the gruesome story of the madness and death of the Per
sian king Cambyses (r. 530-522), who has rightfully been called "the
most cruel and stupid of all Herodotus's kings."52 The story of Cam
byses actually represents Herodotus's first instance of Persian defeat.
It recounts the failure of his attack on Ethiopia, a defeat Herodotus
attributes to the Persian king's reckless mismanagement of his army.
Only when his troops are near starvation and resort to cannibalism
does he abandon the campaign. Upon his return to Egypt Cambyses
demonstrates that he has learned nothing from his mistakes. Instead,
49 Herodotus, I, i ; for a time, Herodotus's cultural relativism has been downplayed in the
historiography, see Hartog, Miroir d'H?rodote; Romm, Herodotus; James Redfield, "Herodo
tus the Tourist," in Greeks and Barbarians, ed. Thomas Harrison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2002), pp. 24-49; see ^so Vivienne Gray, "Herodotus and the Rhetoric
of Otherness," American Journal of Philology 116 (1995): 185-211; and Edith Hall, Inventing
the Barbarian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Recently, however, such assessments have
been (convincingly, in my opinion) challenged by Thomas, Herodotus in Context; Rosaria
Vignolo Munson, Telling Wonders: Ethnographic and Political Discourse in the Work of Herodo
tus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); and Munson, Black Doves Speak:
Herodotus and the Languages of Barbarians (Cambridge, Mass.: Center for Hellenic Studies,
Harvard University, Harvard University Press, 2005). See also Christopher Pelling, "East
Is East and West Is West?Or Are They? National Stereotypes in Herodotus," http://www
.dur.ac.uk/Classics/histos/1997/pelling; and Walter Burkert, Die Griechen und der Orient
(Munich: Beck, 2003).
50 Herodotus, I, 5.
51 See Mathew R. Christ, "Herodotean Kings and Historical Inquiry," Classical Antiq
uity 13 (1994): 167-202.
52 Richmond Lattimore, "The Wise Adviser in Herodotus," Classical Philology 34
(1939): 31.
i8 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 20o8
he blames the Egyptians and kills the Apis, the holy calf of one of the
major Egyptian religious festivals.53
Blinded by his overweening pride, Cambyses believed that he could
wantonly kill and insult, respecting neither the customs of other peo
ples nor those of his native Persia. The fate of Cambyses was an object
lesson in the perils of hubris and unchecked power, and in particular
of the risks of trampling on peoples' cherished beliefs and customs.54 It
provides the background to the famous "anthropological experiment"
executed by the Persian king Darius: "Darius ... summoned the Greeks
who were with him and asked them what price would persuade them
to eat their fathers' dead bodies. They answered that there was no price
for which they would do it. Then he summoned those Indians who are
called Callatiae, who eat their parents, and asked them (the Greeks
being present and understanding by interpretation what was said) what
would make them willing to burn their fathers at death. The Indians
cried aloud, that he should not speak of so horrid an act. So deeply
rooted are these beliefs."55 Generalizing from Darius's experiment, as
well as from the Cambyses's case, Herodotus formulates cultural rela
tivism as a universally valid maxim: "For if it were proposed to all men
to choose which seemed the best of all customs, all, after examination
made, would place their own first; so well all are persuaded that their
own are by far the best."56 Custom, Herodotus declares, quoting a well
known line from the poet Pindar, is "king of all." Here, his maxim
resonates with much of ancient opinion, for this was one the most fre
quently quoted lines of poetry throughout antiquity.57
Introducing his maxim, Herodotus tells his readers that he deems it
in every way proved that Cambyses was "very mad," or else he would
never have endeavored "to deride religion and custom." Cultural rela
tivism thus represents the counterpoint to the delusions of imperial
ism. Herodotus likewise explains the Persian failure to conquer Scythia
and Greece by their lack of understanding of other cultures. The Per
sians misinterpreted the guerilla tactics of the Scythian nomads, and
53 Herodotus's judgment of Cambyses has been criticized; see Cyrus Masroori, "Cyrus II
and the Political Utility of Religious Toleration," in Religious Toleration, ed. John Christian
Laursen (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 20-21.
54 See Rosaria Vignolo Munson, "The Madness of Cambyses," Arethusa 24 (1991):
43-65
55 Herodotus, III, 38.
56 Ibid. I have slightly modified the translation. Godley renders "pasi anthropoisi" as "to
all nations," which sounds a bit anachronistic. I prefer the literal translation: "to all men."
57 See Martin Ostwald, "Pindar, Nomos, and Heracles," Harvard Studies in Classical Phi
lology 69 (1965): 109.
their belief in the military superiority of monarchies led them to fatally

underestimate the strength of the Greek city-states. Herodotus's les
sons, however, were also intended for the Greeks themselves. His invo
cation of the Egyptian perspective, to which I have already alluded,
gets its point from his critique of the Greek pretensions to superiority
over the Egyptians.58 In particular, the Histories implicitly targeted the
Athenian empire. Let us recall that Herodotus finished his work during
the Peloponnesian War, which contemporary popular views blamed on
the excessive power of the Athenian empire.59 Chester Starr has esti
mated that at its apex the Athenian thalassocracy directly ruled some
two million Greeks, while some twenty million people in the Mediter
ranean lands had to reckon with Athenian power.60 In the second year
of the war, Pericles himself had argued in the people's assembly that the
empire was largely based on self-interest and functioned as a "tyranny"
in its rule over other Greek cities.61
Of the major peoples discussed in the ethnographic part of the His
tories the Scythians, who inhabited what is today the Ukraine, are by far
the most Other, for they do not live in cities and their mode of warfare
is almost the opposite of the infantry tactics practiced by the Greeks,
the Persians, and most other sedentary civilizations. Some authors,
notably Fran?ois Hartog and James Romm, therefore have interpreted
Herodotus's study of Scythian culture in terms of a fascination with the
exotic. Romm places them, together with the other northern peoples,
in the Herodotean category of "the most remote of all human beings,"
while Hartog reads the Scythian ethnography as a structural inversion
of Greekness.62 However, Herodotus's full-blown ethnography of the
Scythians places them on a par with the Persians and the Egyptians in
the narrative structure of the Histories. It stands in sharp contrast to
his treatment of the other northern peoples, represented as a motley
collection of oddities at the edge of the world. Herodotus assuredly
contrasts Greek and Scythian customs, as he does with other cultures,
but this narrative device should not be inflated into the "deep" and
58 See Christ, "Herodotean Kings," p. 185.

59 Rosaria Vignolo Munson, "Ananke in Herodotus," Journal of Hellenic Studies 121
(2001): 42.
60 See Chester G. Starr, The Influence of Sea Power on Ancient History (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989), p. 38.
61 See Mason Hammond, "Ancient Imperialism: Contemporary Justifications," Harvard
Studies in Classical Philology 58 (1948): 109-10; and Russell Meiggs, "The Crisis of Athenian
Imperialism," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 67 (1963): 1.
62 See James S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 45-81; and Hartog, Miroir d'H?rodote, passim.
ultimate meaning of the text. Actually, Herodotus's approach is better

explained by the long history of Greco-Scythian contacts that contin
ued into his own time. For over two centuries, there had been Greek
colonies on the northern coast of the Black Sea, Greek traders had
traveled widely in the Scythian hinterland, and they even marketed art
tailored to Scythian taste.63 Scythian archers were employed as a police
force in Athens.64 The controversial question of whether Herodotus
himself ever visited Scythia is not really material to this.65 The second
reason for his interest in the Scythians is that they were enemies of the
Persians. Herodotus explains Darius's invasion of Scythia as a revenge
for a previous Scythian invasion of the Persian empire.66 At the same
time, the Persian defeat in Scythia provides a runner up to the main
story of their defeat in Greece. In his gleeful account of the failure of
Darius's campaign in 512 b.c.e., Herodotus skillfully interweaves Per
sian defeat and Scythian ethnography.
Let us begin with Persian defeat. Because the Scythians have no
cities, while their army consists of fast-moving mounted archers, their
guerilla tactics can easily avoid a regular open-field battle with the
heavily armed Persian infantry. The Persians are lured into Scythia,
in search of an enemy they cannot find and suffering the hardships of
a barren land from which they cannot draw sustenance. Their plight
is the consequence of their inability to understand the functioning
of Scythian society. As usual, Herodotus blames this in particular on
the Persian king. Darius's obtuseness is highlighted in the story of the
63 See Ellis H. Minns, Scythians and Greeks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1913), pp. 37, 283-91, 438-41; see also J. G. F. Hind, "Greek and Barbarian Peoples on
the Shores of the Black Sea," Archeohgical Reports 30 (1983-84): 71-97; M. Rostovtsev,
"South Russia in the Prehistoric and Classical Period," American Historical Review 26
( 1921 ): 203-24; Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiq
uity (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 315-327, esp. 321-22;
David Braund, ed., Scythians and Greeks: Cultural Interactions in Scythia, Athens, and the
Early Roman Empire (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2005); and Thomas, Herodotus in
Context, pp. 54-74, esp. 55-56.
64 See Balbina B?bler, "Bobbies or Boobies: The Scythian Police Force in Classical
Athens," in Braund, Scythians and Greeks, pp. 114-22.
65 See O. Kimball Armayor, "Did Herodotus Ever Go to the Black Sea?" Harvard Stud
ies in Classical Philology 82 (1978): 45-62; and Armayor, "Sesostris and Herodotus' Autopsy
of Thrace, Colchis, Inland Asia Minor, and the Levant," Harvard Studies in Classical Philol
ogy 84 (1980): 51-74; but cf. Lionel Pearson, "Credulity and Scepticism in Herodotus,"
Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 72 (1941): 335-55, esp.
340-45; Jack Martin Balcer, "The Date of Herodotus IV. 1 Darius' Scythian Expedition,"
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 76 (1972): 99-132; and Stephanie West, "The Scyth
ian Ultimatum (Herodotus IV 131,132)," Journal of Hellenic Studies 108 (1988): 207-211.
66 Herodotus, IV, 1.
Scythian message. The arrogant king had demanded that the Scyth
ians surrender and offer him their land on a plate. With the Persian
army exhausted by the inconclusive guerilla war, the Scythians finally
dispatch a herald who brings the Persians a gift consisting of the fol
lowing items: a bird, a mouse, a frog, and five arrows. The herald refuses
to disclose the meaning of the gift, saying that the Persians should find
out themselves, if they are clever enough. Darius thinks that the mouse
signifies the earth and the frog water, while the arrows stand for arms,
so that the upshot of the message is that the Scythians surrender their
earth, water, and arms to the Persians. His na?ve reading is disputed by
his adviser Gobryas, who argues that the meaning of the gifts is a far
less pleasant one. Read correctly, it spells Persian doom: "Unless you
become birds, Persians, and fly up into the sky, or mice and hide you
in the earth, or frogs and leap into the lakes, you will be shot by these
arrows and never return home."67 Gobryas is right: note that Herodo
tus is thus not saying that the Persians as a "race" are incapable of good
intelligence; Darius's wishful thinking is just another item in Herodo
tus's long list of monarchical misinterpretations of messages, omens,
and oracles. Only after additional misfortunes does Darius finally come
around to Gobryas's view. The Persians abandon the campaign, happy
to get out alive.
The next thing to note in Herodotus's ethnography of the Scyth
ians is that he does not portray them as backward barbarians. When
he remarks on the feeble mental powers of the inhabitants of the far
north, he at once makes an exception for the Scythians.68 His appraisal
of Scythian intelligence also appears in the first story he tells about
them. When the Scythians returned from their Persian expedition,
their slaves' sons, born from their wives during the absence of the men,
rebelled against them, but they were defeated by a clever stratagem:
Herodotus relates that one of the Scythians said: "'... my counsel is that
we drop our spears and bows, and go to meet them each with his horse
whip in hand. As long as they saw us armed, they thought themselves
to be our peers and the sons of our peers; let them see us with whips . . .
and they will perceive that they are our slaves. . . .' This the Scythians
heard, and acted thereon; and their enemies, amazed by what they saw,
had no more thought of fighting, but fled."69 The Scythians are here
depicted as perfectly capable of analyzing the role of the imagination in
67 Ibid., 132.
68 Ibid., 46.
69 Ibid., 3-4.
power relations?no mean feat. Coming to the functioning of Scyth

ian society, Herodotus expresses his admiration for their technology of
military nomadism, the combination of mobile homes and fast-moving
mounted archers that had enabled them to defeat the mighty Persian
war machine: "[T]he Scythian race," he declares, "has in that mat
ter which of all human affairs is of greatest import made the cleverest
discovery that we know."70 We may contrast this with Hippocrates,
who also gives a description of the Scythian mobile homes, but entirely
refrains from any positive appreciation of them, and generally gives an
unflattering picture of Scythian physique and customs.71 Herodotus's
appreciative judgment of military nomadism is undoubtedly stimulated
by its role in defeating the Persian army, but the entire ethnography
cannot be reduced to an admire-your-enemies'-enemies logic.
Although Herodotus does not admire the Scythians in all respects,
the only aspect that explicitly comes in for criticism is their stubborn
ethnocentrism. "The Scythians (as others)," he says, "are wondrously
reluctant to practice [the customs] of any other country, and particu
larly of Hellas, as was proved in the case of Anacharsis and again also
of Scyles."72 Anacharsis and Scyles were Scythians who visited Greece
and "went native" there. When they returned home and their adoption
of Greek ways was discovered, both were killed.73 We should further
consider that Scythia stands on the side of liberty in Herodotus's grand
opposition between free peoples and despotic imperialism. What we
learn about their political regime is much closer to the tribal democ
racy of Tacitus's Germans than to the great Oriental empires. The story
of Darius's Scythian campaign ends with the Ionian Greeks' refusal to
assist the Scythians in destroying the Persian army, and so to use the
opportunity to free the Greek cities in Asia Minor from Persian rule.
Herodotus depicts the Ionian leaders as shortsighted petty despots who
are fearful that an anti-Persian revolt will bring about a victory of the
democratic party in their cities, and he gives the Scythians the last
word: the episode concludes with their biting critique of the Greeks'

71 Hippocrates, Airs, Waters, Places, xviii; on the mostly negative treatment of the
Scythians by later authors, see James William Johnson, "The Scythian: His Rise and Fall,"
Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1959): 250-57.
72 Herodotus, IV, 76; but note that Herodotus says that the Scythians share their
aversion to foreign ways with all other peoples: "They too ['kai houtoi'] are very keen to
avoid ...."
73 See A. MacC. Armstrong, "Anacharsis the Scythian," Greece and Rome 17 (1948):
18-23.
servile mentality.74 Here, the Scythians seem to represent the Greeks'

bad conscience about a missed opportunity rather than a simple inver
sion of the values of Greek civilization. (But note that Herodotus
recounts elsewhere how the Scythians, having subdued the Medians
in Cyaxares's days, lose their conquests because of their pride and lack
of prudence.75)
Generally, Herodotus's discussion of the Scythians is remarkably
even-handed. His serious examination of their customs exemplifies
what I have called the "anthropological turn." He really wants to under
stand Scythian society, displaying a detailed knowledge of their food,
clothing, and funeral customs. That he contrasts their ways with those
of the Greeks is not so surprising given the fact that cultures are con
stituted by difference, so that it is impossible to describe them without
terms of comparison. What matters is not the bare fact that Herodotus
contrasts and compares, but the intellectually serious and open-minded
way in which he does so. Herodotus's Histories make thinkable, I con
clude, a new discourse of common humanity that actually comes close
to a notion of transcultural equality. Starting from the stark "facts" of
cultural difference, Herodotus makes two major discursive moves, one
on the meta-narrative level and another in the narrative text. The
meta-narrative move is his explication of the logic of cultural relativ
ism. Acknowledging difference, it affirms sameness on a higher level
of abstraction: all men are fundamentally alike in the way they relate
to their own customs. In most cases they stay within the ambit of their
own culture, but culture ("nomoi") is not a hermetic prison from which
there is no escape. Human beings have the potential capacity to cross
the border toward another culture.
The second move is made up of countless little moves: passages in
which the hubris of rulers, the prideful ambitions of empire builders, and
the pretensions to superiority of (among others) Persians over Scyth
ians and Greeks, and Greeks over Egyptians and others, are scrutinized
and found wanting. In numerous other passages Herodotus displays his
mastery of the anthropological turn: his intellectual engagement with
non-Greek cultures is serious, often sympathetic, and almost never
haughty and patronizing. He decidedly glorifies the Greek victories over
the Persian invaders, and he believes in the virtues of Greek democ
racy, asserting that the Persians are servile and do not fight in good
74 Herodotus, IV, 142; see also Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits ofHel
lenization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 131-32.
75 Herodotus, I, 106.
order.76 However, his really biting criticisms are aimed at the Persian
kings, while he has their advisers counsel prudence and moderation. As
we have seen, Gobryas correctly read the Scythian message, censoring
Darius's wishful misreading. Likewise, Artabanes vainly warns Xerxes
of an impending disaster on the eve of the invasion of Greece.77 The
emphasis is on the theme that great power blinds those who wield it,
coupled with the retribution the gods mete out to those who overstep
the bounds set for them. Herodotus's criticisms of the Persians focus
on their despotic political regime; they should not be read as evidence
of Persian cultural or "racial" inferiority. His discussion of Persian cus
toms is fairly balanced, giving praise where it is due.78 And let us recall
that it is the Persian king Darius who conducts the anthropological
experiment that exemplifies the maxim on cultural relativism. In his
narrative of Persian behavior in the wars against the Greeks, Herodo
tus often censures them, but even there he does not write as a Greek
chauvinist hack.79 Nor is Herodotus an uncritical admirer of all things
Greek. As we have noted above, his extremely critical treatment of
empires and imperialism, made public during the Peloponnesian War,
was rather obviously applicable to the Athenian maritime empire and
the high-handed, sometimes cruel, policies of Athens against Greek
cities that resisted her designs.
The upshot is that Herodotus appreciates the specific virtues of
many, perhaps most, cultures. His working hypothesis seems to be the
equal worth of all cultures, unless there are strong arguments to judge
otherwise. Not to overstate my conclusion, it should be added that he
nowhere explicitly says that all cultures are of equal worth. But his nar
rative and the lessons he draws from it strongly suggest it.
Sima Qian: The Han Empire and Its Barbarians
In Sima Qian's world, empire was a solid reality. Unlike Herodotus, the
Chinese historian assumed that one central empire would dominate
"all under heaven" in the future.80 The recent past, however, was a
76 See Sara Forsdyke, "Athenian Democratic Ideology and Herodotus' Histories,"

American Journal of Philology 122 (2001): 329-58.
77 Herodotus, VII, 10.
78 Herodotus, I, 131-40.
79 See Thomas Harrison, "The Persian Invasions," in Bakker, de Jong, and van Wees,
Brill's Companion, pp. 551-78.
80 Schaberg, "Travel, Geography, and the Imperial Imagination," p. 154, even considers
the Shiji "the imperial text par excellence."
different matter. Chinese tradition held that there had been wise and
righteous emperors in dim antiquity, but the living reality of empire
was quite recent. The unification of China by the Qin (Ch'in) dynasty
in 221 b.c.e. lay less than a century in the past when Sima Qian was
born. The power of the Han was a still more recent accomplishment.
The Han believed that Chinese civilization was the most advanced in
the world, but they knew quite well that there were other sedentary
and urban civilizations, certainly after Zhang Qian's mission to the far
west (139-126 b.c.e.). The habit of calling China "all under heaven"
persisted, and according to the imperial ideology no foreign prince
could claim equal status with the Han emperor, but this symbolic Sino
centrism did not blind the Han to the significance and power of realms
outside China.81
Ironically, the most redoubtable foreign power was not a sedentary
civilization but the nomadic Xiongnu federation. In 209, shortly before
the fall of the Qin dynasty, Maodun became Shanyu, the traditional
title of the Xiongnu ruler. Under his leadership, the Xiongnu defeated
their steppe rivals in the east and the west, and established a strong
nomadic confederacy that now confronted China across a major part
of the Great Wall frontier. The construction of the confederacy was in
part a defensive move, for under the Qin the Chinese had sent armies
and settlers northward, threatening the nomads' access to agricultural
areas. The Xiongnu pastoral nomadic economy entertained a symbiotic
relationship with agricultural regions and towns in the steppe regions
from central Asia to southern Siberia. They also engaged in trade in
the northern frontier zone of China, exporting horses, furs, and jade,
and importing luxuries and seasonally necessary agricultural products.82
The Xiongnu eventually came to control a large territory, extending
from the Tarim Basin in the west to northern China, and to Manchu
ria in the east.83 Their formidable fighting power rested on the same
technology of military nomadism Herodotus so admired in the western
Scythians.
81 See Ying-Shih Y?, "Han Foreign Relations," in The Cambridge History of China, vol.
I, ed. Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),
pp. 378-81; and di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies, pp. 6-7.
82 See Nicola di Cosmo, "Ancient Inner Asian Nomads: Their Economic Basis and Its
Significance in Chinese History," Journal of Asian Studies 53 (1994): 1092-126; H. G. Creel,
"The Role of the Horse in Chinese History," American Historical Review 70 (1965): 659-60;
and William Watson, "The Chinese Contribution to Eastern Nomad Culture in the Pre
Han and Early Han Periods," World Archeology 4 (1972): 139-49.
83 On the Xiongnu state, see Nicola di Cosmo, "State Formation and Periodization in
Inner Asian History," Journal of World History 10 (1999): 1-40; Thomas ]. Barfield, The Peril
ous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757 (Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992), pp. 32-84; and Barfield, "The Hsiung-nu Imperial Confederacy."
In the steppe environment, the military tactics of the nomads were

superior, but they usually avoided regular field battles with numerically
superior Han forces. They raided northern China, but never occupied
Chinese territory. The upshot was an unstable equilibrium, precariously
regulated by the peace treaties concluded by Emperor Wen (r. 180
157). The Chinese paid annual tribute to the Xiongnu, a Han princess
was given in marriage to the Shanyu, the Great Wall was to demarcate
the border, and China and the Xiongnu recognized each other as co
equal states.84 Because the Chinese considered nomadism a definitely
inferior way of life, and failed to appreciate the agricultural and urban
elements in the nomadic economy, they only reluctantly admitted the
equal status of the Xiongnu. Military necessity forced them to accept
it, but it sat ill with their deep convictions of propriety and hierarchy.
The ensuing emotional and intellectual ambivalence could lead to a
dogmatic closure, upholding Chinese superiority against the backdrop
of Xiongnu "barbarian" baseness, but it might also occasion a more
open, questioning outlook. Both perspectives are discernible in Sima
Qian's history.
The distinction between civilized and barbarian long antedated
the Han. In the Warring States era, the superiority of Chinese values
was taken for granted, and even the occasional "wise barbarian" who
rebuked the Chinese did so in the name of traditional Chinese val
ues.85 However, it is important to realize that the civilized/barbarian
divide did not neatly coincide with the boundary between Chinese
and non-Chinese. Only the Han are always on the civilized side, but
in other cases Sima Qian mentions "ethnic mixing" within China. He
asserts, for instance, that the mixture of the Qin dynasty's customs with
those of the Rong and Di barbarians accounts for the violence and
cruelty of the regime.86 In an earlier chapter he had reported that the
Qin themselves were considered barbarian by the more centrally situ
ated states in preimperial China.87 In a recent investigation of Chi
nese perceptions of the Yue (Viet) peoples in pre-Han and Han times,
Erica Brindly notices a general ambivalence in the different notions of
"barbarity" in Chinese sources, ranging from not-yet-civilized Others
within the orbit of an expanding Chinese cultural space and an essen
tial alterity ascribed to the more remote "barbarians." She observes that
Sima Qian's treatment of the Yue contains depreciative essentializing
84 See Barfield, Perilous Frontier, pp. 41-46.

85 See Schaberg, Patterned Past, pp. 130-35.
86 Shiji 15: Qin, p. 85; see also Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo, pp. 171-72.
87 Shiji 5: Qin, p. 23; see also Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo, p. 171.
elements, but also allows for their "potential to act in a civilized man
ner," depicting them as "less civilized others" rather than unchangeable
"barbarians."88 As we shall see, Sima's ethnography of the Xiongnu
presents an even more critical perspective.
To Sima Qian and his contemporaries the Xiongnu question repre
sented China's greatest foreign policy challenge. In 133 b.c.e., Emperor
Wu ended the treaty system, commencing a century of Chinese-Xion
gnu wars. The wars were bitter and, at any rate in Sima Qian's time,
mostly inconclusive, while the financial and demographic burden
almost crippled the Han economy. Sima Qian belonged to a current
of opinion questioning the wisdom of Emperor Wu's aggressive foreign
policy. The costs of warfare, they argued, were appalling and victory
was uncertain, while high taxes and conscription might lead to a popu
lar revolt. This, and not his cruel punishment by the emperor, was the
main reason for Sima Qian's doubts about the benefits of Han imperi
alism. The prosperity and happiness of the people, he believed, were
more important than imperial grandeur. Appreciating the need for a
well-trained army to deter aggression from abroad, he was very much
aware of the human costs of warfare. With approval he cites the advice
of Yan An to Emperor Wu: "Now, when China is not troubled by so
much as the bark of a dog, to become involved in wearisome projects
in distant lands that exhaust the wealth of the nation?that is hardly
right for a ruler whose duty it is to be a father to the people. To seek to
fulfill endless ambitions, determining to win revenge and incurring the
hatred of the Xiongnu?this will not bring peace to the frontier."89 Yan
An reminded the emperor that the fall of the short-lived Qin dynasty
came about when the people rebelled against the heavy burdens caused
by "excessive warfare." More generally, the memory of Qin recalled
the perils of a despotic and over-centralized style of government. Simi
lar criticisms of despotic and aggressive policies by councilors and
ministers are quoted in the Shiji in other places, usually with prudent
endorsement. Like Herodotus's, Sima Qian's critique of imperialism is
thus wedded to a critique of despotic rule.90 But we must be careful not
88 Erica Brindley, "Barbarians or Not? Ethnicity and Changing Conceptions of the

Ancient Yue (Viet) Peoples, ca. 400-50 bc," Asia Major, Third Series 16, no. 1 (2003): 29.
89 Shiji 112: Han II, p. 202.
90 See Robert B. Crawford, "The Social and Political Philosophy of the Shi-chi," Jour
nal of Asian Studies 22 (1963): 402-403; Karen Turner, "War, Punishment, and the Law of
Nature in Early Chinese Concepts of the State," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 53 (1993):
293-94, 3?5-3?7; and Wang Yu-ch'uan, "An Outline of the Central Government of the
Former Han E>ynasty," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 12 (1949): 134-87.
to push the analogy too far: his standard is not the democratic polis, but
responsible civilian imperial rule. The historian's calling is to act as a
moral adviser to the emperor, a role Sima Qian attributed to an ideal
ized model of the Confucian sage.91
The chapter on the Xiongnu begins with the observation that
throughout Chinese history the northern nomads have been "a source
of constant worry and harm." "The Han," Sima Qian declares, "has
attempted to determine the Xiongnu's periods of strength and weak
ness so that it may adopt defensive measures or launch punitive expe
ditions as the circumstances allow. Thus I made The Account of the
Xiongnu.'" On the face of it, this is history in the service of imperial
ism. There follows a summary description of the economic and mili
tary foundations of Xiongnu society that begins with the emblematic
negative statements found in so many travelogues on nomads: "They
move about . . . and have no walled cities or fixed dwellings, nor do
they engage in any kind of agriculture . . . They have no writing." The
ethnography moves to a positive key in its description of the military
skills of the nomads, observing for instance that they "are very skilful
at using decoy troops to lure their opponents to destruction," but it
switches back to the not-like-us mode in another remark on the bat
tle tactics of the Xiongnu. Just as Herodotus on the Scythians, Sima
Qian reports that the Xiongnu advance when things go well for them,
but do not consider it disgraceful to take flight when they are hard
pressed. "Their only concern," the historian scornfully remarks, "is
with self-advantage, and they know nothing of propriety or righteous
ness."92 Later on, however, the tactics of hitting with lightning speed
and vanishing "like the mist" when the enemy outnumbers them are
mentioned in an explanation of the military successes of the Xiongnu
under the leadership of Maodun.93 His moral strictures notwithstand
ing, Sima Qian quite realistically assesses the sources of the Xiongnu's
military power, a power the Han feared and respected. His ethnography
of the nomads wavers between his disapproval of their "un-Chinese"
ways and an objective appraisal, at times bordering on a grudging admi
ration, of their military skills and efficient style of governance. He does
not go quite as far as Herodotus's opinion that the social technology of
military nomadism is "the cleverest invention" we know, but neither
does he fall into the typically "civilized" underestimation of it.
91 See Wai'Yee Li, "The Idea of Authority in the Shih chi," Harvard Journal of Asiatic
Studies 54 (1994): 360.
92 Shiji no: Han II, p. 129.
93 Ibid., pp. 137-39.
Sima Qian's ethnography of the Xiongnu thus oscillates between an

essentialist reduction of their nature to those aspects of it the Chinese
found particularly reprehensible and a more favorable appreciation of
their intelligence and versatility. An example of essentialism is the blunt
statement that "in times of crisis" the northern barbarians "take up arms
and go off on plundering and marauding expeditions. This seems to be
their inborn nature."94 Likewise, some Xiongnu customs, such as their
preference for seats on the left and facing north, and their preference of
the young over the aged, are depicted as simple inversions of Chinese
ways.95 But the greater part of the ethnography is not like that at all.
The description of the political organization of the Xiongnu confedera
tion, for example, gives an impression of efficient statecraft rather than
backward despotism. In fact, its sophisticated combination of central
ized control and decentralized administration seems well suited to elicit
the admiration of Sima Qian's Chinese readers, many of whom were
critical of the unwieldy governmental bureaucracy of the Han. It is true
that Sima Qian mentions several examples of cruel behavior, includ
ing parricide, but elsewhere he recounts even more instances of similar
cruelty on the part of Chinese rulers and aristocrats.
It is not easy to determine the cultural distance between the Chi
nese and the Xiongnu in Sima Qian's narrative. The Xiongnu are
surely represented as Other, in the sense that their means of subsis
tence, methods of warfare, code of honor, food, clothing, and housing
differ profoundly from Chinese ways. They are also Other because they
are consistently represented as enemies, placing them at a political and
emotional distance that is absent from Herodotus's depiction of the
Scythians, who are not enemies of the Greeks, but rather enemies of the
Greeks' enemies. On the other hand, the nomadic-sedentary boundary
is less permeable in Herodotus than in Sima Qian. In Herodotus, there
is not a single instance of a Greek "going native" among the Scythians.
Herodotean border crossing is a one-way street. Scythians sometimes
adopt Greek ways, but Greeks never adopt Scythian customs (although
there is one mention of "Scythian Greeks"96). Sima Qian, however,
reports continuous travel across the frontier in both directions, with
several instances of Chinese adopting the Xiongnu way of life. Unlike
the Scythian frontier, the Great Wall frontier is culturally permeable
in two directions.

95 Ibid., p. 137.
In the early Han we find several examples of border crossing and

cultural adaptation. In this period, the military balance tilted toward
the Xiongnu. Hann Xin, appointed by the first Han emperor, Gaozu, to
rule the border province of Dai, went over to the Xiongnu side when
they invaded his province, and eventually became a Xiongnu general.
Shortly thereafter, Sima Qian relates, "a number of Han generals" went
over to the Xiongnu.97 The most striking example of the cultural inver
sions such contacts could bring about is the story of Zhonghang Yue.
This man was a eunuch dispatched by Emperor Wen, not long after
174 b.c.e., to accompany a Han princess who was to marry Jizhu, the
successor of Maodun, as part of the peace treaty. The court had forced
this mission on him against his will. Upon his arrival at the court of
the Shanyu, Zhonghang Yue promptly went over to the side of the
Xiongnu. Jizhu treated him with great favor, making him a sort of offi
cial advisor on matters Chinese. Sima Qian quotes Zhonghang Yue
extensively, first when he warns the Xiongnu against adopting Chinese
ways, and second when he refutes the criticism of the customs of the
nomads voiced by a Han envoy. The speeches Sima Qian attributes
to Zhonghang Yue merit a careful reading, for they demonstrate the
extent and the limits of the historian's ability to imagine the perils of
Sinification for the Xiongnu, as well as his willingness to give voice to
an imagined Xiongnu critique of Chinese culture.
To begin with, Zhonghang counsels his Xiongnu friends to recognize
the demographic imbalance between themselves and China. The Chi
nese vastly outnumber the Xiongnu, and yet the military power of the
latter is sufficient to withstand, and sometimes even defeat, the Han.
That is because their way of life is well suited to military training and
preparedness. "The strength of the Xiongnu," Zhonghang argues, "lies
in the very fact that their food and clothing are different from those
of the Chinese, and they are therefore not dependent upon the Han
for anything." However, the tribute the Chinese send to the Xiongnu
court might change this. The Shanyu is getting fond of Chinese gar
ments and food, and his subjects might develop similar tastes. Zhong
hang strongly warns against becoming dependent on Chinese imports,
pointing to the utter uselessness of Han silk when riding on horseback
"through the brush and brambles." On the other hand, he "taught the
Shanyu's aides how to make an itemized accounting of the number
of persons and domestic animals in the country."98 Here, he advised
97 Shiji no: Han II, pp. 138-39.

98 Ibid., p. 143.
them to adopt some of the routine practices of the Han state.99 But the
key issue in Zhonghang Yue's advice has to do with the cultural con
sequences of taking up Chinese habits and tastes. It presents us with
an analysis of the dangers of luxury to a militarized society that is not
unlike later European explanations of the fall of the Roman Empire.
Thus far, Zhonghang Yue has mainly dwelt on the perils of Sini
fication. When faced with the Han envoy's strictures about Xiongnu
culture, however, he replies with a critique of Han society from a
Xiongnu perspective. The first point the envoy had made was that
Xiongnu customs showed insufficient respect for the aged, for they
give the best food and drink to the young men. Well, Zhonghang Yue
retorts, is it not true that the Han do the same in wartime, when "the
old parents at home voluntarily give up their warm clothing and tasty
food so that there will be enough to provide for the troops?" The Han
envoy had to admit that this was indeed the truth. Zonghang then
simply pointed out that, since warfare was the main business of the
Xiongnu, it was perfectly appropriate to allot the best food and the
sturdiest clothing to those who bore the brunt of the war effort. The
final results were beneficial to all: "So the young men are willing to
fight for the defense of the nation, and both fathers and sons are able
to live out their lives in security. How can you say that the Xiongnu
despise the aged?"100
The Han envoy is not yet finished. "Among the Xiongnu," he con
tinues, "when a father dies, the sons marry their own stepmothers, and
when brothers die, their remaining brothers marry their widows! These
people know nothing of the elegance of hats and girdles, nor of the
ritual of the court!" This time, Zhonghang Yue's repartee is longer. For
a start, he explains that the Xiongnu are well provided with all they
need and enjoy more leisure than the haughty Chinese: "the people
eat the flesh of their domestic animals, drink their milk, and wear their
hides, while the animals graze from place to place, searching for pasture
and water. Therefore, in wartime the men practise riding and shooting,
while in times of peace they enjoy themselves and have nothing to do."
The laws of the Xiongnu, Zhonghang further declares, "are simple and
easy to carry out; the relation between ruler and subject is relaxed and
intimate, so that the governing of the whole nation is no more com
plicated than the governing of one person." Sima Qian's readers would
99 See Michael Loewe, "The Former Han Dynasty," in Cambridge History of China, vol.
i, pp. 126-27.
100 Shiji no: Han II, pp. 143-44.
surely decode the praise of Xiongnu simplicity as an indirect critique of

the complicated laws and cumbersome bureaucracy of the Han.
Coming to the Han envoy's objections against the Xiongnu mar
riage code, he explains that their purpose is to safeguard the preserva
tion of the clans, so that the ruling families will stand firm in times of
turmoil. This is followed by a searing critique of Han society:
In China, on the other hand, though a man would never dream of

marrying his stepmother or his brother's widow, yet the members of the
same family drift so far apart that they end up murdering each other!
This is precisely why so many changes of dynasty have come about in
China! Moreover, among the Chinese . . . enmity arises between the
rulers and the ruled, while the excessive building of houses and dwell
ings exhausts the strength and resources of the nation. Men try to get
their food and clothing by farming and raising silkworms and to insure
their safety by building walls and fortifications. Therefore, although
danger threatens, the Chinese people are given no training in aggres
sive warfare, while in times of stability they must still wear themselves
out trying to make a living. Pooh! You people in your mud huts?you
talk too much! Enough of this blubbering and mouthing! Just because
you wear hats, what does that make you?101
How should we read this fascinating passage? The first thing to note is
that Sima Qian does not express these criticisms of Han culture in his
own voice, but puts them in the mouth of a Chinese who "went native"
among the Xiongnu. He appears thus to be telling his readers that if an
intelligent and unprejudiced Chinese man were to familiarize himself
with the "barbarian outlook" on the world, this is the kind of opinion
he might well arrive at. Elsewhere, he relates that the way of life of
many other nomads of Inner Asia resembles that of the Xiongnu, up to
the faraway lands on the western borders of Parthia.102 He also recounts
that the Wusun, who live in western Inner Asia, fear and respect the
Xiongnu but hardly bother about distant China.103 Such a "global" per
spective, showing that the Xiongnu are not an isolated case and that
their power reaches far into the west, might serve to impart a measure
of modesty to his audience. Sima Qian often presents defamiliarizing
views as the opinions of such remote peoples. Nicola di Cosmo, who
offers the best discussion of the Shij?s Xiongnu narrative, considers it

102 Shiji 123: Han II, p. 234.
103 Ibid., pp. 239-40.
possible that Sima Qian "might have been regarded as a 'barbarophile'

by his contemporaries."104 Apart from that, the historian has his Han/
Xiongnu composite personage express an opinion he himself probably
shared: China is huge and wealthy, but the majority of the Chinese are
toiling away for a meager reward while a small elite wallows in luxury.
Consequently, there is enmity between the popular classes and the rul
ing stratum. Here, the author seems to use his nomadic subject matter
to deliver his opinion in an internal Chinese debate.
In the speech quoted above, Sima Qian has Zhonghang Yue per
form a discursive move not unlike the one Herodotus attributed to "the
Egyptians" when he reported that they called all people who did not
speak Egyptian "barbarians." However, he nowhere employs his meta
narrative comments (figuring at the end of all his chapters) to formu
late the general rule of cultural relativism in anything like the strident
terms of Herodotus. What he is saying is that a "barbarian perspec
tive" on Han culture and institutions is thinkable and intelligible for an
educated and well-informed Chinese. In this manner, he practices the
"anthropological turn" and makes a first step toward the thinkability of
cultural relativism. No less, but also no more.
Sima Qian's discussion of the Xiongnu is thus far more than a long
digression on "savages" and "barbarians." It is a densely written and
serious ethnography, comprising three observations. In the first place,
he posits, here and elsewhere, that the Xiongnu way of life is well
adapted to the steppe environment in which they have to maintain
themselves. Second, their peculiar and, in Chinese eyes, "barbarian"
marriage customs ensure the survival of their people in a society perma
nently organized on a war footing. In the third place, the technique of
nomadic militarism enables them to escape domination by the numeri
cally superior Chinese. When all is said and done, it is no mean feat to
force the mighty Han to recognize a nomadic confederacy as an equal
partner in international relations. The upshot is that there are no good
reasons for the Xiongnu to become "civilized" along Chinese lines, and
very good reasons not to do so.
The opinions attributed to Zhonghang Yue may well reflect views
held by the author himself. This is also apparent from his endorsement
of the politics of Emperor Wen (r. 180-157 b.c.e.). Let us recall that it
104 Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies, p. 271. Likewise, Joseph Roe Allen III,
"An Introductory Study of the Narrative Structure in the Shiji," Chinese Literature: Essays,
Articles, Reviews 13 (1981): 56 n. 46, finds Sima Qian's treatment of the Xiongnu "quite
sympathetic," especially considering that they were Han China's most enduring enemies.
was Wen who concluded the peace treaty with the Xiongnu, while it
was Sima Qian's master, Emperor Wu, who had sided with the war fac
tion in 133 b.c.e. Praise for Emperor Wen thus represented an indirect
way of criticizing Emperor Wu. That stance should not be equated,
however, with a disapproval of Chinese imperial expansion as such.
Sima Qian's discussion of imperial foreign policy exhibits the same
ambivalence we have encountered in his ethnography of the Xiongnu.
He quotes a letter dispatched in 162 by Emperor Wen to the ruler of
the Xiongnu: "We have heard it said that Heaven shows no partial
ity in sheltering mankind, and Earth no bias in bearing it up. Let us,
then, with the Shanyu, cast aside these trifling matters of the past and
walk the great road together ... in order that the peoples of our two
states may be joined together like the sons of a single family."105 These
words are part of the proposal to establish a lasting peace in which
both parties would recognize the Great Wall as the legitimate border.
Sima Qian clearly sympathized with the worldview just outlined. At
one moment, he attributed to Emperor Wu the dream of winning over
the kingdoms of the far west by peaceful means.106 Elsewhere, he even
imagined that "the multitudinous tribes within the four seas, translat
ing and retranslating their strange tongues, have come knocking at our
borders in submission. Those who bring tribute and beg for an audience
are too numerous to be told."107 These words surely represented a Con
fucian metaphysical dream rather than a realistic appraisal of the state
of affairs in central Eurasia. But it was a dream that was solidly lodged
in the intellectual imagination of Han China.
Empire and the Temporalities of History
In the dialectic of the civilized and the barbarian, and in visions of

empire, notions of temporality play an important role. Some temporali
ties only allow empires to falter or fail in the teeth of fate, while others
promise them a victorious ride on the winds of time. That is not to say,
however, that we face a clear-cut choice between linear and cyclical
time. There is, by now, a broad consensus that "all conceptions of his
tory contain both linear and cyclical elements."108

106 Shiji 123: Han II, p. 236.
107 Cited in Watson, Ssu-ma Ch'ien, p. 53.
108 George Macklin Wilson, "Time and History in Japan," American Historical Review
85 (1980): 560.
Connecting the nomadic ethnographies in Herodotus and Sima

Qian to the temporalities underpinning their histories will enable us to
identify similarities and differences in their handling of the anthropo
logical turn. In the first place we may conclude that the strong devel
opmental temporality characteristic of the European Enlightenment is
entirely absent from these histories. There is no stadial theory that would
guarantee the evolution of "lower" nomadic societies to the "higher"
stage of sedentary, agricultural civilization. In Herodotus, individual
Scythians adopt Greek ways, but this proves to be their undoing, and
there is absolutely no prospect of the Scythian people adopting Greek
or, for that matter, Persian culture. Sima Qian's account mentions cul
tural border-crossing in two directions, and the historian discusses the
possibility of the Xiongnu being seduced by Chinese luxuries and hab
its. But the latter point is made only to underline the perils of such an
acculturation for the vitality and the independence of the Xiongnu.
The Han regarded themselves as the cultural center of the world,
with concentric regions of "barbarity" around them.109 It follows that
the desirable and intelligible transition is that "barbarians" become
"civilized." As Mencius remarks: "I have heard of the Chinese convert
ing barbarians to their ways, but not of their being converted to barbar
ian ways."110 In the opening lines of his account of Central Asia, Sima
Qian likewise declares that "all the barbarians of the distant west craned
their necks to the east and longed to catch a glimpse of China."111
But his ethnography of the Xiongnu conveys a quite different message.
Unlike Mencius, Sima Qian has heard of Chinese adopting "barbarian
ways." In his narrative, several Chinese act out the "non-intelligible"
move from Han to Xiongnu culture, and one of them voices a critique
of Han culture from a Xiongnu standpoint. In these sections of the
book, the grand Sinocentric sweep of Sima Qian's historical narrative is
quite literally punctured by the anthropological turn. From his account
of the Xiongnu, it seems extremely unlikely that the Chinese will ever
impose their civilization to the north of the Great Wall.
The differences between Herodotus's and Sima Qian's views on
"civilizing the barbarians" are closely connected to the temporalities
of their histories. In Herodotus, time is both linear and cyclical: the
wars between the Greeks and the Persians are recounted as a unique
109 See Q. Edward Wang, "History, Space, and Ethnicity: The Chinese Worldview,"
Journal of World History 10 (1999): 285-305.
110 III A, 4: Mencius, p. 103.
111 Shiji 123: Han II, p. 231.
series of events with an irreversible and auspicious outcome. That is

linear time, but it is "weak" linear time, for Herodotean history is also
cyclical. Cities and empires rise and decline. Fortuna never stays in
one place for long. The real lesson of the Histories is not Greek victory
but Persian defeat. "World Empire" is a dream that will always elude
mortal men. In secular terms, this outcome is explained by the corrup
tion of power and the blindness of kings. At another level of thought,
it is inscribed in Greek religion, for the gods will not permit the affairs
of a man, a city, or an empire to prosper forever.112 "It is heaven's way
to bring down all things of surpassing greatness."113 Thus spoke the
Persian general Artabanes, counseling prudence to Xerxes on the eve
of his invasion of Greece. Two temporalities thus structure Herodotus's
narrative of rise and decline: political cycles caused by the corrupting
effects of excessive power, and religious cycles in which the gods strike
down the hubris of empires.
The temporalities of the Histories exclude the enduring transfor
mation of one culture by another. Cambyses's attempt to damage and
ridicule Egyptian religion bespeaks his insanity and will eventually ruin
him. Herodotus recounts how the Persian king dies from a self-inflicted
wound on his thigh, in the selfsame spot where he had stabbed the
Egyptian holy Apis calf.114 Like the overall pattern of the Histories, the
narrative of Cambyses's downfall is framed by two cycles. He is brought
down by his own mindless pride, but it is equally true that he is felled
by the revenge of the Egyptian deity. And with Cambyses falls the
entire project of cultural imperialism. The Persian empire conquered
the greater part of the known world, calling into question the received
wisdom about the transience of empires, but it failed to subdue the
Ethiopians, the Scythians, and the Greeks, thus reaffirming the validity
of the recurrent cycles of rise and decline that dominate the temporal
framework of the Histories.115
Just as in Herodotus, the temporality of the Shiji is not perfectly
cyclical. The dynastic cycles represent a series of analogies between
recurrent political crises. From the time of the ancient Five Emperors
down to the Qin dynasty, Sima Qian observes, periods of strong and
112 Thomas Harrison, Divinity and History: The Religion of Herodotus (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), pp. 31-63.
113 Herodotus, VII, 10.
114 Herodotus, III, 64.
115 See Justus Cobet, "The Organization of Time in the Histories," in Bakker, de Jong,
and van Wees, Brill's Companion to Herodotus, pp. 411-412; and Momigliano, Classical
Foundations, pp. 29-30.
weak government have alternated.116 Elsewhere he refers to "the law

of change, that when things reach their period of greatest flourishing,
they must begin to decay."117 The Shiji, however, is also structured by
notions of linear time. Unlike Herodotus's work, it is a history "from the
earliest times to the present day." According to Joseph Needham, "the
Chinese were the most historically minded of all ancient peoples."118
They kept written records from the eighth century b.c.e. onward, so
that historians in Han times could look back on a long past in which
Chinese civilization had gradually expanded, albeit with numerous set
backs and ages of war and turmoil.
Sima Qian's Confucian outlook theorizes the growth of order and
civilization as the unfolding of the immanent potential of human and
cosmic nature. There is, or must be, an encompassing order pervading
the course of nature and human endeavor.119 This cosmo-political order,
however, remains precarious, and is forever threatened by the failure of
the human actors who must sustain it.120 The immanent cosmic order
can only realize itself through human agency: there is a cosmic ontote
leology, but there is no such thing as divine providence.m There is a
vision of "reform" and "correction," but its temporality is not "progres
sive," tempered as it is by the powerful notion of a "return" to the Way
of the ancient sages. Assessing the temporalities of pre-Han historical
writing, David Schaberg typifies it as "a record of continual failure and
rare success."122 Grant Hardy argues that the thematic and nonlinear
narrative structure of the Shiji conveys an open-ended, contingent, and
nonfinalist vision of historical development, and he observes that "a
sense of loss permeates the Shiji, a yearning for what once was."123 We
116 Shiji 28: Han II, p. 16; see also Han II, pp. 6, 198, 217.
117 Shiji 30: Han II, p. 63.
118 Joseph Needham, "Time and Knowledge in China and the West," in The Voices
of Time, ?d. J. T. Fraser (New York: G. Braziller, 1966), p. 101; Needham regards the tem
porality of Chinese historiography as basically linear, though not "developmental" in the
modern European sense. For views that emphasize the cyclical element in Chinese concep
tions of time, see Nathan Sivin, "Chinese Conceptions of Time," Earlham Review 1 (1966):
82-92; and Jaroslav Prusek, "History and Epics in China and the West," Diogenes 42 (1963):
20-43.
119 Hence the comprehensive, "encyclopedic" structure of the Shiji; see Mark Edwards
Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China (New York: State University of New York Press,
1999)? PP-308-17.
120 See Benjamin Schwarz, "History in Chinese Culture: Some Comparative Reflec
tions," History and Theory 35 (1996): 27-29.
121 See Joachim Gentz, "Wahrheit und historische Kritik in der fr?hen historiogra
phischen Tradition," Oriens Extremus 43 (2002): 37.
122 Schaberg, Patterned Past, p. 276.
123 Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo, pp. 127-35, 120.
may conclude that Sima Qian's vision of history and the expansion of
Chinese civilization is premised on a weak linearity forever threatened
by dissolution and decay. The empire is a solid historical fact, but its
future moral and political health is not, in the end, guaranteed by the
temporality of Sima Qian's history. Although Sima Qian, in contrast to
Herodotus, considers an imperial mission civilisatrice both feasible and
desirable, his ethnography of the Xiongnu underlines the limits of the
expansion of Han civilization in the steppe regions of northern Asia.
Conclusion
Herodotus knew nothing about China, and Sima Qian was entirely igno
rant about Greek historiography. It only makes the parallels between
them more fascinating. Both historians question the wisdom of imperial
expansion and probe its conditions and consequences. Both perform
the anthropological turn, passing beyond a complacent Grecocentric or
Sinocentric perspective on themselves and the surrounding world. The
role of Othering in their writings should not be overstated. Notions of
common humanity and an incipient cultural relativism play equally
significant parts. The dialectic of Othering and common humanity
bespeaks a creative ambivalence in their outlook. They fully belong
to their native cultures: Sima Qian is a Han Chinese and Herodotus
is a Greek, but their intellectual enterprise is fueled by an investiga
tion of the dynamics of their own culture in its evolving relationships
to other cultures. That, more than anything else, explains their intel
lectual power and wide-ranging curiosity. Something else they share is
a secular orientation. While it is true that the gods have their role to
play in Herodotus and that there is a cosmic-metaphysical element in
Sima Qian's Confucian outlook, neither of them ever explains trends
or events in terms of a divine plan for the world. Their visions of his
tory are fundamentally different from the divinely ordained sequence
of events that structures the historical narrative of the Hebrew Bible, a
text that is world-historically contemporary with them.
The main differences between Herodotus and Sima Qian turn on
temporality and their relation to empire. While both the Histories and
the Shiji work with combinations of cyclical and linear time, the bal
ance tilts toward the cyclical side in Herodotus and toward a weak
linearity in Sima Qian. That is hardly accidental. Grafting his long-run
history of China on the mythical traditions of the Way of the ancient
sage emperors, Sima Qian conceives of a temporality premised on the
expansion of Chinese civilization, of which the dynastic cycles are a
temporal substructure. His temporality is not, however, progressive,

but precarious and mournful. Herodotus, on the other hand, recounts,
and to a certain extent rejoices in, the failure of the Persian attempt
at "world empire." The overwhelming significance of this irreversible
event may suggest a linear temporality, but Herodotus's explanation
and evaluation of the decline of empires structures his narrative to such
an extent that the rhythm of rise and decline become its major tempo
ral frame.
A further difference concerns cultural relativism. While both his
torians are remarkably open in their ethnography of the nomadic "bar
barian" others living on the Eurasian steppe, Herodotus's formulation
of cultural relativism is more explicit and epistemologically grounded.
It accords with the peripheral position of the Greeks in relation to the
great civilizations of western Eurasia and northeastern Africa. They
were living on the rim ofthat world, and their political and intellectual
culture was a highly agonistic one of ever shifting power relations in
and between city-states. By contrast, the Chinese ideal of civilization
and the state was more stable.124 While the Greeks peered from the
outside into the entrails of empires, Sima Qian wrote from an insid
er's perspective within what he, with some justification, believed to
be the greatest and most lasting empire in the world. In Sima Qian's
history, Chinese civilization occupies a unique nodal point in space
and time. That is where he differs from Herodotus, who never claims,
nor could have claimed, a comparable centrality for Greek civilization
(only a much later European "invented tradition" made such a claim
for Greece).
The conclusion I propose to draw is that we should not overempha
size, nor simply invert, the significance of Othering and "orientalism" in
intellectual history. I have sought to show that it was precisely the fron
tier experience that enabled Herodotus and Sima Qian to include eth
nography in their historical accounts, to formulate critical perspectives
on empire, and to engage in a serious and open-minded investigation
of "barbarian" culture. The similarities between Herodotus's Scythian
ethnography and Sima Qian's Xiongnu ethnography are much greater
than an undue emphasis on the Greekness of the former and the Chi
124 Nathan Sivin observes that "China differs from the Greek World primarily in that
the state was so rarely reinvented," see "State, Cosmos, and Body in the Last Three Centu
ries b.c.," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 55 (1995): 7-8, 34-36; the same point is made
by Mark Edward Lewis, "The City-State in Spring-and-Autumn China," in A Comparative
Study of Thirty City-State Cultures, ed. Mogens Herman Hansen (Copenhagen: C. A. Reit
zel, 2000), pp. 359-74.
neseness of the latter might induce us to believe, to say nothing of an

approach in terms of Chinese versus European or "Western" culture.
It is only in the context of the similarities that we can appreciate the
significance of the differences between the two historians. Those dif
ferences, I have sought to demonstrate, can be explained by the geo
graphical position and the political history of Greece and China, and
by the peculiarities of Greek and Chinese intellectual history, rather
than by essentialist conceptions of Greek, European, or Chinese iden
tity. In the new historical mode of inquiry into the human condition
pioneered by Herodotus and Sima Qian such identities became, per
haps for the first time, thinkable as objects of historical inquiry rather
than its unquestionable starting points.

Herodotus and Sima Qian: History's Anthropological Turn in Ancient Greece and China

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Journal of World History, Vol. 19, No. 1

peting with older religious, poetic, and philosophical modes of self

Scythian ethnography as an exemplary case of othering, while Owen

Two "Fathers of History"

5 See Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berke

9 See Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo, pp. 16-18.

chapters. It recounts the entire history of China up to the historian's

13 Shiji 130, cited in Watson, Ssu-ma Ch'ien, p. 50.

"an arena for moral hermeneutics" rather than a straightforward exer

sion of the Greek city-states with Persian imperialism, he was witness

History, the Politics of Empire,

(Shendu) he presents some information the Chinese had obtained

of expansion of Emperor Wu. Ferghana (Dayuan) represented a link in

35 Strong moral relativism is a self-contradictory concept, for the elementary reason

trast between a homogeneous Chinese "civilized" way of life and "bar

Herodotus: Persians, Scythians, and Greeks

Herodotus's Histories revolve around the new world order created by

47 Hs?n Tzu, 15.

their belief in the military superiority of monarchies led them to fatally

58 See Christ, "Herodotean Kings," p. 185.

ultimate meaning of the text. Actually, Herodotus's approach is better

power relations?no mean feat. Coming to the functioning of Scyth

70 Herodotus, IV, 46.

servile mentality.74 Here, the Scythians seem to represent the Greeks'

Sima Qian: The Han Empire and Its Barbarians

76 See Sara Forsdyke, "Athenian Democratic Ideology and Herodotus' Histories,"

In the steppe environment, the military tactics of the nomads were

84 See Barfield, Perilous Frontier, pp. 41-46.

88 Erica Brindley, "Barbarians or Not? Ethnicity and Changing Conceptions of the

Sima Qian's ethnography of the Xiongnu thus oscillates between an

94 Shiji no: Han II, p. 129.

In the early Han we find several examples of border crossing and

97 Shiji no: Han II, pp. 138-39.

surely decode the praise of Xiongnu simplicity as an indirect critique of

In China, on the other hand, though a man would never dream of

101 Shiji no: Han II, p. 144.

possible that Sima Qian "might have been regarded as a 'barbarophile'

Empire and the Temporalities of History

In the dialectic of the civilized and the barbarian, and in visions of

105 Shiji no: Han II, p. 147.

Connecting the nomadic ethnographies in Herodotus and Sima

series of events with an irreversible and auspicious outcome. That is

weak government have alternated.116 Elsewhere he refers to "the law

temporal substructure. His temporality is not, however, progressive,

neseness of the latter might induce us to believe, to say nothing of an

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