在中国历史上，中亚游牧民族与中国人的关系一直是一个主题。通过调查游牧文化的形成，通过分析中国边境沿线互动模式的演变，并通过探索这种互动是如何记录在史学中的，这本书着眼于这两种文明之间在公元前一千年的文化和政治紧张关系的起源。
本书的主要目的是在导致游牧民族和中国人形成的历史背景下，分析他们之间的民族、文化和政治边界，并将“他人”的文化认知视为同一历史过程的函数。这本书以考古学和文献资料为基础，介绍了一种新的中国边疆史研究方法，它结合了大量的事实数据，并仔细审视了中国历史学家司马迁的动机、方法和一般历史观念。
Ancient China and its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History
Relations between Inner Asian nomads and Chinese are a continuous theme throughout Chinese history. By investigating the formation of nomadic cultures, by analyzing the evolution of patterns of interaction along China’s frontiers, and by exploring how this interaction was recorded in historiography, this looks at the origins of the cultural and political tensions between these two civilizations through the first millennium BC.
The main purpose of the book is to analyze ethnic, cultural, and political frontiers between nomads and Chinese in the historical contexts that led to their formation, and to look at cultural perceptions of ‘others’ as a function of the same historical process. Based on both archaeological and textual sources, this book also introduces a new methodological approach to Chinese frontier history, which combines extensive factual data with a careful scrutiny of the motives, methods, and general conception of history that informed the Chinese historian Ssu-ma Ch’ien.
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