He points to state walls and fortification against nonstate peoples springing up from western Europe through central Asia into China, and lasting until the Mongol invasions of Europe in the thirteenth century. It seems a rather extravagant claim, but, coming as it does from Lattimore, it merits pondering. “There was a linked chain of fortified northern frontiers of the ancient civilized world from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The earliest frontier walls appear to have been in the Iranian sector. The walled frontiers of the western Roman Empire in Britain and on the Rhine and Danube faced
...more
