ABSTRACT
Any reader of the preceding chapters will certainly have noted a series of persistent themes animating the ongoing scholarly conversation, including the complexity of the efforts to identify a civilization or to demarcate its boundaries precisely. It is quite challenging to determine where any one civilization ends and another begins, even though every kind of analysis of what a civilization is or does depends, at least implicitly, on some sort of boundary-demarcation exercise. Whether civilizations are “real” or not is, as Matthew Melko (1969: 4) once observed, quite beside the point – what matters is whether “we can find value in the concept of civilizations,” value expressed in terms of the kinds of social dynamics and relations that the concept highlights and to which it calls attention. But, in order to unlock this value, it is first necessary to determine what a given civilization consists of and where its boundaries are. However, whether we are speaking geographically, historically, or even conceptually, any concrete specification of where a particular civilization starts or stops seems to be quite contestable, calling the ensuing analysis into question.
