ABSTRACT
This chapter models a transborder approach to antiquity that combines critical orientations within classical scholarship with interpretive frameworks of global studies to show how this combination of methods can generate new knowledge. It promotes approaches that recognize the fluidity of ancient boundaries as a complement to approaches that privilege bounded states. The chapter focuses on transborder processes in order to offer a model for decentering Greco-Roman antiquity, and presents two case studies that demonstrate evidence for perceptions of shared supraregional consciousness grounded in distinct localities. The first case study involves Polybius, whose universal history globalization scholars and social theorists view as one of the earliest texts to attempt to understand the “whole inhabited world” as a single interconnected place. The second case study presents evidence of the coproductive dynamics of local and global from the transcultural site of Ai Khanoum in Afghanistan at the border of the ancient world or, one might say, in between ancient worlds.
