Acknowledgments
Two initiatives contributed to this volume. One was Yuri Pines’s research project “Rethinking Early Chinese Historiography in Light of Newly Discovered Historical Texts,” supported by the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF) grant 240/15. Another was “Comparative Antiquity—A Humanities Council Global Initiative (2018–2022),” initiated and directed by Martin Kern at Princeton University. Both projects coalesced in the international conference “Rethinking Early Chinese Historiography” (May 2019), held in Jerusalem and supported by the joint grant of ISF (978/18) and the Institute for Advanced Study, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The conference was attended by twenty-three scholars: two thirds of them specialists on China, one third experts in other early Eurasian historiographic traditions. While in the end only ten papers were selected toward a thematically unified volume, we benefitted enormously from, and remain grateful for, all of our participants’ presentations and discussions at the conference. In preparing this volume, Yuri Pines was supported by the ISF Research Grant 568/19.