This extract from the Homeric Catalogue of Ships in Iliad book 2 (specifically the Achaean section) stands as a prologue to the collection of texts, reminding us that much ancient Greek geographical writing is a response to Homer, whom authors tended to exalt as the originator of geography. The passage enumerates, with obvious omissions, the allies from Greece and the Aegean who took part in the siege of Troy, arranged in regional ethnic groups, each with its own leader, and names a variety of settlements within each region (or island), the majority of which still existed in the subsequent historical periods. It illustrates the early use of regional identifiers within mainland Greece (and some of the islands), putting down a marker about the longevity of these culture regions throughout the whole ancient history of Greece.

Through much of the twentieth and well into the twenty-first century, scholars in China and in the West debated the nature of Chinese nationhood. In the West, the once dominant view was promulgated by Joseph R. Levenson and like-minded scholars, who depicted Chinese identity in terms of “culturalism,” that is belonging to a universalizing and inclusive civilization, defined by a common Confucian culture. A concept of national identity conceived in ethnic or racial terms was considered a modern phenomenon, closely related to China’s entrance into the world of nation-states.1 In the last decades of the twentieth century, though, this view was criticized by scholars who demonstrated the existence of traits of exclusive ethnocentric Chinese identity back in the past. Some went as far as to postulate racism as pertinent to Chinese civilization from its earliest stages.2