BRIDGING BRONZE AGE SOUTH ASIA TO THE AEGEAN - (R.) Arnott Crossing Continents. Between India and the Aegean from Prehistory to Alexander the Great. Pp. xvi + 138, ills, maps. Oxford and Philadelphia: Oxbow Books, 2022. Paper, £34.99, US$49.99. ISBN: 978-1-78925-554-6.
horizon of the so-called Bronze Age globalisation, bringing into the picture the Aegean world. As plenty of previous research highlights, early forms of globalisation are especially visible in Indian Ocean exchanges over an extensive time span. In particular, the first peak of interoceanic contacts falls into the third to second millennium BCE, and it is on this period that most of this book is focused. Complex connectivities linked the Indus civilisation, in modern-day Pakistan and north-western India, and Mesopotamian societies at the head of the Gulf, generating an intense network of trade and cultural exchangean early example of globalisation. Before delving into the main arguments of A.'s work, the contents page immediately reveals a peculiar terminological choice, which would have benefited from a thorough preliminary explanation. Both the contents page and chapter titles refer to 'Prehistory'. Across the discussion, however, terms such Bronze Age or Iron Age appear frequently, further generating a sense of confusion. The book discusses the period from the third millennium BCE until the end of the second as Prehistory, even though it deals with urbanised and literate societies commonly associated with so-called Proto-History (also a contested label, but this question goes far beyond the scope of this short contribution). Since A.'s vocabulary choice is nonconformist, a preliminary note of explanation would have been helpful. In general, in historical and archaeological debate, adopting standard periodisations has its downsides. Such labels often fail when applied to interregional contexts; simply using dates would be a safer option. The book includes five chapters, an introduction and an appendix. The general focus is on the interactions between the Indian subcontinent (the author uses the generic name India) and the Aegean across a wide time frame, from the third millennium BCE to Alexander the Great. The first four chapters are dedicated to the period covering the development and existence of the Indus civilisation (also known as the Harappan civilisation) and its external contacts. Previous research has documented the intense exchange networks linking Harappan settlements to the Ancient Near Eastern societies of Mesopotamia and the Levant, as summarised in the first chapter. In this geohistorical context, A. reports on the possible evidence of Indus objects (Chapter 2) and commodities (Chapter 3) in the Aegean. This large section of the book also has a conclusion (Chapter 4) making the whole discussion self-standing. The evidence is admittedly scant; however, A. goes a step further, providing a systematic excursus of objects and commodities found or used in the Aegean that could be from South Asia. This excursus for many of the categories analysed, while necessarily tentative, enables A. to delineate clearly the exchange pattern in its many nuances. The book adopts, indeed, a bottom-up approach, highlighting the few Indus finds in the Aegean, such as the carnelian beads (p. 19
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