This is an entry for a Frequently Asked Questions list I'm
working on for Usenet newsgroup soc.history.ancient.  Its purpose is to
provide people who conceive an interest in regions' ancient history with
up-to-date ways to get basic information or to dive into the field.  For
basic information, a section on "periodisation and terms" and a set of
"introductory" references; for research purposes, a set of "research" 
references. The bibliography is annotated (to varying degrees) and 
hyperlinked (on the Web; the capitalised words represent such hyperlinks).

This entry is part of the Polities half of the FAQ.  My primary interest
in doing this is regional history; while I recognise that the scholarly
trend is finally turning back towards less-regional approaches, I have
found that questions on Usenet fairly frequently resemble "Can anyone 
tell me about Region X in Period Y?"  At the same time, although 
regional history has long been relatively prominent in scholarship, 
it has barely penetrated the popular history market, except for specific 
regions of local interest in any given country.

That said, I did find quite early on that regional histories often may
not be fully comprehensible without attention to the elite politics
beyond their borders.  So the Polities document is intended to cover
any political organisation that is attested for more than one of the
regions I treat.  The distinction is *that arbitrary* because it is
founded strictly on the notion that where a region is ruled from outside
you need to go outside it to understand its history; therefore only polities
which cross regions' borders need additional treatment.  In practice I'm
rarely finding that significant polities are omitted by this procedure.

Because polities' history, even more often than regions', tends to be
named after individuals, the Polities half of the document gives dates
for many more individuals than the Regions half.  These dates are dates
of rule for rulers (who are listed, with dynastic connexions if any noted),
but dates birth to death for others.  Only rulers who ruled (at least in
title) for ten years or more are normally listed; this seems to be a fair
arbitrary rule for selecting rulers who name their times (for all that
Edward VII of the United Kingdom, the source of "Edwardian", 1901-1910,
is an obvious exception).

In general, since I expect to cover the entire ancient Old World up to
AD 700 in this document, I'm being extremely selective.  Online 
references, being relatively few, I'm including relatively freely; 
also because it would be nice if some of the links still work when 
I update this two years hence.

References are chosen on a number of conditions:  introductory ones
should be in English; research ones should provide guidance to the
literature; both should be readable and recent...  In this text version,
there are four codes preceding references that need them:

O indicates something I haven't seen;
* indicates something that I haven't seen any reviews or favourable
  citations of (print only; assume this of all online sources for
  obvious reasons);
+ indicates something wonderful, that I suspect will stay on the list a
  long time;
- indicates something I really wish I could replace (usually because of
  age, occasionally because an exceptional void in scholarship requires
  listing an otherwise inadequate work).

Please let me know of things that need changing.  I'm not a scholar
by trade, have learned much of what I know about doing historical
research while working on this document, and while I don't expect to
change the style, I do want to be sure the content is accurate.

Joe Bernstein
joe@sfbooks.com