Abstract

How World History Can be Explored. A Research Project concerning an Intercultural Comparison in the Medieval Millennium

The study shown how a group of experts from disciplines as diverse as Medieval Studies, Byzantine Studies, Indology, Islamic Studies and Jewish Studies can successfully work together with a historian to explore world history. The comparison, the humanities’ equivalent of the natural sciences’ experiment (Marc Bloch), is employed for a diachronic investigation of the foundations of various societies. While the ‘state’ and the ‘economy’ emerged as foundations with distinct organizational forms for the first time ever in the Old Kingdom of Egypt (3rd millennium B. C. E.), India employed very similar foundations primarily for the colonialization of new land. In ancient Rome few religious foundations emerged at first due to the public regime of worship, while from the time of the Constantinian Revolution onwards they became indispensable for sacramental and pastoral care in the mass church of Christendom.