The highly contested nature of politics in contemporary Turkey reflects a long history of struggles for hegemony across its space. The laying down of boundaries and borders as markers of territory and power has been a feature of Anatolia's geopolitical character since the earliest historical records. Although of course a regular phenomenon in human experience, the process has an undeniable concentration in that precious landmass which bridges and divides Europe and Asia. Baysal and Karakatsanis's book encompasses this narrative, but goes much further by taking, as its title says, a cross-disciplinary perspective on borders and boundaries over time. For both reasons it is an important contribution to our understanding of Turkey and to the discipline of border studies even in light of the rapid expansion of that field.

Arising from a conference held in Ankara in 2013, the book has sixteen chapters which in chronological terms range from prehistory to the present day. A thoughtful preface by Susan Sherratt together with the editors’ own introduction serve to frame and underpin the theoretical thrust of the different approaches taken by contributors. Given the slippery nature of the terms in play—borders, boundaries, frontiers—this reference is useful again to the reader as s/he works through the chapters. However, in line with others before and after (see e.g. Hingley, Reference Hingley2018: 78, note 2), we deliberately don't get an attempt to set down precise meanings or even to provide a conceptual clarification for the terms. While the latitude so granted to the contributors has undoubted merits and yields arguably a more productive discourse than would otherwise have been the case, there may have been an opportunity foregone to produce material more amenable to hard comparison. The suite of well-produced maps and the illustrations which complement nearly every chapter deserve mention as a feature which grounds and illuminates the subject matter.

What, concretely, makes a frontier region? Is it always physical geography? Beyond defensive structures such as fortifications, are there particular ways in which the built environments of frontier regions are impacted by liminal factors? Chapter 11 on northern Mesopotamia in Late Antiquity prompts consideration of these and other questions germane to the volume. Elif Keser-Kayaalp's subject indeed is one of those central to it. ‘The fact that the main characteristic of the region is its being a frontier encourages one to look at it in the light of border/frontier/boundary studies’ (p. 135). She does engage herself with the business of standardisation in terminology, using the model for a conceptual framework of borderlands put forward by Bradley Parker (Reference Parker2006) who aims to facilitate ‘a cross-disciplinary supra-regional comparison of frontier dynamics’ (ibid. 77). One of her achievements in the chapter is highlighting how the late antique Roman material culture in the region was shaped more by reference to the Centre than by direct interaction with the Other. Similarly, the Christian community (East Syrian Church) on the Persian side of the frontier seemed to innovate architecturally and doctrinally in order to differentiate itself from Christians (west Syrians) across the border and pre-empt suspicions of disloyalty to the King. Methodologically, the choice to deploy a model as a way to better understand borderland processes looks like another noteworthy achievement.

Going from Late to Early Antiquity and in geographical terms from south-east to eastern Anatolia, Julia Linke (Ch. 5) explores symbolic borders and the Assyrian perception of Urartu. The premise of the chapter is that mountains, and high ones especially, cause the creation of symbolic borders between the peoples living on either side.

I have had some experience of this phenomenon on the other side of Anatolia. On the lower slopes of a range near Afyon, I enquired about crossing over in a small town called Tınaztepe. Although I was told that travel on foot to a village further along the foothills would take no more than an hour (though this seemed doubtful given that the map indicated about a dozen kilometres), traversing the height was unheard of and no one who I asked had a notion of how long any such trek would take. Yet, the distance as the crow flies to both points from the settlement was virtually the same and by a more or less direct way I reached the other side of the range in an afternoon. I came to refer to the phenomenon whereby people in mountainous regions underestimate the distance to familiar places and overestimate it to unfamiliar ones as ‘Tınaztepe's Law’ (Brennan, Reference Brennan2005: 46–47). The fact that the mountains in question were modest perhaps indicates greater applicability of the idea explored by Linke. In the case which she examines the symbolic border constructed by the Assyrians between themselves and the Urartians is breached by the physical crossing of the range by the Assyrian king and his military and recognition of similarities instead of only differences between the two (pp. 71–72).

David Hill (Ch. 7) is frustrated with the apparent disconnect between what we know from archaeology about cultural diffusion in western Anatolia and prevailing or entrenched views on the delineation of states in the region in the Archaic period and after. Instead he posits ‘fuzzy borders’, notably between Ionia and Lydia, a space of mutual interest which, he argues, more accurately reflects the reality on the ground. In what is one of the most stimulating chapters in the volume the author convincingly pushes back against traditional historical models which paint the Greek strip of coast as being perpetually in the dark shadow of predatory inland states. Rather, he suggests each side allowed the other to play to its strengths—the Greeks for instance trading by sea, the Lydians on land—a relationship that brought political, economic, and cultural benefits to both. Without any maritime tradition to speak of, the Lydians sensibly opted to have the Ionians handle their external trading and, in so far as and so long as they were de facto allies, defensive needs on the coastal front. This mutually advantageous arrangement in turn allows us to see Ionian colonisation activity in the Black Sea in different light. The traditional models ‘that see Ionian colonization as a necessity to counter being hemmed in by an expansive and dominant neighbour’ (p. 90) are supplanted by a positive dynamic which has the process given strong impetus by the likelihood of Lydian influence extending north to the southern Black Sea coast.

Hill underpins his thesis by critiquing the traditional Eurocentric dominated discourse that has to a large extent framed Western scholarship on the subject of interregional relations in the ancient world. For this he draws on important recent studies in the Anatolian context by Mac Sweeney (Reference Mac Sweeney2013), Greaves (Reference Greaves2007), and Draycott (Reference Draycott2010), among others, which emphasise models of interaction ‘that are able to express a more nuanced and permeable cultural reality’ (p. 87). While Hill's criticism of the traditional approach is fair and persuasive, the extension of this to the historical sources themselves is less so. ‘The strongly defined polarity between Greece and Persia as expressed in the sources’ (p. 87) applies to some sources but surely not all. Aeschylus’ Persians, to take a relevant example, demonstrates a greater grasp of geopolitics than many of its modern readers may give it credit for. When in the play the queen of Persia asks of the whereabouts of Athens (l. 230), it is not barbarian ignorance the author is pointing to but the reality of his polis being on the periphery of a larger, more powerful world. The historiographical writings of Xenophon, an Athenian who saw more of Anatolia and wrote about it more than any other Classical Greek, are another case in point.

The leap to modernity in the volume is somewhat abrupt. From Late Antiquity with Keser-Kayaalp (Ch. 11) and Robinson (Ch. 12) we arrive in the contemporary world with only stops at the Bulgarian-Turkey border in the mid-twentieth century (Ch. 14) and the new Republic of Macedonia, where the historic position of ethnic Turks as a squeezed minority in the country is considered by Maja Muhić (Ch. 13). The leap marks a move away from inter-state boundaries of various sorts to more abstract and personal ones, exemplified by Marc Herzog's exploration of the films of Fatih Akın (Ch. 16). In these the lead characters are said to reflect a directorial perspective embedded in ‘inbetween-ness and hybridity’ (p. 197). More concretely, the lead protagonists in films such as In July (2000), Head On (2004), and The Edge of Heaven (2007) are shown to continuously negotiate sociocultural, class, and ideational borders with a propensity to live their lives ‘outside their bounds’ (p. 202). Illustrative of this is the memorable character of Sibel in Head On who desperately tries to escape the roles imposed on her by her conservative Turkish-German family to pursue a life of her own design. Ironically, via a fake marriage, in the end this takes her to Turkey, where one night she becomes the victim of brutal assaults that leave her for dead. Herzog might have noted that the German-Turkish sociocultural world has provided rich material for many other cultural figures, including Orhan Pamuk, whose book Snow (Reference Pamuk and Freely2004) also crosses back and forth in Deutschkei space.

Coming to this book, I wondered on the one hand to what extent it would advance my understanding of the complex societies that exist in and around Turkey today, and on the other how it might modify my own conception of borders and boundaries. On both counts it proved to be eye-opening. In part this is owed to the diachronic focus on a single space, in particular being able to see how certain liminal factors persist over time and being able to trace cultural roots that reach back through millennia such as those from Tınaztepe to Urartu. Perhaps though it owes itself even more to the bringing out of integrative factors and the reality that borderlands are interactive spaces which stimulate and impact on political, economic, and cultural processes often far beyond their own immediate hinterlands. On the downside, the format of the book (awkward size, division of pages into columns) has a dated feel to this reviewer. The green hardback cover adds to the sense of holding a clunky doctoral thesis from the 1970s. The series, which began in the early 1980s with important volumes from Stephen Mitchell (Reference Mitchell1980) and the late David French (Reference French1981), is overdue some rethinking in terms of its physical design. Also down to personal taste, a chapter on Istanbul―a metropolis that embodies boundaries and transgressions of every sort―is not a notable gap, but would have been a plus.