With state formation, however, came competition and conquest by rivals. The culmination of antiquity was not the small city-states of the classical Greek period but their amalgamation into a vast universal empire, first pioneered in history by the Assyrians and Achaemenids, but kicked into an even higher gear by the Romans and the Qin-Han dynasty. At the beginning of the common era, this type of polity dominated Afro-Eurasia in a band stretching from its Eastern to its Western extremes. Sometimes historians have looked to the nomads of the Central Asian steppe as a connecting element of pre-colonial history. But for most of the time, they were too feeble and ephemeral a presence to determine the shape of world history. Looking for immediate long-distance connections, the inspiration of modern globalization, has made ancient historians overlook the major parallel development across Eurasia: universal empires. This chapter situates the formation of the Roman empire and its driving dynamics within this wider arena of universal imperial monarchies, ruled by ‘divine’ kings of kings, governed by aristocratic and gentrified elites and based on a fiscal logic of low protection costs.