Inspired by postmodern and postcolonial critics of the dominant Western canons in the fields of historiography, philology, cultural anthropology, and archaeology, this book explores the meanings and uses of “antiquity” in three cultural areas and compares the genealogies of the representations of their remote past. It discusses the entanglement of European conceptions of antiquity and its colonial and postcolonial appropriation and transformations. By confronting three cultural areas and by diachronically exploring the functions of “antiquity,” the book provides cultural anthropology and postcolonial studies with historical foundations and implements the postulate of the local gaze at global phenomena for world history and globalization research. It both questions and diversifies the Eurocentric notion of “classics,” and thereby contributes to a productive debate on the use of the past in globalized societies.