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One of the great enigmas of human history is how the Eastern or later Han dynasty of China,which ran from around 25CE to 220CE,and that of the Roman Empire from the era of Augustus from 27BCE to that of Constantine the Great around 330CE were almost contemporaneous and yet there is very little solid evidence that they had any contact with each other.How did two such vast entities manage to occupy their extensive geographies in blithe mutual ignorance? This question has been addressed perhaps most extensively by Walter Scheidel and others in the edited 2009 Oxford University Press volume,"Rome and China:Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires." Their conclusion is broadly that they just did not know about each other;there was no particular reason,it was just a fact.