Part I: Anchoring Modernity.- The Making of New Delhi. Classical Aesthetics, “Oriental” Tradition and Architectural Practice: a Transcultural View.- Classics in the Garden: Suppers in an Earthly Paradise.- A Classic Paving the Way to Modernity: The Ritual of Zhou in the Chinese Reform Debate since the Taiping Civil War.- Modernity’s Islamicist: Sayyid Qutb’s Theocentric Reconstruction of Sovereignty.- Part II: Repositioning Texts.- Classical Scholarship and Arab Modernity.- The Septuagint as a Jewish Classic.- Phenomenon and Reference: Revisiting Parmenides, Empedocles, and the Problem of Rationalization.- Towards an Anthropology of Reading.- Part III: Reconstructing Pastness.- The Ruins of the Others: History and Modernity in Iran.- Making New Classics: the Archaeology of Luo Zhenyu and Victor Segalen.- Homer, Skepticism, and the History of Philology.- Naked Presence and Disciplinary Wording.- Middling Ages and Living Relics as Objects to Think with: Two Figures of the Historical Imagination.