The first international conference on the history of the Kingdom and Empire of Qin was held on December 10-19, 2008 at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The conference was organized by the Faculty of East Asian Studies of the Hebrew University of Yu. 14 scientists from China, the USA, Canada, Germany, Israel, Korea, and Taiwan made presentations. The conference was divided into three thematic sections: "Archaeological Perspectives", "State and Society in Qin" and "Qin ideology and image of Qin". Several round tables were held, during which participants discussed a number of issues raised in the reports. The conference participants were addressed by Lothar von Falkenhausen (University of California, Los Angeles, USA), R. Yates (McGill University, Canada) and Yu. Pines. In his opening remarks to the archaeological section, von Falkenhausen noted that the archaeological material discovered during excavations in recent decades allowed us to identify previously unknown features of the Qin society and its evolution. In particular, it is becoming more and more clear that the Qin unification of the ancient Chinese ecumene was largely prepared by previous historical development, moreover, it can even be defined as the restoration of the original cultural unity of the Zhou world, the degree of unification of which was much higher than is commonly believed. Thus, even before political unification at the end of the third century BC, the states of the Zhou circle had a high level of standardization of coins, weights and measures, musical tones and written signs - in other words, everything that traditional historiography attributes to the first Qin Emperor. Thanks to archaeological and epigraphic findings, it can also be argued that the Qin rulers, in their desire to unite the Middle Kingdom, were guided by the already existing and well-known Zhou model. page 146Qin epigraphic monuments dating both to the early period of Qin's existence (the inscription on the bell of Qin Gong ... Read more