The AHA Prize in History prior to CE 1000 is awarded for the best book in English on any field of history prior to the year 1000 CE. The prize was first awarded in 1985. Until 1999, it rotated annually among the following geographical areas: Near East and Egypt; Far East and South Asia; Africa, North America, and Latin America; and Europe.

2023
Xin Wen, The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road (Princeton Univ. Press)

2022
Brian G. Lander, The King’s Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire (Yale Univ. Press)

2021
Simon Martin, Ancient Maya Politics: A Political Anthropology of the Classic Period 150–900 CE (Cambridge Univ. Press)

2020
Charles Sanft, Literate Community in Early Imperial China: The Northwestern Frontier in Han Times (SUNY Press)

2019
Jack B. Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers (Princeton Univ. Press)

2018
Jeremy Hartnett, The Roman Street: Urban Life and Society in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Rome (Cambridge Univ. Press)

2017
Alain Bresson and Steven Rendall, translator, The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy: Institutions, Markets, and Growth in the City-States (Princeton Univ. Press)

2016
Hina Azam, Sexual Violation in Islamic Law: Substance, Evidence, and Procedure (Cambridge Univ. Press)

2015
Nicolas Tackett, The Destruction of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy (Harvard Univ. Asia Center)

2014
Alex Mullen, Southern Gaul and the Mediterranean: Multilingualism and Multiple Identities in the Iron Age and Roman Periods (Cambridge Univ. Press)

2013
Patricia Crone, The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism (Cambridge Univ. Press)

2012
Kyle Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275-425 (Cambridge Univ. Press)

2011
Saskia Roselaar, Public Land in the Roman Republic: A Social and Economic History of Ager Publicus in Italy, 396-89 BC (Oxford Univ. Press)

2010
Matthew Canepa, The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran (Univ. of California Press)

2009
Zainab Bahrani, Rituals of War: The Body and Violence in Mesopotamia (Zone Books, distributed by MIT Press)

2008
Anthony Barbieri-Low, Artisans in Early Imperial China (Univ. of Washington Press)

2007
John Matthews, The Journey of Theophanes: Travel, Business, and Daily Life in the Roman East (Yale Univ. Press)

2006
Christopher Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800 (Oxford Univ. Press)

2005
Callie Williamson, The Laws of the Roman People: Public Law in the Expansion and Decline of the Roman Republic (Univ. of Michigan Press)

2004
Kurt Raaflaub, The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece. (Univ. of Chicago Press)

2003
David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave (Thames & London)

2002
William Harris, Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity (Harvard Univ. Press)

2001
Barry Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples 8000 BC-AD 1500 (Oxford Univ. Press)

2000
Warwick Ball, Rome in the East: The Transformation of an Empire (Routledge)

1999
David Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis, The History of Cartography: Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Artic, Australian, and Pacific Societies, vol. 2, no. 3 (Univ. of Chicago Press)

1997
Amélie Kuhrt, The Ancient Near East, c. 3000-330 BC, 2 vols. (Routledge)

1996
William Klingshirn, Caesrius of Arles: The Making of a Christian Community in Late Antique Gaul (Cambridge Univ. Press)

1995
Bruce Smith, Rivers of Change: Essays on Early Agriculture in Eastern North America (Smithsonian Inst. Press)

1994
Miranda Shaw, Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism (Princeton Univ. Press)

1993
E.J.W. Barber, Prehistoric Textile (Princeton Univ. Press)

1992
Glen Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Univ. of Michigan Press)

1990
Robert Borgen, Sugawara no Michizane and the Early Heian Court (Harvard Univ. Press)

1989
Dorothy Thompson, Memphis under the Ptolemies (Princeton Univ. Press)

1988
Erich Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Age of Rome (Univ. of California Press)

1986
Benjamin Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press)

1985
John Van Seters, In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History (Yale Univ. Press)