Sonja Brentjes, Jens Høyrup, and Bruce O'Brien's new book Narratives on Translation across Eurasia and Africa: From Babylonia to Colonial India disentangles histories of translations from their treatment in specialized intellectual fields. They make the point that histories of translations are not merely sub-categories of the histories of pre-modern sciences, religion, law, or literature but are in fact histories of cultural practices that cut synchronically and diachronically through the entire textual fabric of the investigated societies.