Regardless of time or place, the monotheisation process has occurred at the frontiers of each monotheistic empire (oikoumene/ummah) and involved top-down indoctrination and the imposition of monotheistic laws, through which norms and identities were later internalised. Understanding religious identity this way, as a base-layer of current national identity rather than a simple milestone in a national history, necessarily challenges the way history is typically understood – not as a national story, but as an ecumenical story, in which it is a given oikoumene, or monotheistic civilisation, that originates present identities, instead of primordial ethnicity. This requires the untying of the Gordian knot of tribalism, ethnicity and nationalism, which have been long conflated. In distinguishing between these perplexing categorisations (ethnicities, empires, civilisations), we will turn towards the dangers of separating the ‘ancient’ from the ‘medieval’, which have long perpetuated lazy assumptions about the tripartite division (ancient, medieval, modern) of history. Without these loaded terms, we can view Pontic-Caspian Eurasia as part of a template binding Western History to Global History.