91桃色

It鈥檚 easy to think that ancient history is, well, ancient history鈥攐bsolete, irrelevant, unjustifiably focused on Greece and Rome, and at risk of extinction. In What Is Ancient History?, Walter Scheidel presents a compelling case for a new kind of ancient history鈥攁 global history that captures antiquity鈥檚 pivotal role as a decisive phase in human development, one that provided the shared foundation of our world and continues to shape our lives today.

For Scheidel, ancient history is when the earliest versions of today鈥檚 ways of life were created and spread鈥攆rom farming, mining, and engineering to housing and transportation, cities and government, writing and belief systems. Transforming the planet, this process unfolded all over the world, in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas, often at different times, sometimes haltingly but ultimately unstoppably. Yet it鈥檚 rarely studied or taught that way. Since the eighteenth century, Western intellectuals have dismembered the ancient world, driven not only by their quest for professional expertise but also by nationalism, colonialism, racism, and the idealization of Greece and Rome. Specialized scholarship has fractured into numerous academic niches, obscuring broader patterns and dynamics and keeping us from understanding just how much humanity has long had in common.

The time has come, Scheidel argues, to put the ancient world back together鈥攂y moving beyond the limitations of Greco-Roman 鈥渃lassics,鈥� by systematically comparing ancient societies, and by exploring early exchanges and connections between them. The time has come, in other words, for an ancient history for everyone.