What Is Ancient History?

Walter Scheidel

$49.99

Hardback

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English

Princeton University Press
22 April 2025

Historiography; Ancient history: to c 500 CE

From one of today's most innovative ancient historians, a provocative new vision of why ancient history matters

and why it needs to be told in a radically different, global way

It's easy to think that ancient history is, well, ancient history

obsolete, 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

a global history that captures antiquity's 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's ways of life were created and spread

from 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's 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 idealisation of Greece and Rome. Specialised 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

by moving beyond the limitations of Greco-Roman 'classics', 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.

By: Walter Scheidel
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm,
ISBN: 9780691236650
ISBN 10: 0691236658
Pages: 328
Publication Date: 22 April 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities and professor of classics and history at Stanford University. His books include Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity and The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (both Princeton).

Reviews for What Is Ancient History?

""Compelling. . . . Scheidel has given us much food for thought about our beautiful, magical Antiquity. I recommend. . . everyone who is concerned with Ancient History to purchase this book.""---Mark Beumer, Kleio-Historia

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What Is Ancient History?

Walter Scheidel

$49.99

Hardback

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