Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
What Is Ancient History?

What Is Ancient History?

Scheidel, Walter

Hardcover

General World HistoryHistoriography

ISBN10: 0691236658
ISBN13: 9780691236650
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: Apr 22 2025
Pages: 328
Weight: 1.10
Height: 1.40 Width: 5.70 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

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 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--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.

2 different editions

Also available

Also from

Scheidel, Walter

View All

Also in

Historiography

View All