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Owen Rees, "The Far Edges of the Known World: Life Beyond the Borders of Ancient Civilization" (Norton, 2025)
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Ryan Tripp
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- [00:32]
Owen Rees
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Owen Rees
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Ryan Tripp
Hello everyone. This is New Books and Ancient History. I'm your host, Ryan Tripp. Today we're here with Owen Reese. He's a lecturer at Birmingham Newman University. He recently published the Poor Edges of the Known World Life beyond the Borders of Ancient Civilization, published by Norton Press. Welcome to the podcast.
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Owen Rees
Thank you so much for having me. I'm glad to be here.
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Ryan Tripp
So let's get into it. First, tell us a little bit about yourself and your path to researching or writing the book.
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Owen Rees
So yeah, I'm ancient historian by background, by training, so sort of my specialism was always ancient Greece. That's where my sort of core research lies. But alongside that, to kind of keep myself entertained, I also run a history fact checking website dedicated to the ancient world, something called badancient.com so basically in my spare time I like to work with other historians to kind of fact check and debunk misconceptions about the ancient world down to pseudo history and fake things like aliens building pyramids and how do we know that's not true and things like that. So my sort of path to this book was almost an amalgamation of the two. So what I wanted to do, I knew I wanted to write a book about the ancient world And I knew I wanted to write a book that kind of was familiar, told familiar stories, but felt unfamiliar. So the kind of way I got through to it was using, like, the bad ancient approach. I was like, what. What are our kind of main misconceptions about the ancient world? Where do we keep finding the kind of questions we get coming into the website and try and navigate for people and look at the evidence. And I realized time and again the questions we were getting. So the kind of queries about the ancient world we were being asked, they weren't wrong. People weren't telling us misinformation. But what they were were very narrow in their understanding of the ancient world because of the perspective from the ancient world. So so much of our evidence from the ancient world comes from elite, usually men, living in cultural hubs at the center of society, of empires. And I wanted to kind of move beyond that. So I was really fascinated with this idea of, okay, so we have a good idea what might be going on in, like, ancient Rome. We have a good idea what's going on in ancient Athens, Alexandria, all these kind of centers. But that's actually a very small percentage of the population of the ancient world. So what's. Basically my question was, what's everyone else up to? And does it look the same? So this is kind of where the idea grew. And as I was kind of exploring, you know, different perspectives. So rather than a Greek perspective from Athens, I was interested in a Greek perspective of life living in what is now Ukraine. You know, what's it like being Greek there? Or what's it like being a Roman at Hadrian's Wall in the north of England? What's it like being a Greek trader in Pakistan? You know, these sort of questions. And that was kind of where the ideas were beginning to kind of percolate and formulate for the book. But as a historian, all historians are products of the society that's around them, and I think it's fair to acknowledge that. So from my perspective, I'm based in the United Kingdom, and something we've been grappling with for many a year is the big Brexit vote and us removing ourselves from the European Union and the idea of our borders and people crossing borders, this is the big obsession in the sort of modern British psyche right now. So whilst I was coming up with this idea of different perspectives of the ancient world, I then started to kind of go, well, I wonder what's going on at the borderlands of that ancient world? So what's happening at the edge of empire. Not in the sense of you are far away from Rome or. Or you're far away from Egypt, but instead you're actually quite close to another cultural sphere. So I was really interested in this kind of interplay between cultures and people crossing through. So this is where the kind of the themes of the book really started to come out alongside a core, not message of the book, but like a core drive of the book, which was to remove our focus from the center and to look out at the edges, to move away from the narratives we're used to telling. We know pretty well, like the emperors of Rome and people like that and what's going on and the machinations and the political interplays and actually look at the edge and look at everyone else away from that. Partly because I wanted to see if there were big differences and to sort of see how they played out as a result. The kind of example I usually give for this, in our sort of perspective of the ancient world, by focusing on Rome, by focusing on Alexandria, by focusing on Antioch and all these big places. The example I always give is it's a bit like going to, let's say, New York and claiming you've seen America, or coming to London and saying you've seen Britain, you haven't. You've seen something amazing, you've seen something vibrant, you've seen something unique, you've seen something dynamic, but you haven't seen everything. And actually, if you think about those examples of London, New York, you've seen a very narrow perspective on the broader topic of what it is to be in America, what it is to be in the uk, what it is to be in sort of France and never left Paris and things like that. So this was also kind of in the back of my mind, not to deny the importance of these places. Rome is still important. It's still fascinating, it's still exciting, it's still interesting. So is Athens. So, you know, it's not to take away from that, but it's to kind of go, what about everyone else? So that was kind of how the idea came. There is a slight problem, and that is our stories come from Rome and they come from Athens and they come from these places because that's where our most evidence is. So in many ways it's quite natural to be led to the evidence. So to tell stories at the periphery, to tell stories at the edge of the world, you have to acknowledge that the evidence is very different, and there aren't necessarily neat narratives that can be told. So the book was designed with A structure in mind, but not necessarily a continual narrative. We move chronologically through 13 sites, almost 13 case studies, to explore life at the edge of different cultural spheres, beginning in sort of the world of Pharaonic Egypt with the pyramids and all that, and what's going on at the edges of that world. And then we move into the Greek world up until, like, Alexander the Great, you know, what's going on at the edges of that world. And then we move into the Roman world and, you know, the building of the Roman Empire and what's it like to live at the edge of the Roman Empire before the last section, which basically goes, what's going on outside of the Mediterranean? You know, what's going on in Pakistan, what's going on in Ukraine, what's going on in China, and all these other different sites. So there were problems that came along, but for me, it was important to tell these different stories from a unique perspective. But as I said to you at the beginning, there is familiar. So the same issues that is being faced in Rome is being faced. Nothing is being faced in these other places. And actually, one of the things I really enjoyed about writing this book was finding out just how familiar or unfamiliar people's experiences were of these big events. And I suppose, finally, I kind of wanted to write a book that was about normal people because normal people live quite interesting and exciting lives. And when you move away from the obsession with empires and palaces and the elite doing everything in the core political centers of the ancient world, we get to hear so many. What I consider much more interesting stories, much more exciting stories, and dare I say, unusual stories as well. So that was kind of the. The basis of the book and the theoretical underpinning I approached it with.
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Ryan Tripp
All right, thanks. So on that note, you open the book with a. A massacre, and which is, I. I thought was, you know, I guess, enticing, kind of little jarring. You also discussed pastoralism, if you can touch on the massacre, along the shoreline of. Or near the shoreline, actually, of Lake Turkana in Kenya and a couple of the other sites. And the significance.
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Owen Rees
Yeah. So I wanted to start history at a point where ancient history doesn't normally start. So ancient history traditionally begins in Mesopotamia. So it's the, you know, the birthplace of civilization and agriculture and all that kind of stuff. So that's usually the story, the starting point of the story of human civilization and therefore ancient history. However, people who may have heard of Lake Turkana or the East African Rift Valley, Great Rift Valley that it kind of sits within, you may have heard that within the framework of the kind of cradle of the human story, so many of the different hominid animals that have existed before Homo sapiens, many of them are found in and around Lake Turkana in quite a notable number. So it is considered sort of one of the sort of birthplaces of humanity. So what I wanted to do was kind of ask this question of the narrative of the human story is it's sort of born in this kind of area, it then moves away, and then history happens elsewhere. And my question was, well, whilst history is happening elsewhere, what's happening at Lake Turkana? So that's why I wanted to start it there and kind of place these nomadic pastoralist groups that are normally ignored in ancient history and kind of center them at the beginning. And, I mean, you mentioned the massacre. So the reason why I focus on massacre to begin with was to kind of focus in on the na. On human nature. So, yes, there is a massacre, and it is not a pleasant massacre. So there is a site around Lake Turkana in which 27 skeletons have been found, many of them bound, so tied, you know, hands and legs and feet tied, and they have been killed in quite brutal ways. And this includes men, women and children. And we're not 100% sure why. There's many theories, but it seems that potentially an outside group has moved into the area and it's created conflict rather than something that we often see in situations like this, anthropologically, where you might have the killing of the men, but sometimes the children and women are kind of absorbed into the new group. The killing of the women and children is particularly notable for its brutality. And I mean, the other instance in this, and this is not a pleasant topic, is one of the skeletons found was found sat upright and bound in a ditch, and she is a pregnant woman. So actually, I mentioned the 27 bodies, but really there's 28 deaths here in this massacre. So it is not a pleasant element of the human story and kind of shows the brutality that can come when different social groups clash. And I wanted to kind of frame that because also on the flip side of this, at Lake Turkana, what we see is amazing community spirit built in some of the pastoral groups. So some of the other sites we see slightly later than the massacre dates to, we find something called pillar sites. So they sort of erect large bits of stone that come from a few kilometers away. So you think of the manpower, you think of the time and the effort to build these sites, and they are sacred sites, and they are burial sites and excavations on these sites showed that these pastoral groups, who are by their nature nomadic and semi nomadic, are almost putting their flag in the ground at one place, and then they keep returning to and they will bury their dead there. So they create this sort of communal site and in doing so build this idea of communal identity through commemorating the dead. Now, the site itself is a fascinating one, these pillar sites, because they are early examples of monumentalism. So humans building monumental sites, so the big stones going up again, like I said, the effort that goes into these. It's often been assumed that to achieve building sites like this, creating sites like this, it's often been assumed that you have to have a hierarchical culture that does it. So you have a leader basically telling everyone what to do. And then you have the infrastructure based on that idea of said leadership and hierarchy. But at some of the pillar sites, the archaeological digs are finding that there doesn't seem to be any really any real distinction of sort of wealth and prestige. So I'm not saying this is like an egalitarian society, but it's interesting that in death they are all perceived almost equally. So maybe that challenges our idea of what pastoralists were capable of doing. Pastoralists more than capable of building monuments, which challenges a normal narrative that you need agriculture and you need sedentary life to build monuments. These sites prove that's not true. And they might also potentially challenge the idea that you need hierarchy to do this. So again, the assumptions that we have about history, about human history, are challenged by a lake to Ghana in Kenya and these stories that come from it. For the book itself, what I wanted to do was kind of introduce the idea of the unusual. So pastoralists doing things that we don't usually expect pastoralists to do. And it kind of leads to moving further north from Kenya up into the ancient lands of what became Nubia. So we're thinking more so South Sudan in the modern day. And you get the fundamentally, the kingdom that would become Kush or Kerma as the site originally. And what we see there is the beginnings of a urbanized civilization, for want of a better word. But they are pastoralists. So we're watching pastoralists set up an urban site. And again, so we're sort of watching the unusual occur in front of our eyes. And so at places like Kerma, we've got, you know, the usual building sites. We start to see religious buildings, we start to see bakeries, we start to see the beginning of industry. But we also see they maintain their cultural identity, which they get from they. They receive from their Pastoralist roots. So we see there's still high importance placed on cattle and the animal livestock, that they still move around and still move from pasture to pasture. And we see it in their religion, we see it in their sense of hierarchy because they do start to form a hierarchy and in their items of prestige. So on the one hand we've got, as I said, the unusual. We've got pastoralists, we've got nomads settling down and building what might be perceived as almost like the beginnings of a state. But on the other hand, it doesn't mean they abandon everything that they've known before. And I just love that dichotomy. I love that almost that duality of identity of sedentary and semi nomadic really. And that's what Late to Carnau offers us. So the reason why it starts the book is it kind of makes us think, what do we actually mean when we're talking about ancient history? Who are we actually talking about? Who could we be talking about that perhaps we don't normally talk about? So pastoralist groups such as these don't leave writing. So all the evidence I use in my book comes from the archaeology. But even then there are these stories, there's this understanding that we can still draw from that evidence to better understand the way wider human story. And I suppose for the book itself, it made the most sense to me to begin where the human story is said to begin.
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Ryan Tripp
That's great. Okay. It was a very pretty compelling introduction.
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Owen Rees
Thank you, I appreciate that.
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Ryan Tripp
So in your next focus is on Egyptian men and women along the second cataract of the Nile in present day Sudan. This is where the Sinusrat pharaohs actually constructed, I guess scare quotes, frontier fortresses. I was kind of curious about their adoption of Nubian cuisine, trade. And they also intermarried. What were the, and I'm going to ask this a couple times, what was the extent of that? What were the limitations to it? And then ultimately what happens along these. What you describe as borderlands.
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Owen Rees
Yeah, the, the frontier in the southern Egypt. So moving down the Nile you get to the cataracts, which are these difficult to navigate parts of the River Nile. And they build a series of forts, enormous forts. Like the infrastructure that goes into these forts is really impressive. I go into it in my book because it's just quite phenomenal just how much investment goes in. And we're talking. This is the early second millennium B.C. so we're thousands of years away from the Roman Empire's system of defensive structures on their borderlands, which is the only thing in terms of infrastructure that passes this in European history at least. So one of the things to understand is there are two things going on. Bit of a contradiction there. There are two things going on in the borderlands there. One of them is this is a political statement made by the pharaohs. This is our land and we're growing it, we're spreading it. Now, in the ideology of Egyptian pharaohs, one of their jobs is to spread order and overcome chaos. This is one of the means of doing it. The idea being that those south of this frontier, who they called the Kush or the Kushites, they actually refer to with an epithet. They are the wretched Kush. That's the translation of the term they always use, the wretched Kush. So it's this idea of the barbarian, the, the chaotic, nasty group of people to the south. They're not the only ones the Egyptians don't like, by the way. They're also not very fond of the Libyans to the west and they're not very fond of the, what they call the Asiatics. So what we would think of as the sort of West Asia, but with Nubia, the Nubians to the south become something of a bogeyman. And this frontier is like where we have protected the order to the north with these frontiers, with these forts, and we will stop chaos coming in. And in fact, we will use it as a jumping point to push forwards our own sense of order. That's one story from the frontiers. Another story from the frontier is that this is a moment of cultural exchange, which is a weird way of thinking about military force, but they are. And the reason we know they are is because of a really obscure object. Not obscure, mundane. It's really boring. And because it's boring, it's, as a historian, fascinating. So at these forts in which we have the exertion of Egyptian imperial power, ideology and their disdain for Nubians, I mean, some of these forts are literally named in Egyptian destroyers of the Kush, destroyers of the Nubians. Like that's the kind of names they're given. Okay? But in the forts we've archaeologists found a large collection of Nubian pots. And not just any kind of pots, but actually culinary pots for cooking and the like. Now this kind of raises a question. Because they're not expensive, they're not fancy looking, they're not made of gold, they're not silver or anything like that. They're clearly not prestigious items, but they are there. And you gotta ask the question, why are Nubian cooking pots in an Egyptian fort, when there are also Egyptian cooking pots in an Egyptian fort. So we know they can get Egyptian crockery. We know they can do that. We know that's not a problem. These pots are normal, everyday items, and they're found in the homes of these soldiers, these garrison soldiers. So something scholars have kind of projected and speculated on this is, well, the reason why there are Nubian cooking pots is because there are Nubians cooking, which makes perfect sense. You then ask the question, who are these Nubians who are cooking? Or why are there Nubians in a fort of Egyptians? Why are they in an Egyptian fort? In this time period, within both cultures, if there's cooking going on, there are women cooking. So it stands to reason that these are being used by Nubian women. And we know from sediments or like traces of food left in some of the pots that actually they have some of the culinary markers associated with Nubia. So they're Nubian women using Nubian pots, cooking Nubian food in an Egyptian garrison fort. It's been, I think, quite convincingly argued that these are women in the homes of these Egyptian men, most likely intermarriage, and that's what they're doing there. Marriage becomes the simplest explanation. And these forts go through a period of hundreds of years of fluctuation. So they're under Egyptian control. Egypt then starts to lose some of its own control of its land. It goes through quite a murky period in which it is sort of battle. The pharaohs are battling for their own control of the land against outside forces, one of those forces being the Nubians to the south. So there's a period where the forts get taken over by the Nubians, and the Nubians, the Kush keep using them in a similar manner. And then the new kingdom of Egypt, that kind of time period comes and the Egyptians push the Kush back south, and then they expand and they start to expand into the Kushite kingdom itself. During all of this, the forts still persevere, they still exist, and they're still doing fine. There's actually very little change in terms of the administration, in terms of what's going on day to day. That all pretty much stays the same. And those pots, those Nubian pots, actually grow in number. So whilst we might look at the political chaos of Thebes to the north and sort of the kind of central focus points of Egypt, or we might look to the political growth and expansion of Kush to the south, and they're, you know, almost retaliation against the Egyptians in the frontier. What we find is Actually stability in a weird sense. And one of the clearest examples of that are these Nubian pots where life just seems to kind of go on. And in a place like Egypt, at a frontier like Egypt, that kind of clashes. It jars with the ideology that our written sources talk about. I mean we even like as a final example of this, like we even have examples from some of these forts where men who are basically in charge of the fort had garrison leader of the fort and they were there because their father was there and their father's father had the same role. We have written accounts of them talking about their father serving the pharaoh and then them, they serve the kushite king, as if this is perfectly normal. So when we kind of move, when we strip away the ideology of what the sort of the palaces are telling us, the pharaohs are telling us, what we find in the actions of normal people is that desire for normality, that desire for their home to stay where they are, to stay where they know what's going on and to just adapt. And that's a key story throughout all these chapters in my book. It's human adaptation and human resilience and places like the frontier in Egypt. Kind of a perfect example of that in action.
- [27:24]
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Owen Rees
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Owen Rees
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Owen Rees
Whatever.
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- [28:54]
Ryan Tripp
So let's move to the ancient city of Megiddo. It was, you argue, it was a cultural and commercial crossroads of the Bronze Age. If you can, please give us a very, very brief rundown of Megiddo, but in the context of one or two examples of how that was and how that came to be.
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Owen Rees
So Megiddo is a site in ancient Canaan. So the period in which Megiddo is founded and grows and sort of expands and becomes this cultural and trade crossroads in Canaan is pre Israelite. So, I mean, in the history of Megiddo, the Israelites turn up. So that's how far back we're going. And Megiddo is the. For those who know your scripture, Megiddo is supposed to be the site of Armageddon. So Armageddon coming from via Greek to give us the hill of Megiddo. So Megiddo has this history of conflict. Many battles have been fought in this area and around this area because it's such an important trade route from Egypt, coming north along the coast of what is now Palestine and Israel and heading up into sort of Syria and up into Turkey. It is a vital trade route and a route of passage, of movement, movement of people, and it sort of sits within that. So Megida has always been this interesting and important site, but it's never. It was never powerful. So politically, militarily, it was never a strong dominant culture. In fact, it actually sat at the sort of edges of various other strong cultures. To the south. And probably most prominently in the history of Megiddo, you have Egypt. So Egypt tried to expand its empires under the pharaohs, in particular the New Kingdom, up into the sort of what is now West Asia, not always successfully. And even when they retracted, they were still an important, powerful player. So militarily, financially, they were superior and dominant to everyone else in that kind of region. To the east, you have the growing sort of cultures of Babylon, and to the northwest you've got the growing cultures of the Aegean. So what would sort of be the Mycenaean period of sort of Greek history, you know, the Minoans and before that, and people like that. So Megiddha kind of sits in this sort of matrix, this network of cultures, and is trying to survive and just trying to keep going so it has its own sort of petty king and is carrying on, carrying on. That's ultimately the story of it. So as I go through the history of Megiddo and we look at the growth of Canaanite religious sites in the city, in the town, and how the town grows from being what seems to be a pilgrimage site to being an actual urban center. We start to see them interact with the Egyptians, trying to get help dealing with petty squabbles with other sort of Canaanite kings and kingdoms in the area. We've got a series of letters, the Amarna letters, which were found in Egypt, which were basically kings, such as those of Megiddo, asking the pharaohs for help or support or to leave them alone or to send military aid or, you know, that sort of thing. So it really builds this picture of what Megiddo is in the wider scheme of things. But as you mentioned, what I became fascinated with was how this little site is historically pivotal to our understanding of global trade in the ancient world. So Megiddo has, it has trade items that clearly show influence from Egypt. So we've got like statuettes of gods and things like that, normal Egyptian items. So, you know, that we'd expect to find. We also have evidence of ivory carvings that show cultural and artistic influence from the Aegean. So we get sort of the Greek esque influence coming in as well. But the ones I found most interesting was there's a burial site south of Megiddo where they've studied the dental plaque. So the dirt that is calcified in the, between the teeth of the dead. And they've studied that and found in one body, in what is late second millennium, mid second millennium bc they found evidence of the protein markers from a banana. That's a bit odd because the banana hadn't been really domesticated outside of Southeast Asia at this point. All our evidence suggests the banana hasn't yet made it to India, let alone to sort of Africa and the West Asia. So what's going on there? That picture is then added to by other similar evidence from the burials where they found evidence of soya beans, which at this point are mainly domesticated in the Yellow River Valleys of China through oil. It's most likely how that's been arriving and things like vanilla. So we've got. Which. Only this point is only really found in India. So what we're finding at a, at a. Just a burial in an inconsequential region on the peripheral of Egypt or the peripheral of Babylon, and the growth of what's going to become the Aegean culture of ancient Greece, we find evidence of human trade, human movement, and globalization to the east. That in itself is fascinating. Like, it's just phenomenal. The idea that the banana might not have even left Indonesia by this point, and yet it is finding its way to West Asia, to the Levant, is just remarkable, is not the image we have of the ancient world, but it shows just how much movement there is in the ancient world. This picture is then expanded and kind of exploded in my mind by the fact that we also have evidence in this region at this time period of bronze. So we're in the Bronze Age, and bronze requires two elements. And the least prominent element within the Mediterranean basin, the element that's the most hardest to get hold of, is tin. So when researchers study the bronze found in what is now modern Israel, they analyze the tin content within it as well, trying to find out where has that tin come from. And all the research suggests that it has come from northwest Europe, most likely Cornwall, which is in the south of England. In my mind, that immediately paints a picture of a trade network. So you've got to visualize we are nearly a thousand years away from Rome really becoming the republic we know it as. We're a thousand years away from that. And we have evidence that there is a trade network that links the south of England in Cornwall all the way potentially to Indonesia and China via the Levant region in western Asia. And that is just a span that epitomizes global history. It epitomizes the globalization of what we're talking about. It doesn't mean these people know about each other, but it shows how interconnected humans can be even when they don't interact politically. And I suppose that was something that Megiddo. Yes, the excitement of the Armageddon story is there, and yes, the story of the political machinations with Egypt is there. And that's great. But what I really loved about that chapter and what I really loved about doing that research was that trade network and really trying to get to grips with just what we mean when we talk about the ancient world and ancient history and just how much of the world that can and should include.
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Ryan Tripp
All right, that's great. So let's move on to. So along the Black Sea, there's a Greek town, Olbia. And, you know, it's initially, at least near the River Bug in the present day Ukraine. So this is. It's pretty complicated chapter. You have a lot going on with cultural sharing. You have philosophers, ideas, coinage, cults, attire, and then Grecos, Scythians, if you can address the Scythians. And I was really interested in the intersections as well as the divisions in the Greek town and of course maybe describe how why the Greeks are there along the Black Sea, that would be great. But we'll reserve some of the content obviously for your book. But you can pick and choose. Philosophers, coinage, cult attire. I do want to get though to the. The intersections here too.
- [38:03]
Owen Rees
Yeah. So I suppose there's a couple of things we need to sort of get the background of to understand why Olbia is so unique. First things first. The Greeks have a concept of the barbarian. So barbarian to a Greek is a foreign speaker. That's all. That's all it really means. You're a foreigner, you're a foreign speaker, you don't speak Greek. And to them it didn't always mean that you were like savage or, you know, all the kind of negative connotations that comes later with the term barbarian. It just meant you were foreign. And if we were to look at the quintessential foreigner to the Greeks, so who is the most unlike us? So the Persians are a bit different, but they live in cities and they have armies and they have kings and we have some kings and, you know, they write and they enjoy art and that's quite similar to us. Egypt, they're a bit strange and they have these weird pyramids and things like that. But you know, again, towns, gods, so pretty normal, it's pretty similar. Even though they're foreign, even though they're not Greek, they are at least similar. Scythians, on the other hand, to the north, these are the quintessential barbarian. So they speak a foreign language, but they also don't live in towns, they're nomadic, they don't have armies which use heavy infantry. They have horse archers. That's weird. They don't believe in the bravery of standing in the front line and fighting for your fatherland. For want of a better term, they believe in hit and run. So it's the antithesis of Greek concepts of masculinity and of bravery. They also have outrageously, they have women with autonomy, which is the antithesis of Greek culture. So everywhere you look at Scythian culture, it is not Greek and it's almost the exact opposite of Greek. So to our Greek writers in the center of the world, so Athens, where you think of like philosophers, like Plato, like Aristotle and people like this, Thucydides, the historian, their idea of the Scythian, that's it. And this is the opposite of us and something to be slightly wary of in many ways. So when we have a Greek city that lives in. Settled in Crimea, so in what is now southern Ukraine, which is the. Not the heartland, but it is a part, a quintessential part of Scythian cultural landscape, we have Greeks living with Scythians. And for me, that's. We just have to explore that. Like, what does a Greek maker of his neighbor. So we know what Athenians would make of it. But what does that Greek living in the Ukraine, what did in Ukraine, what did they make of it? And what's their experience of this? So when you start to look at the stories that come out from Olbia and from the Black Sea region, the Greeks are there for trade. I mean, that's fundamentally what they're there for. Albia started as a market town. So they're there to kind of capitalize on the woodland to the north, on the. The skin trade, the trappings and, you know, the hunting trade that can exploit around there various minerals and also enslaved people. So big trade markets and all the things that the Athenians, the Miletians, all these different Greek city states want and can make a lot of money from. So that's why Albion is there. But to do that, you need the support of local people. They need to want to trade with you. So one, they've got to trust you. Two, they've got to work, want to be involved in this and the way that they are, want to be involved with it. They have to see value in it. So how do you create value? How do you create an equal value of trade with a culture where in the Greek society they have coinage, they're starting to use coinage and money as we know it, and the Scythians do not. So one of the things I love, and you sort of alluded to it, is in Olbia, we see the invention of coins that the Scythians might like. So we don't see coins as an extension of Greek identity. We see coins used and shaped so that it had meaning to Scythian groups. So we've got tokens that are shaped like dolphins. The Black Sea has dolphins. And it's related to that. We also get arrowheads. But so many arrowheads that are blunt, they're clearly not arrowheads. They're shaped coins to look like arrowheads. What kind of arrowheads are they shaped to look like? They're shaped to look like Scythian arrowheads. So again, why are they doing this is to sort of tap into the psyche of the people around them. So that they see some form of value, some sort of recognition of value with the coins so that the Greeks can create this trading system. As this evolves over time, places like Olbia start to strike their own coins. And on those coins we still see the imagery that we associate with Scythian culture. So we see a particular type of ax that is associated with the Scythians, we see a particular type of bow. So again, they still obviously have a desire to be. I don't know, it's almost offer a recognition of the culture around them in some ways, but so they can make money. Oh, let's not pretend it's for anything else. This is about making money. So we see that. But as a result, we also start to get stories come from this region of. Well, not all the Scythians are that bad. So one example is a philosopher, Ancharsis, who is. He's given a tale in which he travels the Greek world and meets with other great wise Greeks. I go into it in the book because it's really interesting who he meets and how that kind of interacts with what we know of Greek history. But, you know, this idea of the noble savage, this idea of actually we can get wisdom from these people. We start to see quite early in our written evidence about places like Albia. So we have that and we have this kind of cultural adaptation. But the other reason why I really like Albia as a site and kind of gets into this intermingling of cultures and intermingling of ideas between Greek and Scythian is in Olbia we have clear evidence, both written and on inscriptions, right? We have clear evidence that this happened, which is that the Albion people decided to offer citizenship. So this is like a. A membership to something that only Greek people have, but not only any Greek, it's a Greek from that place. So if you're a Greek in Athens and you're not from Athens, you don't get to be a citizen. If you're a Greek in Sparta, but you're not from Sparta, you don't get to be a citizen. Whereas in Olbia, what we find at a moment of crisis, they offer citizenship to a group they call the mixelenes. So the mixed Greek, the half Greek. And what they're talking about are people who have intermarried. So people who have, you know, Albion person who has met a Scythian woman and they've married and they've had children and they've got this lineage and, you know, they're allowed to live and they have like Settlements near the city of Olbia, they are offered citizenship. The reason why I love this is because it counters a narrative from Athens specifically. So if you look at Athenian evidence, if you look at a philosopher called Plato, he at one point talks about mixing Greek lineage with foreign lineage. And he says it very negatively. So it's the idea. He doesn't call them half Greeks, he calls them half foreign. So it's the mixer. Barbaroi is the term he uses. So, you know, what we see from the edge of the world is intermarriage is fine. We could even give you citizenship. You're half Greek, you're basically one of us, not perfect. I'm not saying this is an ideal egalitarian. They're a beautiful society we should be imitating, but at least acknowledge that you are more us than you're not. Whereas in Athens, Plato's argument is like, no, you don't count. You are not the same as a Greek. And that contrast is kind of the epitome of the book. Look at what the center says and look what life actually looks like for normal people. It doesn't look the same. So that kind of intermarriage around Olbia is a classic example of it. Olbia as a town goes through quite a tumultuous journey. It is founded by the Greeks. It then has to deal with the expansion of the Persians in the area and the Persian wars, the Athenian domination of the Black Sea. It's got to navigate that. It ends up becoming a democracy so that it can keep the Athenians onside. It then comes under some sort of chaotic dealings with the kingdom that Alexander the Great is starting to spread, and it has to deal with expansions. Then all the time drawing from the Scythians, the local people, to offer support, offer safety, to offer help, and to work together. And that's the kind of story of Olbia through until around the time of Julius Caesar, really. So sort of the height of the Roman Republic, where it finally gets sacked by a group that come from Dacia, sort of Romania kind of region. They sack it. But interestingly, after it's sacked and it goes, it's unused for a while, the Scythians go to the Greeks, a particular Greek group, and ask them to resettle it. So the Scythians actually request the Greeks come back and rebuild this market town. And what I love about that is that the fate of Olbia is not in the hands of the Greek people. It's actually in the decision making of the Scythian people. And the Local people in the area, they wanted it, so they invited them back. And that just shows the kind of. Whilst there is cultural frictions, whilst there are differences, of course they are, they're evident. But there is also this mutual respect and almost symbiotic relationship that they've come to appreciate and respect and want back. And that's the kind of the key takeaway I get from Olbia as a case study.
- [48:36]
Ryan Tripp
So that was great stuff. Can you elucidate? I know at the Greek kind of garrison commercial settlement of Nakash, there's Doric columns that emerge from there, which I thought was really fascinating. There's also courtesans and it becomes kind of a Greek intellectual site to sojourn to. Can you elucidate the how and why for all those things as well as, you know, the ultimate fate of this town along the Nile?
- [49:09]
Owen Rees
Yeah. So Naucratus is a Greek outpost in Egypt where the Egyptians didn't allow the Greeks to just build towns and live everywhere. Like, you know, they're not allowing the Greeks to just kind of settle in Egypt, but they did allow this one town slightly down the Nile specifically for trade. So the site of Naucratus becomes an amazing place of cultural interchange between the Egyptians and the Greeks. So the Greeks had a long standing respect for the Egyptians because they saw the Egyptians as an ancient culture that they were, you know, and the Greeks understood that they actually see Egypt as the source of a lot of cultural things or cultural inheritances that the Greeks adopt, like religious practices and such like. So now Gratis kind of offers that. So in terms of the columns and the like, this has been speculated for a while because the Greeks, as they start to interact with Egypt more, seem to adopt the Egyptian style of monumental building. So we see a change in the sculpture, we'd see a change in the large buildings and how and the sort of the big blocks that they're using rather than small bricks and things like this. And one of the things is we see the emergence of pillars, which we now think of as quintessentially Greek. But the evidence has been argued to suggest that they seem to have adopted it from the Egyptians, who of course also used pillars in their monumental buildings. So we've got this idea of what we think of as characteristically Greek actually coming through Egyptian cultural exchange. But yeah, the site of Naucritis is an amazing place. It's full of all these fascinating stories where, you know, it's most famously associated with sex workers. There is one example, her name is Rhodopis, who comes from Greece. She's actually an enslaved sex worker. She is owned by the same person who owns Aesop, the great fable storyteller. And her story is just phenomenal and to the point of mythical. You know, it's said that she buys, she gets her freedom bought from her, bought for her by the brother of Sappho, the poetess, no less. And he. She ends up staying as a sex worker and making a fortune. It's even speculated that she was one of the people who paid for the building of one of the great pyramids in Egypt. Not true at all. But it kind of gives you an idea of the kind of wealth she was associated with. So now Qutis has this reputation for sex work, mercantile, trade, but also education, intellectual product, basically. So it becomes a place where you go or you're said to have gone if you are a Greek intellectual. So this is true of Egypt generally. So Egypt is a place where people like Pythagoras are said to go to Egypt. Socrates, Plato, Solon, they all at some point go to Egypt. Whether or not that happened in reality is a completely different question. But in terms of storytelling, if you're a wise man in Egypt, in Greece, you will have gone to Egypt. It's the only explanation to give you your wisdom. And where would a Greek go in Egypt? They go to the Greek city in Egypt, they go to Naukratus. So Naukratis kind of has this reputation of intellectualism. And even when Naukratus loses its primacy in Egypt, so once Alexander the Great takes over Egypt and the Ptolemies inherit it from him, they start to build Alexandria, which becomes the great capital of Egypt. So Naucratus loses this sort of status as the only and the most important Greek settlement in Egypt, but it maintains the reputation of intellectualism. So we get some of our most prolific writers coming from nowquitous specifically. So even when it loses this position of primacy, it is still doing what it's always done and it's still holding, holding its own against the growth of this new center in Alexandria. So that's the kind of overview story of Nukrates. But in terms of the themes of the book, I suppose the biggest thing is it's interesting to see the Greeks in a situation where they're not the dominant culture and how do they deal with that? And that's a lot of what that kind of chapter explores through the storytelling, but also through the archaeology of the site and the. The evidence of the trade networks at the Site.
- [53:58]
Ryan Tripp
All right, so let's move. We want to move to the Roman Empire. You can move to Rome here. All right, so, of course, a starting point, I think, would be Hadrian's Wall. Why did he build his wall in Britannia at the world at the world's edge? It's a pretty straightforward question. And I know you mentioned the Vindolanda tablets in. You know, I think it's not so much in passing, but you briefly mentioned them in that chapter.
- [54:27]
Owen Rees
What's.
- [54:28]
Ryan Tripp
So this approaches, this question, what did the tablets. And then you have a substantial lot more examples and evidence reveal about life along. Along the wall, and you go into how soldiers alleviated the boredom, et cetera. So you can maybe focus, focus on that in your response. And then if you can just briefly address that dead child at the end of this. At the end of the. At the end of the chapter.
- [54:56]
Owen Rees
So Hadrian builds his wall. It's a statement of intent. That's what it is. It's a statement of, well, among other things, I can build this massive wall because it crosses, it literally bisects Britain and very much shuts out everything to the north. It's interesting because the Romans have a strange relationship with Britain, as did the Greeks, to the point where they weren't always convinced it was real because of how harsh it was described as and how barbaric the people were described as. And so it's an interesting point where this wall is almost a visual representation of where civilization ends, according to the Romans. However, the Romans actually did go past the wall. You know, there is evidence of Roman settlements north of the wall. There are forts and things like that. And at one point, they even attempted to build a wall further north, north. But they ended retreating back to Hadrian Tour as like their. Their safety zone. So in many ways, history might have actually agreed with them. It's almost the limit. This is how far Rome can push itself and to go any further north, it starts to waver. So it's a fascinating insight into sort of Roman psyche as a result, but life at the wall. So we've got this amazing collection of evidence at Hadrian's Wall because of the environment in which the archaeology has been found, the wet, boggy mud and things like that. These are anaerobic environments, so natural materials, organic materials survive. So we have these tablets from which people have written letters to each other and they survive. So we can read the letters from people in Roman forts, either being sent to them or they're sending to someone else. So what it gives us is a Real insight into their everyday lives. And among other things, one thing that really comes across in these letters is it's really, really boring and really, really normal. And it's a beautiful thing. So we get examples of, like, someone literally writes a letter asking to be sent more socks because they're running low. We get letters, you know, we've got, like, receipts and orders for, you know, certain barrels of beer and olive oil and wine and all this kind of stuff, just because they need to feed the troops and keep things going. But we also have evidence of clothing and drawstring bags made of leather and all this kind of stuff, like, just normal things that were in the hands of everyday Roman soldiers or their families or the people in and around the camps or the forts. But it is not quite as exciting as perhaps you'd assume the frontier would be. There's not a lot of talk of raiding. There's not a lot of talk of the enemy. And again, I just. I found that interesting. So my question was, you're spending a lot of time not doing anything. How are you alleviating the boredom? So, you know, we look at the board games, we look at the dice games, we look at the loaded dice and people cheating and gambling and all this kind of stuff, and it just builds a picture, not of a Roman fighting machine, but of a human group who happen to have a military job and a reason for being there. And it is amazing. But we also have the family members that are with them. So one of my favorite letters from Vindolander, which is one of the big forts just south of the wall, is of a Roman woman who's a wife of, like, a commander at the fort, and she's trying to organize a birthday party. That's all she wants to do. She wants to organize a birthday party. And it's just an invite to a friend. And it's just lovely. It's just a lovely thing to see. And it's just that normality, and it just kind of reminds you of everyone else involved in these stories. So, yes, we could focus on the. There's, like, a big Caledonian raid at one point where Roman forces defeated. We could focus on that. It's interesting. It appears in the chapter. We go through it, but for me, it's those other stories around Hadrian's World, those other stories of everyone else that's there. And what does life look like? Because the Hadrian's War, this isn't Romans. This is people within the Roman Empire who have been sent there. So we see Syrian people, we see North African people in the north of England living their lives, but they're there for the purpose of exerting Roman imperialism. Like that's the purpose. So it's that lovely sort of dichotomy again of everyday with imperial intent. And that's what we get from Hadrian's Wall, even though it's such a famous site. Actually, a lot of the evidence isn't widely sort of talked about in great detail in, in books such as this. So that's why I wanted to put it in and that's why I think it's important for the kind of themes of the book.
- [59:44]
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- [60:59]
Ryan Tripp
All right, so you go through next a, a town, Volubilis, and it's kind of shipped, it's Punic and then it becomes Roman, but it ultimately ends up kind of a blending of Punic, Mari and kind of Greco Roman cultures. How did that come to be? And what was the significance and insignificance of the Roman withdrawal?
- [61:25]
Owen Rees
So Volubilis is a site in ancient Mauritania, which is sort of modern Morocco, and it begins life as probably a Berber or what the sources call Maori settlement. And then Carthage, who's the big dominant power in North Africa, expands west and takes over this area and basically builds the city or the town that I'm describing in the chapter. It goes through a history that's hard to trace because archaeologists, when they found it, were only really interested in the Roman bit and they kind of ignored the other bits. So there is more work being done on it and we're getting more and more excavation evidence from the excavations coming through. That's talking about the earlier layers, but ultimately earlier archaeologists were just interested in anything that had Latin in it, anything that had Greek on it and anything that had like a Roman emperor around it. That was the kind of focal point. So the early history we don't know much of, but we do know it perseveres through the Carthaginian period. And then Carthage gets defeated by Rome. It is still going when Rome takes over Egypt. We know this because a new ruler of Mauritania is put in power by the Romans around this time. A guy, Jubba Juba II and his wife, who is Cleopatra Selina, who is the daughter of the famous Cleopatra vii. So that is probably where we see the real cultural blending that occurs of Punic, so the origin of the site, Berber or Maori again, or the sort of the local culture, but also Egyptian and also the beginning of Roman as well. And of course, Cleopatra Selina is also educated in Greek, as is Juba. So we see this real cultural blending in the small site in Mauritania. So that's sort of what's going on. But what's interesting is Rome sort of the Roman domination of the. Of the site, of the area becomes clear. But actually not a lot really changes at Volubilis. And this is most clear when Rome leaves. So in the third century, there's a whole crisis with the imperial palace in Rome. There's loads of different emperors and basically no one's in power for more than like short periods of time. And we finally get to a point where Diocletian, the emperor, settles that down and to maintain order, he starts to shrink the empire purposefully to make it more manageable and more controllable. And one of the places he leaves is Volubilis. He shrinks sort of north of Volubis and leaves it now outside of the Roman Empire. So what was a city within the Roman Empire is now a city without outside the Roman Empire in a matter of days. So the Roman administration leaves. And what we see in Volubilis is very little change. And in fact, some of the things we consider very Roman, like mosaics in these big villas that are there, are actually being commissioned and bought and placed after the Romans leave. So again, something I like to talk about in the books and we have talked about in this interview is this idea of continuity, this idea of perseverance. And also the identity at the edges of the world might be shaped by these dominant powers, but actually because of the blending we're talking about, they become their own identity. So to maintain these, what we think of as Roman traditions makes sense in their own identity. And that's the site of Lubris really kind of epitomizes that. And the town ends up being abandoned after an earthquake, but is resettled around the 5th century. So we're now in sort of AD 5th century AD and it is resettled. And interestingly, by the 6th and 7th centuries we start to see more Latin inscriptions reappear. So, you know, that kind of looming shadow of Rome is still there at a time period where Rome itself has actually or the Western empires, you know, the classic. Isn't it sort of broken up and the so called fall of Rome has occurred and yet Volubilis is still kind of projecting some of these same ideas that it did under Roman rule. And I just find that fascinating.
- [65:49]
Ryan Tripp
As do I. So let's turn to the Greco Roman Chronis village along the oasis in Egypt. Again, there's numerous topics that can be reserved for the book that you hit. Selecting a couple the veterans, the veteran.
- [66:08]
Owen Rees
Experience.
- [66:10]
Ryan Tripp
Rather, and widows as well as of course the Greco Roman Egyptian intersections.
- [66:16]
Owen Rees
So Karanis is a village set up almost exclusively for veterans. So during the Ptolemaic period it's part of an expansion into the Faiyum oasis and veterans within the army are encouraged to basically settle there when the Romans come to Egypt. Karanis maintains this position. So I mentioned at Vindolanda and at Hadrian's Wall we have loads of these tablets because of the anaerobic conditions. So we've got loads of organic evidence. The only other place quite like that is Egypt where we get that same level of evidence. So at Karanis we have mountains of papyrus, so papyri in a plural, we've got mountains of it from basically personal family archives. So the kind of documents you keep in your house and they hid under like stairs and doorways and things like that. We found them and we've got them and we can read them. And what we find at Koranis is a lot of the people whose documentations we have and the letters they've kept and the contracts they've kept and the receipts they've kept, they are veteran families. So what I found really interesting about Koranis is there is Greek culture there. There is Roman culture, there's Egyptian culture there. But a thread through a lot of this is also people who have served in the Roman military and people who have left the Roman military. So what we also see is the network of soldiers going back to it, kind of links to the Hadrian's War thing. It's the human element of the Roman military machine. So rather than focusing on the killing and the battles and the fighting, what about the men? What did they do? And also, once you've got your diploma that says that you're now a citizen and you've done your service and you're discharged honorably, what then? Where do you go? You haven't lived with anyone for like 20, 25 years. Do you go home? What we see in Koranis is often the answer is no, you don't go home. You get offered a place with a friend who might send you to his brother. His brother will look after you and put you up and then you'll find somewhere to stay. And this is what we see at Karanis. So it's a lovely insight into those kind of social networks and the reality behind the kind of glory of Rome, if you think of it like that. So that's. Karanis is, for me, that is the. One of the most important aspects of the evidence. The other one is we've got things that challenge our conceptions of the ancient world. So at Karanus, Karanis is quite a poor village. So a lot of the insight we have are for poorer elements of Roman, of the Roman Empire. So we see things that perhaps we wouldn't necessarily expect to see, or we just don't have evidence for many places elsewhere that do it. But at Karanis, we have clear evidence, for instance, of women working and having jobs and running businesses. We have evidence of women as tutors, we have evidence of women living alone with other women. There are no men involved, even though legally they have to have men sort of sign documents as a guardian often and things like that. So we see that kind of things that challenge our preconceptions about the ancient world in terms of the story of the town and the mixing of the cultures. It is just. It gets to the point where it's so hard to disentangle one culture from another. So to talk about the Roman element or the Greek element or the Egyptian element becomes almost impossible to identify. And it becomes, like I said earlier, it becomes almost its own identity and its own culture. And so we see that in Karanis, with the use of Latin and Roman names, but Also Greek names and Greek letters. So the writing of letters to each other is usually in Greek. But on the same token, we see in the Fayoum oasis the importance of the cult of the crocodile, which is more Egyptian. So we see this amazing sort of blending of culture to the point where to kind of talk about the cultural identities as separate doesn't really make sense. And that's kind of clear throughout Karanis, even to the point where Christianity appears, because that's how long Karanis kind of survives for and it continues and perseveres for into the, the growth and the spread of Christianity as well. So it's quite different to the other sites I talk about in the book. And it just offers yet another different unique perspective of the ancient world that adds color and flavor to our understanding.
- [70:46]
Ryan Tripp
All right, so let's move out of Greece and the Roman Empire to India.
- [70:52]
Owen Rees
Yeah, yeah.
- [70:54]
Ryan Tripp
So there's a pillar, the Biocite in India constructed for worshiping Vishnu. If you can elucidate how that's connected to the history of taxa in present day Pakistan, it would benefit, I think, readers of your book.
- [71:16]
Owen Rees
So one thing I'm always interested in is evidence that doesn't make sense on the surface of it. And then when you dig in and you explore the story, you find out actually this makes perfect sense. And associated with this site. Absolutely makes sense. So the pillar that we're talking about is a pillar erected by a man called Heliodorus. So we're in sort of north central India, so we're not in the Greek sort of grasp of northwest India and Pakistan. We're sort of in the hub of the sort of Indian, ancient Indian culture and society. Heliodorus sets up this pillar dedicated to an incarnation of Vishnu. And Heliodorus himself is an ambassador from the, at that point, Greek controlled city of Takshila in Pakistan. And what's interesting about it is it is a dead, it is dedicated to Vishnu. So it is a religious dedication written in the local script. It's not written in Greek. So it's written for the local people to read and to understand the piety of Heliodorus to Vishnu. So for me originally ask contrary, what's a Greek man doing using Indian language to dedicate to a small, at this point, a small Indian religious cult? It's one of the earliest examples we have of this cult in its origins. But then I realized it really sums up where he's from, which is Taxila. So Taxila was a cultural, religious and intellectual hub at the, the boundaries of The Greek world, the Persian world, the Indian world, even to an extent, through trade and networks, the Chinese world. So it, its history is one, is of a center of learning. So even in the earliest mentions, attacks in the Indian evidence, we have it as a center of learning, both within the epics, the Sanskrit epics, but also within the history of Buddhism. So it becomes almost like it's often described as one of the first university towns. It became somewhere you went to study Buddhism. As it's a growing religion, it's an interesting place because it's never wholly Indian, Greek, Persian or whatever. It's very adaptable. And whilst its core identity is what we would probably associate with Indian culture, it is not afraid to adopt Persian, Greek or foreign ideas and to blend it with its own. And so what we get at Taxila is things you don't see anywhere else, not to begin with, because it's where innovation and excitement occurs away from the conservative eyes of the sort of political and cultural centers around the world. So the classic example is around the Gandhara, and the lands of which Taxila sits is where we see Greek sculpture and Greek art influence Buddhist art. And it's around the sort of 1st century AD in which we see the first sculptural depictions of Buddha. So up until that point, Buddha was not. You did not draw him with a human form that was considered almost sacrilegious. But the Greeks do predict that do depict the divine in physical form. And so we see that adoption. And so what we now think of is almost the ubiquitous statues of Buddha comes from that Greek tradition. But we also see it going the other way. So Buddhism leaves places like Taxila and it spreads west. So we see evidence of Buddhists in Alexandria, in Egypt. We also see, there's a suggestion that Buddhists may have even gone as part of a ambassadorial group to Athens to meet the Emperor Augustus in the first century. And one of the sites I love in the book is a place called Berenice, which is in Egypt. So it's on the west coast of the Red Sea in Egypt. And two years ago, or maybe three years ago now, archaeologists have found a statue of a Buddha. So a small statue of the Buddha that's dedicated by an Indian, probably a trader. And what I love about it is it really gets to the heart of what this book is about. The Baronyka Buddha was brought by an Indian, probably an Indian man, dedicated in the temple of Isis, which is an Egyptian goddess. So we got an Indian man with the Buddha in the temple of an Egyptian God. Which is in a Greek city of Berenice, which at this time period was under Roman rule. That's a lot of cultures at play with one item, with one artifact. So for me, that just kind of dispels the idea of cultural silos, of the idea that you've got Roman culture and you've got Greek culture and you've got Egyptian culture, and you talk about them separately. With this one Buddha statue, we have four or five cultures interplaying in one moment. And it's just a phenomenal story as a result. So Taxila is a place of excitement. It's a place of synergy. It's a place of innovation. It's a place of intellectual exploration. And it combines so many different stories that we're used to telling but not usually telling at the same time and being actually interrelated.
- [77:00]
Ryan Tripp
It was phenomenal, and it was excellent. So you end the book with Islam and Christianity and Ethiopia and a couple other slides. Can you elaborate on the connections and divisions?
- [77:15]
Owen Rees
Yeah. So the reason why I wanted to focus on Axum, so the kingdom of Axum, which is in Ethiopia and Eritrea, is because it epitomizes the sort of the themes that have constantly been building through this book, even to the point where we began the book in East Africa and moved slightly north into Ethiopia and Sudan, and I wanted to end the book in a similar region. So we end the book back in East Africa, but specifically in Ethiopia and Eritrea. What we get at Aksum is a story that begins and hits its zenith, so hits the kind of golden period of Aksumite history, when Europe is supposedly ending its classical period and entering what used to be called the Dark Ages. So it's just that kind of reminder of the global history we've been talking about. So Aksum begins life sort of just before the first century A.D. the first time we hear about it, it's part of a trade network, and it's a trade network around the Indian Ocean. So it's one that connects the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, down to the port town that Axum controls on the coast, even down as far as Tanzania, and then across to maybe even as far as Vietnam. Something else I explore in one of my other chapters. So Axum is part of this massive trade network and grows as a result. And it has this amazing storm story that is not often told. But yet some of our evidence suggests that Aksum was not only important in the ancient world, but one of our sources actually describes it as one of the four most powerful kingdoms in the ancient world, alongside Rome, China and Persia. So it was perceived to be more powerful than perhaps our history of it likes to tell. So the kind of. The story of Aksum is one of growth. By about the 4th century, it begins to adopt Christianity and it forms a Christian tradition that lives outside of the Catholic and Orthodox ones to the north. So we get the Ethiopic Church that exists and persists to this day, one of the oldest continuous church systems in history. And they have these amazing stories I explore in the book, like the story of the Queen of Sheba and whether or not the Ark of the Covenant is actually in Ethiopia, as the Ethiopian tradition suggests it is. But also they interact early on with the history of Islam. So again, like I said at a point in European history, Islam is medieval history. But the kingdom of Aksum has been going since the first century. This is ancient history. The ancient world is continuing. Just because Rome fell doesn't mean ancient history isn't still going on. They're not all done. So we get this interaction with Arabia, attempted imperial expansion into the region. And there's actually a little section at the end, towards the end of the. It's mentioned in the Quran where the Aksumites actually attempted to take the town of Mecca before the time of the Prophet Muhammad. They actually attempt to take it and there's a miracle where an elephant won't attack the city and ends up bowing instead and the birds attack the soldiers and there's all this stuff going on. And it's said to be the year that Muhammad the Prophet was born. So, you know, it's called the Year of the Elephant. It's like a whole thing. And it is, it's an amazing story, but really there's an underlying tradition within the Islamic tradition of Aksum in Ethiopia being a friend of Islam, not Muslims themselves. You know, like I said, they're a Christian kingdom, but a friend to Islam. So when Islam is growing in Arabia and they end up getting, being expelled from Mecca and sort of thrown out and they're exiles, many of them turn to Aksum for safety and sanctuary. They become refugees to Aksum and Aksum lets them in and basically gives them that safety for many, many years. This is around 615 AD and the last sort of exile to return to Mecca doesn't go back till 628 BC. So there's a tradition within Islam that the Prophet Muhammad basically declared that Ethiopia was untouchable, it was neutral. So whether it be jihad or Islamic expansion into Africa that we know occurs and we know the story of the Islamic expansion through North Africa. They were told from the beginning, you do not invade Ethiopia because of this almost debt that we owe them. And what's really fascinating is actually no Islamic state actually does invade Ethiopia or Axum or this kind of area, not until the Ottoman Empire. So, you know, even though it's a tradition that would even medieval Islamic scholars questioned, they didn't break it. They didn't break this thing that Muhammad was said to have told them. So Axum offers this story. It also offers this bridge between the ancient world and what we think of as the medieval world and in many ways disrupts our normal timeline. So whilst Rome is falling, whilst the classical period is supposedly falling apart, and the golden era, as there, as we are so often told, the golden era of European history is collapsing. The rest of the world is not. And at Axum, actually, whilst Rome is supposedly collapsing, Aksum is thriving. And the Aksumites are doing what they've always done and are having a great time and are growing and building and dominating the trade scene. So for me, the fall of Aksum, which comes about the 7th 8th century CE, so AD is really the end of the ancient world. That's when we see the last sort of tradition of the ancient world come to an end and something else replace it. So the end of the ancient world is not Rome, it's not Greece. For me, it is in Ethiopia. And that is a lovely moment. For me personally, I found that a lovely moment with which to end the book because it kind of encapsulates all the different themes of the book, from the historiographical to the evidence base and the different stories I wanted to tell and the different people's narratives I wanted to tell, to really show that ancient history, history is a global history and one that can combine us and unite us in many ways through our shared stories.
- [83:52]
Ryan Tripp
And I'm sure an increasing number of scholars and readers, including this one, will come to agree with you. All right, thank you for joining us today, Professor Rees. So, again, I really appreciate you being on the podcast. It's been very lively and informative. So the book is the Far Edges of the Known Life beyond the Borders of Ancient Civilization by Owen reiss, published by W.W. norton. On behalf of Professor Rees. This has been a production of the New Books Network, the Ancient History Channel. I'm your host, Ryan Tripp. Please tune in next time.