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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to Nomads Past and Present, a podcast about nomadism and nomadic peoples around the world and throughout history. I'm your host, Maggie Freeman, and my guest today is Owen Reese. Owen is an interdisciplinary researcher with a core specialism in ancient history. He is a lecturer in applied humanities at Birmingham Newman University and also the founder and lead editor of Badancient Docs, which brings together specialists to fact check common claims made about the ancient world and expose the prevalent pseudo history in the modern day. His book the Far Edges of the Known World explores life in the borderlands of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. And that's what we'll be talking about today. So thank you so much, Owen, for joining me.
- [00:55]
B
Yeah, thank you so much for having me on.
- [00:57]
A
So first, maybe just to situate listeners in the kind of context of what we'll be discussing today, could you talk a little bit about. About just the kind of general chronological and geographic context of your book, which I know is very wide, but could you talk a little bit about the periods that you write about in some of the geographic regions as well?
- [01:22]
B
Yeah, no worries at all. So the book covers, I mean, like you said, it's broad ranging. I think I worked out at one point. It covers 6,000 years of history across three continents, give or take. So what are we talking about? We're talking about the ancient world. I break the book up into almost like spheres of influence, cultural spheres of influence. So the first sphere I see very much as the pharaonic Egyptian world and the edges of that world. So, you know, the pyramids have generally been built by the time these chapters begin, but that is the world. So we're going back 4,000 plus years ago to a very different time indeed. And then we move chronologically through into the ancient Greek world, what we might consider the classical world. So 5th, 4th and 3rd century Mediterranean, we then move into the Roman world. So that takes us into the Common era. So we're out of before the Common Era, we're now into the Common Era as well, and the Roman republican and the Roman imperial period. And it ends. I mean technically, and I'll make a point of this in the book, the book ends in the European tradition is the Medieval World. But if you look at it from the tradition of the one I focus on is Ethiopia. As my last chapter is still the end of the ancient world. There's. So that kind of classical golden period is then coming to an end when Europe is very much the Roman Western Empire, supposedly Collapsed. And we think the golden age of the ancient world has ended, whereas in Ethiopia it hasn't. That kind of change of perspective was quite an important theme throughout the book. And actually, when we look outside of the Mediterranean, do our preconceptions and our assumptions still stand, such as our chronology, our timelines, our categorization of ancient, classical, medieval? Does it exist beyond it? So chronologically, that's the kind of period I'm covering pretty much all of the ancient world. Geographically, we sort of start in the edge of the Egyptian world. So we. One chapter is. Looks at the border with Nubia, which is now modern Sudan, but we also move into the lands of Palestine and Israel and beyond that through. I mean, by the. If you think of the Roman Empire, which is like the third section of the book, the Roman Empire, we're talking almost all of Europe, the Mediterranean, North Africa. But my point within the book is actually the ancient world is bigger than we often give it credit for. And so the Roman world is very aware of societies much further away than we think of. So they're well aware of India. They have good trade links with India. We have evidence that they're very aware of sort of the beginnings of Southeast Asia up to about Thailand, they seem to be aware of China. And one of the chapters I like to focus on is there's strong evidence, both written and archaeological, that they are aware of Vietnam. They just don't know they're aware of it. They're not sure what it is. So I also find that really interesting. One of the things I really like about it is our idea of a map is very set in stone, and you know it or you don't know it. And actually, when you start looking at the outer edges of the ancient world, they have vague understandings. And that includes, obviously, what we're going to talk about today is the cultures at the edge, but also just geographically, they have a vague understanding. There's something there, not 100% sure what it is. So, yeah, so that's the kind of chronological spread. That's the kind of the beginnings of the geographic spread. So the final section of my book tries to break away from the classical world as we think of it, and goes, what else is going on? So I look at ancient Ukraine, I look at Pakistan, I look at. I mentioned Vietnam and its relationship with China. And I also mentioned Ethiopia, which is the Aksumite kingdom, which takes us up to the rise of Islam, you know, six, seven centuries. That's kind of where that ends. You know, the idea that it's an ancient history book that has the rise of Islam in it is a fun tidbit of the book.
- [05:49]
A
Yeah, yeah. I think your book does a lot of, I think, interesting kind of playing around with, like you just said, our traditional periodizations. Right. Like you mentioned, you know, in Ethiopia, classical. The kind of classical age in Ethiopia. And simultaneous to our idea of the kind of European Dark Ages. And you just mentioned Islam, the golden age of Islam hasn't even happened yet. You know, our ideas of, you know, when are the rises and falls of these kind of great empires and civilizations. These vary really widely depending on what your perspective is. And same for geography as well. You know, the idea of what's a center and what's a periphery, those are very subjective, depending on where you are located and depending on who is making the map, who is telling the story.
- [06:53]
B
Yeah, precisely that. And what I've often found is historians hide behind evidence. So it's not. It's not me that's saying Rome is the center of the world. It's our Roman evidence. It's only talking about Rome. So that's not my fault. That's their fault. And what I wanted to do in this book was to completely invert that. And the only way to do that was to pretty much dismiss the narrative from the center for what it is, which is a single perspective. I often liken this to a modern holiday goer. So you want to go see the world, you want to go and see America. So you fly over and you go and stay a couple of days in New York. You've been to New York, you've seen something amazing, something vibrant, something culturally unique and quite fantastic. You come home and you say, I've seen America. Have you now? So it doesn't take away from what New York is or in the ancient world, it doesn't take away from what Rome is and the Roman history and the Roman culture. It's all fascinating, it's all interesting. I'm not taking away from that at all. But it's a perspective and it's a set of experiences. So what I wanted to do is to basically abandon that and go, well, how can I look at the ancient world from a completely different lens without relying on that? And so that's why I ended up going to the very edge, because it's the bit that actually the written sources know about, talk about. We have some narratives. I can work with this. But to understand what's really going on there, you have to then start relying on less literary evidence and we move away from Those narratives and start to look at the archaeology. We start to look at personal letters, in some cases personal correspondence, you know, day to day evidence, shall we say. But to do that, I'll be, I'll be honest with this wasn't easy. So to do that I had to abandon the idea that history has to be built on a singular narrative. And when you think of books, especially books like mine, books written for the public in mind, it's narratives, it's storytelling that kind of drives those books. But to do that you have to rely on a certain type of evidence and then you can only tell certain stories and you can only give certain perspectives. And I didn't want to do that. So that's why I sort of took this more case study approach. And you know, there's lots of small narratives there, lots of different bits and bobs, that kind of piece together, but there's no like singular narrative that goes through this book. That wasn't the point. It was to kind of disrupt that. And just really, I'll be honest with you, one of the designs of this book was there's loads of cool things I want everyone to know about it. So let's just cram in as much interesting stuff as I can that's thematically relevant to what I'm talking, what I'm talking about.
- [09:38]
A
That's a great segue to what was going to be my next question, which is how you chose these case studies. Because I mean, like you said, there's a lot of interesting stuff crammed into this book. But you're also, like you also said, covering a very long time range. You know, you said 6,000 years. There's a lot of interesting stuff that happened in 6,000 years. So I can imagine you must have had to whittle down quite a bit as well, because, you know, no publisher is going to let you publish a book of, you know, here's 6,000 years worth of all the really interesting stuff that was happening in Ethiopia and Pakistan and Ukraine trade over those 6,000 years. So how did you decide what to include?
- [10:25]
B
So there was a couple of ways, I would love to say I planned it out really thoroughly, but I did not. It all happened quite organically. So once you got the theme, which is life at the edges of these worlds, then think what kind of areas are well excavated, what kind of areas has interesting evidence I can play with. So this led me to Egypt in particular. So the kind of evidence we have surviving in Egypt, it's just phenomenal. Like the organic matter we have still survives which also means that the papyri, so the written element of day to day life survives. And so you can tell those individual, those family stories, those kind of narratives. And that also led me to places like Hadrian's Wall, which although so north of England, although it's a very different climate to Egypt, again it's anaerobic conditions, so we get a lot of surviving organic matter, organic material. So again we've got written wooden tablets. The ink is still visible on them. So that gives us an amazing insight. But other times I was thinking, where would I expect to see cultures interacting? Because this is one of the themes of the book. When you go to the edges of the world, you find the interactions of different peoples. So I was like, where would you expect to see it? So sometimes that led me to trade centers. So for instance, in Crimea, in the ancient Greek world, there is the site of Olbia, which is a well excavated site, but also gets mentioned in the histories of ancient Greece. So Herodotus, Thucydides, these kind of history writers. It gets mentioned there in passing, but we have good archaeological evidence for it. And it was a market town set up specifically to trade with a particular community group, the so called Scythians. So again I was looking to place like that. That's a logical place to look. Massalia, which is now modern Marseille, so the south of France, again, sort of a Greek outpost in what is now modern France. I would expect some interesting things to come up. Let's have a look. So that kind of. It was driven by inquisitiveness more than anything else. But then as the themes kind of grew and expanded, it was a concurrent different theme. So one is life at the edge, the other is who's missing. From our narratives, we talk about the classic ancient world, who's missing and who is. It's a bit weird that they're missing. And that led me to Aksum, which is this kingdom in Ethiopia, which the more you read about Aksum in its role as a Christian kingdom, its role in Islam and the history of Islam, its role in the global trade networks of the ancient world, it's embarrassing that it doesn't come up more in our histories. So again, that was a natural choice. But then that sounds like I've been thinking all this through. There's one site in Koloa which is in Vietnam, that literally came about because I heard a podcast and thought that sounded cool. So I started looking more into it and then that's how I got interested in the more I researched Koloa and ancient Vietnam. The more I realized it off, it offers like a mirror to a lot of the European focus sites I talk about in the book. Because Koloa lived on the edge of the Chinese, the Han Dynasties world, which is pretty much concurrent with the Roman imperial period. So sort of first century BCE to third, fourth. Well, it goes beyond that, but you know, that kind of early stage of common era. So. And I found that the interactions, their kind of relationship, their history had a lot in similarity with many of the places dealing with the Roman Empire or living on the edge of the Roman Empire, which I just found interesting. I found it interesting how they're characterized and how similar that sounded to the Greek and Roman characterization of so called barbarians. There's even what weird chronological coincidences. There's a first century ce, first century uprising against the Han court, the imperial court in Vietnam. And it is a, a big rebellion that lasts only about a year and a bit. And it is led by the Trung sisters, who are female led rebellion against a major imperial power that gets brutally put down, but inspires this national ideology of resistance that was then used for centuries and centuries and centuries. Roughly. I think there's like 20 years between that happening and the Boudicca rebellion in Britain, which again a female led rebellion against the imperial power in the area that inspired resistance and identity for hundreds and hundreds of years. Not linked in any way, just chronological or temporal coincidence. And I just find that interesting. So that's sort of how. Where around it, but I think I even mentioned it in the introduction to the book. I picked 13 sites, I could have picked 13 more. It could easily been replaced by more. So what makes these special? I just found them interesting.
- [15:40]
A
And so that I think brings me to my next question, which is about the sources that you use. You talked about this a bit already about your kind of methodology, you know, looking at archaeological records in addition to literary and documentary sources. But could you just say a little bit more about kind of your approach to sources and what sources that you used? We haven't even gotten to sort of talking about the, the nomads yet. But this is a question that comes up invariably.
- [16:17]
B
We can bring them up now, don't you worry.
- [16:19]
A
I mean it's never too early in my opinion to talk about nomads. But every, you know, this is always the, the chall that researchers on this podcast talk about is when you're dealing with people who are kind of outside of the outside of kind of canonical history writing, there is often a reason that those people or their History have been left out of the canonical history narratives up until now. And one of those reasons is because their histories are challenging to research with the kind of traditional tools of the historian. So how did you kind of circumvent that challenge?
- [17:03]
B
So I suppose what I tried to strike was a balance between using the literary evidence to get context, but always from understanding that, getting context from the centers of these cultures and their perspective of what's going on at the edge. And then it was a matter of trying to find corroborating evidence archaeologically and go from there. So when it came to nomadic groups, it wasn't as difficult as I had anticipated. But that was partly driven by well chosen case studies. But ultimately it is one of the reasons why the book cannot be narrative driven. So what I was more interested in was trying to present, especially when we talk about nomadic groups, I was more interested in dispelling misconceptions that come from the central narratives. So using, say, Herodotus, so called father of history, Greek writer of the 5th century, who describes a lot of cultures at the edges of the world, one of those cultures being the so called Scythians, this nomadic ancient Greek tribal collective, for want of a better term, which seems to span graphically from Ukraine all the way east to Siberia, possibly down into bits of Iran as well. And even in Herodotus's own writings about the Scythians, he is well aware that they're not all the same. He understands that culturally there are differences between these groups, that they seem to share something in common that makes them a single identity to him. Part of our problem is central cultures historically have liked to label things and then don't like nuance. Herodotus tries to offer nuance. So he's like, these are the Scythians, this is the land of Scythia. Except that these are the different groups in Scythia and they're very, very, very, very different, but they're all Scythian, so it's fine. So you can see him almost grappling with the fact that he's getting information that doesn't corroborate this idea of a single culture. And what I found interesting, and it's something that happens a lot with Herodotus work quite recently, is he's not as wrong as we thought he was. Sometimes he is very wrong, but he's not as wrong as we always thought he was. So for instance, he talks about Scythian culture. He talks about the use of cannabis as part of a cleansing ritual. We're Finding archaeological evidence of the use of cannabis seeds in what seems to be some form of ritualistic setting. So he might not be wrong. He talks about the drinking of mare's milk culturally. Doesn't really surprise us from the later cultures in the regions that he's talking about. But more recently, archaeology has started to find evidence to back this up. So there's lots of different examples of that. So whilst we're kind of exploring the Scythians, I was kind of using it as a way of exploring both them, their perspective, what their world looked like. Very difficult in terms of narratives. Not as hard when we talk about trade links, trade networks, and also digging into the stories the Greeks tell us about them or the Romans tell us about them, about these groups. So one of the things is tiny little things, you're like, well, what can we make of that? So I mentioned this site called Olbia, which was, like I said, a market town set up to help trade with the Scythians in the north. Really interesting town where they seem to have had to try and create money that the nomadic groups around them would respect and accept when they don't have a financial system. So we get evidence of them basically making money that's clearly aimed not at Greeks, but at these nomadic groups. So that's really interesting. So we've got, like, coins that are shaped like dolphins, we've got coins that are shaped like arrowheads, which was a symbol, an important symbol in Scythian culture. And then when they make what we might consider usual coins or sort of round imprinted coins, we see the imagery on it reflects Scythian cultures, not Greek cultures all the time. And that's interesting. Like, why have they chosen to do that? Is it to kind of keep this going? Like, this is you, this is us, we're together. So you basically have to convince another culture that money has value, which, as a thought exercise, is actually quite an interesting thing to think about. So Olbia has this life as a city for like 500 years, and then it finally gets sacked and then abandoned around the first century, around the time of Julius Caesar. Although I should point out Julius Caesar's nowhere near this. It's not his fault. This is another group entirely. What's interesting is Olbia is then refounded about a century later, and we are told in our Greek and Roman evidence that it was refounded because the Scythians asked for it to be. And now we've got an example. Well, Scythians at this point is a very vague concept. So these Nomadic groups or the semi nomadic groups living in the area, they asked for it to come back. They asked for that trade network to be re established. So in many ways what we have is an example. What can we make of this? Well, now we have suddenly that Scythian nomadic agency in a trade network that we often assume they're passive within or they're just, you know, sort of being made to trade things. Do they really understand the value of you? They're almost made to be overly simplistic in their cultural outlook, in their financial outlook, in their everything. And it's absolutely nonsense. And when we get examples like this, more could be made of that. And so that's the kind of perspective I take. Actually. The Scythian groups in the early Albian history are heavily involved, dynamically involved in what's going on at the site and are important players in it that the Greeks aren't using or manipulating or afraid of because they're barbaric, but are actually working with and rely on. And that's a very different perspective. It's by asking those new questions that we can actually offer a different perspective on life at the edge and a different perspective of these nomadic groups.
- [23:13]
A
Yeah, you have some really interesting examples of, I guess I would say assimilation, for lack of a better word, kind of cultural assimilation between like these nomadic or other kind of quote unquote peripheral peoples and societies with Greco Roman culture, but also vice versa. You know, you have some examples of, for example, like Scythian elites kind of assimilating aspects of, you know, kind of status markers, for example, from like the Greco Roman world, maybe starting to speak more Greek or Latin, but also vice versa. Like your example about the coinage, like coinage taking on these cultural symbols that are important to the Scythians, rather than trying to kind of force upon the Scythians or the people who these coins were made for. Yet, you know, rather than trying to force them to use coins in this very, that were in this very specific, like Mediterranean way, creating monetary devices that were adapted to their culture, to their lifestyle. So continuing the theme of continuing the nomad theme, I had a somewhat selfish question coming from my personal interest as an architectural historian. You know, you said that one of your interests was in kind of destabilizing or just kind of change or changing people's ideas, changing these very kind of commonly entrenched misconceptions about what nomadic lifestyles, for example, entail. And so you had a couple really interesting examples in the book about the construction of permanent architecture, the construction of Settlements, the construction of monumental architecture on the part of a couple of the nomadic groups that you discuss in the book. So I wanted to ask you to just say a little bit more about those.
- [25:31]
B
Yeah, so I mean, the book literally starts with it because I just find this really interesting. So sometimes it's about just pointing out assumptions that underpin our entire understanding of history and underpin our entire understanding of quote, unquote, civilization. And one of those is one of the key markers of civilization beyond writing, which is often considered the great marker of civilization. One of the key markers is monumentalism. So the building of large monuments of any description. So this could be large rocks being set up, or it could be as elaborate as the pyramids, coliseum, whatever it be. But ultimately, it's the investment of time, it's the investment of resources, it's the investment of manpower, woman, power to. To do this. Because you've got to think, if you're living day to day, hand to mouth, you haven't got time to do things like that.
- [26:20]
A
That.
- [26:21]
B
So it usually was seen as an indication of two things. One is that there is now time to do that. There is time to put effort into something like that. The second thing is it's always been assumed it required hierarchy. So you've got a firm hierarchy of a leader at the top who can then force people to do these things. That was always the idea. But more recent research has been starting to raise questions about this. The second side of this is nomads. Nomads move. That's what nomads do. Nomads are movers. So nomads don't stay still. So why would they build anything that makes no sense. So an underlying assumption is nomads don't build anything, which is not true. So the book starts at. It was a bit of fun for me. I wanted to start somewhere that human history begins, which is around Lake Turkana in Kenya. So when we think of the human history, the story of the human animals, we learn that sort of Kenya, the Rift Valley, that kind of area is very much. That's where humans begin. They then move out of that area. They go to Mesopotamia, and then civilization begins. They move to Egypt. And this is where history begins. And all this coming. And I just wanted to go, well, what about the people that stayed in Kenya? What are they up to? They're still modern humans. What are they up to? So we kind of follow them. So these are the pastoral groups, pastoralist society, nomadic, in a very particular function. And what we find there, the book goes into, in A fair amount of detail I'll whiz through. But ultimately, they set up sacred ritualistic sites where they bury the dead. And they have large stone formations that they move kilometers to get to that point. This is a monumental site. This is monumentalism in action. And it's a nomadic group who, chances are, aren't there all year round. So what's it there for? This is where our job is to kind of speculate. Is it very much like a flag in the ground? This is our land, which is very sedentary in the way of looking at things. Is it a matter of just cultural collectivity? So is it, you know, this is where we sort of share our identity and then maybe we disperse away and we come back to this point at certain times a year. Could be anything like that. So, you know, that's the kind of speculative side of trying to understand the evidence. But the important bit is there is monumentalism right there. And interestingly, research that has looked at the burials around these sites is struggling to find hierarchy. So at the moment, there's no evidence of people being buried according to status in any way. But there is clearly people who are, for want of a better term, from our perspective, there are people who are more well off than others. You look at some of these burials, that's clearly an elite burial. But then you look at other burials, that's not as elite. They haven't quite got the same sort of jewelry and the same sort of things buried with them. But in the site of the burial sites themselves, where these monuments are, they're buried side by side. There is no hierarchy to distinguish them. There's no sort of rich area. There's no sort of family plots or seemingly any family plots. Of course, this is speculative, and of course all the sites haven't yet been done dug up. However, the evidence of the moment is that there does not seem to be a hierarchy or any really established hierarchy. So, again, does this kind of challenge this narrative that you need hierarchy to build monuments, that you need hierarchy to create the hallmarks of civilization? So that's why I love that site. The other one that always struck me when I did this book, and I bring it up every time because it blows my mind, because I'm a Greek historian. That's my background, Ancient Greek. And in ancient Greece, the Scythians to the north, Ukraine I talked about, Ammonia, are a couple of things. One is definitely nomadic. They move. That's what Scythians do, they move. The second thing is that they are the quintessential barbarian. So when the Greeks talk about barbarian, Barbaros, the people who go ba, ba, ba. The Scythians kind of epitomize everything they sort of say about the barbarians. So they're the inversion of Greek norms. So they don't speak Greek, they don't stay still, they don't live in cities, they move. Even the way they fight, their fighting is on horseback. It's with archers, it's throwing spears and running away. Greek warfare is about standing in your line, heavy infantry. Running away is cowardice. Completely different relationship. And they're ruled over by kings. The Greek world at this point isn't generally ruled by kings. There are a couple of exceptions. And the other thing is women have like or some form of autonomy which to the Greek mind is completely unacceptable. I mean, this is why there's a tradition that the Greeks might have used the Scythians as inspiration for the Amazon myths. So the myths of the female warrior race who are said to live on horseback, semi nomadic, get rid of all men. They do the fighting and are said by some sources to live in the lands of Scythia. As an aside, really interesting because the archaeology evidence might suggest there could be some plausibility to it with the. The discovery of have female burials that have all the hallmarks of combat wounds and combat wounds being healed. Which is interesting. An aside but interesting. So reason why I mentioned the Scythians here is because Herodotus, father of history, mentions in his rather meandering discussions of the Scythians, he mentions a site called Galonis which is in the north somewhere. He has no idea where it's somewhere and it is a city of the Scythians made entirely of wood. This is what he talks about. So immediately for someone like me, I'm there going, well, hold on, I thought you said Scythians are nomadic. What's the Scythian doing with the city? So you sort of look at it really interesting is that Herodotus is like, it's not possible. I agree. It's almost like he's talking to me because it's not possible. I agree. So it must be that the Greeks helped them build it. That's the only explanation. So again he's trying to explain the unexplainable to him. What is interesting is archaeologists have found a massive, massive site in the north, in sort of north central Ukraine called Bilsk, which is this enormous wooden fortification. And it is for many it's often referred to as proof that Herodotus was telling the truth and that this is the city he was talking about. I think that's a stretch. But what is interesting is there seems to be, you know, Herodotus was aware of a tradition that Scythians might move, but they also build things. They build these big water wooden fortifications. So, Bill, I mean, to kind of put this into context. So Bilsk is really. It's three fortifications that are combined together. So there's two forts on a plateau and then a massive wall that kind of combines them and then creates another enclosure as a result. In terms of the wall perimeter for bilsk, it is 33 km long. So context. 33 km long. City of Rome, 3rd century CE. The Aurelian Walls are completed. The Aurelian walls of Rome are 19 kilometers long. So this is nearly double the length of the walls of Rome. It encloses just under 5,000 hectares, which is about. It's just a bit smaller than Manhattan Island. So there's a little bit of wiggle room if you were to put it into Manhattan. So this is a huge space, Absolutely huge space. And in certain areas, we have evidence of industry, we have evidence. A little bit of living quarters there seems to a temple or. I mean, I was reading one bit of research. Most of the research in this, by the way, is in Ukrainian and Russian. So still very much waiting for the Western European tradition to pick this up and work with it. But from what I was reading, there seems to be some speculation or debate in the scholarship about whether or not there's possibly an observatory of some sort or some form of trying to read something within the stars or the planets or whatever it is. They don't know, but it is speculative. But the idea here is, if this is a nomadic site, why have nomads built a massive wooden city? And what is this about? So my chapter on this digs into this topic. Of course, it kind of challenges the idea of, like, look, just because they're nomadic doesn't mean they're not building. Just because they're nomadic doesn't mean they don't need things. So one example, this massive empty space that is useful for nomadic herding groups when you're potentially getting raided against, you've got somewhere safe to bring in your livestock. Or if it's like, if these cultures are set up like Herodotus tells us, that there's massive royal retinues moving around and they have massive camps, it gives them somewhere to be when they're in the region, someone to place themselves, and then when they leave, it's just empty. There is use for it, there's value for it, if you look at it from their perspective. The other thing is, when you actually dig into the site and you look at the history of the site, it doesn't seem like the Scythians or the nomadic groups in the area, they don't seem to have built it, they seem to have used it. And then we have evidence that actually maybe there is a local group that has sort of built these small forts and then adapted to kind of embrace the Scythian or nomadic groups around them, to kind of make it a place for them to come to trade. So we have evidence of industry aimed at what we call the Scythian culture. So the sort of hallmarks of Scythian culture, things like the specific arrowheads, particular bridles they have, and also the animalistic art style that is sort of iconic of Scythians, you know, so we're sort of seeing evidence of some of that aimed specifically at this culture. Other thing that came from Bilsk, again, using one site to challenge lots of conceptions we have about nomadic groups. Scythian culture is identified by those three items I just mentioned. If you find that in an archaeological site, you found a Scythian site. That is not a great way of identifying a culture, but it is how we identify Scythians. So you've got a Scythian site. So there are certain, what are called kurgans, these particular burial mounds around Bilsk have been excavated. And so people started to look specifically at those kurgans to kind of look and find out more about these people. Really interesting. So we found out about the global trade networks in the area because there's like one Scythian woman who's been buried with a scarab beetle, which has hieroglyphs inscribed on it. So clearly come from Asia, sorry, from Egypt. Whether or not from Egyptian or from Greek trade, we don't know. All we know is that it's there thousands of kilometers away. So that gives you an idea of the scope of the trade network the Scythians or the nomadic groups are part of. But the other thing that came about is they did analysis of the people's remains to basically find out how far they traveled in their lifetime. So you can get basically a isotomic footprint of an individual's life, what they've eaten, what they've consumed, and sort of that has left a mark on, for better term, on the body itself. And they found that these nomadic peoples aren't traveling more than about 70km, 60km from where they live, which, when you put it on a map, doesn't even get them to some of the major rivers like the Danube, doesn't even get them there. So immediately my question is, well, how nomadic are we talking when we talk about nomads, Are we buying into the Greek and Roman perception of these massive hordes of people moving across continents, constantly on the move, can't be controlled, can't do anything with them? Or, you know, are we talking more pastoralist ways of life where there is movement, but it's only movement to other areas to feed your livestock or to move? We're not talking, you know, moving continents. So, you know, this is more about challenging ancient perceptions, but also our own. The assumptions we make when we talk about traveling communities, traveling groups, the assumptions that we make that go with that. And, you know, Bilsk is just a perfect example of that, because if you believe this is a Scythian site, if you believe Scythians are there, they're not moving about much and they're building things. So either we accept the nomadic groups do that, or you being a bit hypocritical and are starting to kind of have to undo your own thinking. So, yeah, anyway, that kind of sort of brings an end to that meandering thought. But, yeah, you were absolutely right. So that was why I wanted those key elements to kind of be brought out. Nomads belong in our histories. They're an important part of my histories. But also, you don't want to go too far and go, they're just like us. They're just like the Romans, because they're not. But they're not as different as we often like or just assume that they are. There are some similarities, and we just need to be careful of our preconceptions, really.
- [39:53]
A
Yeah, yeah. I think you do a really good job of addressing that. I think very sensitively within the book is I think you're careful to say that these people are worth studying, worth knowing about, not because they are just like the Romans, but because they are their own thing, and that's worth studying and learning about as well. And like you said, of course, there are similarities. Of course there are these interchanges, but they also had their own languages and belief systems and social relations and their own cultural kind of identifiers, and those are worth studying on their own merits. And I really liked how you kind of positioned the Bilsk case study within the book, because you start that section on the kind of Roman world by making the Point that it's really with the Romans that that binary between civilized and barbarian really gets entrenched. And the Romans really kind of defined themselves in opposition to the barbarians and architecture and permanent architecture is off it and sort of became, under the Romans and continues into the present day, became one of those signifiers of civilized versus barbarian. It became one of those things of, you know, if we have the technology, we have the resources, we have the manpower to build monumental works of architecture. Like the example you give in the Roman context is Hadrian's Wall, you know, this enormous infrastructural investment that was directed against the barbarians, you know, that Rome built to have this wall separating, like, very literally separating us, the civilized people from them, the barbarians. And it's very kind of just entrenched in our imagination, in our worldview, that therefore, by definition, the barbarians cannot have that form of architecture, cannot have that kind of building practice. But then the Scythian example of Bilsk destabilizes that entirely. The Scythians are either building this fortified kind of city, or whatever you want to call it themselves. At the very least, they're there, they're using it. It has some utility in their way of life. And so that binary, I mean, falls apart for many reasons. But that's just kind of one example of how that binary, you know, when you start to interrogate it even a little bit, completely ceases to make sense. But you can understand when looking at these, when looking at the literary sources, why it was important for the Greeks and the Roman Romans to construct that binary, why it served them to say, you know, this is us, we are the Romans. We do this, we build like this, we can do this. Ergo, those people, the people who are inferior to us, the people who are a threat to us, they cannot.
- [43:14]
B
Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. And this is. As historians, we can then fall foul of the gravest of historical sin, which is to consider the Roman mind a monolithic thing, or the Greek mind a monolithic thing. So it's the idea where the Greeks said this. Did they? All of them, every single one of them, they all thought that. And that kind of drove a lot of the research in the book, which is like, I know what people like Plato say about barbarians. I know what, you know, what Aristotle has to say on it, what Xenophon has to say on it. And all these things. I wonder what someone living in Crimea, as a Greek, had to say about these things. I wonder what someone living in the south of France, miles and miles Away from Greece, what they had to say about the foreign groups around them. So the Albia example, you mentioned assimilation earlier. And the fact that there are assimilation goes both ways. One of my favorites of that is it's a young man described at Olbia in the Roman period who is seen by the source who's writing it. Dio Chrysostom is describing meeting this young man and he describes him in a very Greek way. So Dyer is a Greek himself. He describes in his very Greek way. So he immediately. He's a beautiful young man. It's a very Greek way of describing an 18 year old. It's about 18, 19. This lad, he's very tall, he's very dashing, he's very military, he's in military garb and he speaks Greek and he knows his Homeric poetry and things like this. But he is where he's on a horse, he is wearing Scythian clothing, or what's conceived to be Scythian clothing. He's wearing trousers. I mean, that's the least Greek thing you can do. He's wearing trousers and he's got a cavalry based sword. So a foreign looking sword, foreign looking clothes. He speaks Greek, but his Greek's a bit weird because he's clearly got a dialect. And it becomes this weird moment where our source doesn't really know what to do about this lad because he's like, well, you're Greek but you don't seem very Greek, but you are Greek. And what's me? Well, he can't appreciate. And what's really interesting is that this young, this young man has in many ways assimilated to Scythian culture, wearing the clothes, presenting himself as an elite within that culture. But his description of his own identity when he's asked about like, who do you like for your poetry and things like that, it's very, almost overly traditional. And it's almost like he's clinging to a heritage of about five generations ago, which when we think of diasporic groups around the world, when we think about, you know, moving as a culture, moving to other countries, that's often what we end up doing. There is this assimilation, but also there is this I will cling to traditions, even though that culture back home might have sort of let go of those traditions and moved on, but you're sort of hanging on to something because it's how it was remembered. So it's, it's again, it's a very human story, but it does, it jars with the narrative of Roma culture is this, you know, Greek Culture is this Greek language, is this Greek stress like this? And you go, yeah, they do in some places. Places, but not in all places. So if that's true for dress, if that's true for language, why can't it be true for their conceptions of foreigners? Now, I'm not saying these are utopian, egalitarian places. I'm not saying that at all. But what we do get is evidence of intermarriage. What we do get is evidence of close relationships, of cultural exchange at a very personal and close level. And if you step away from our written evidence, and I would expect that. That I would expect people to kind of try and get on with the people around them so their life's a bit easier. So it's not. It shouldn't be surprising. But because our evidence, because our literary evidence from, like, Rome and from Athens and places like this is so categoric in how it sees foreign groups, how it perceives nomads, it comes as a surprise. And that in itself is revealing. So, yeah, as I mentioned, for the very beginning, that was kind of the point of this, but I really wanted to kind of expose these inconsistencies and then just go, why don't we just look at the evidence? Why don't we just see what's going on in these places? Are they interesting? Isn't interesting how wrong Plato is? I love it when Plato's wrong. So I like to point out whenever I can.
- [47:44]
A
Yeah, I really like how you put it as these examples of kind of diasporic Greek or Roman culture, because that is a very human story, and I think it's very relatable. That idea, I think, is very relatable to a lot of people today. So as a final question, as we're coming up on the end of our time, I did want to ask you just about the kind of contemporary relevance of your work, of these various case studies as you see them. You make the point in a few places about how these kind of tropes about barbarians get recycled in contemporary political discourse. So I just wanted to ask you to say, you know, if you can say a little bit more about that.
- [48:36]
B
Yeah. So there's a few ways. There's a lot of ways we could talk about this. I suppose the first one is, one of the things I wanted in the book was to dispel this idea of continuity, of a single monolithic tradition, what we call the west, and kind of expose it for the ridiculousness that it is not the west as an ideal now, but as this idea that it goes all the way back to Greece and Rome and it's a continual baton that's being passed along. It's absolutely nonsense. So that was the first thing, Greeks moving around. And actually let's look at the Greeks when they're the foreign Greek group in a place. So there's always this idea, we have this in England. I don't know if you have this elsewhere, but in England we definitely have this. Well, Britain we have it. Which is foreign people coming here, immigrants. If I immigrate somewhere and I go live in Spain, I'm an expat, I'm not an immigrant. So you know, just the way we term these things, the way we think about these things. So. And you know, when we talk about the Greeks settling through the Mediterranean, we talk about settlements, we talk about it as, you know, they're setting up markets, they're doing this down the other. They've emigrated. They are now foreigners in foreign lands. But they're the foreigner. Then the group that's there, that's not a foreign land to them, that's their land. So that's actually. Let's look at the Greeks, the Romans, whoever it is, let's look at them from the perspective of being the foreign alien group and see what happens, happens. So one of my favorite chapters that kind of really looks into this is there's a Greek site in Egypt called Naucratus. Egypt has its own clear set of cultural identity and dare I say, sense of superiority. Just like the Greeks, just like the Romans, the Egyptians, absolutely we're superior. And when the Greeks come, they're only allowed like one or two settlements that they're allowed to live in. So this is sort of 6th and 5th century BCA and now crutches is one of them. And what we have there is the Greeks in a town as the foreign group, the outside group, the look down upon group, that that's the ecosystem they're living in. And it's just a different way of looking at the Greeks. It's a different way of looking at what we're told are the superior cultures that everyone else is trying to take on. So that was one side to actually go, you know, the idea of movement, the idea of displacement, the idea of diaspora is a human one, not a foreign one. So even if you identify with the Greeks, the Romans, they're doing it too. Everyone's doing it. Movement. If there's one thing humans do is move. That's what we do and we're good at it. So that was the first bit, the Other bit I wanted to kind of of talk about was modern political discourse. There is fear of outside groups coming in, there is fear of integration, there is fear of multiculturalism. And there's often a resistance in the modern world. When we talk about ancient multiculturalism, like, this is a modern idea, you're projecting onto the past. And actually what my book was trying to do without. I don't hammer this home. I'm not trying to like, it's. When I wrote this book, I didn't want it to be a lecture on, you know, the way things should be talked about and things like that. It's not what it is, it's not a diatribe. But every single site, you can't get away from it. There's intermingling culture. There's multiculturalism because people move, people interact, people adapt. That is the human story. But because our focus on history has always been on political narratives, imperial narratives, military narratives. And I say that as a military and political historian. That's my background. I'm not, not. I'm not taken away from that at all. But it does offer a small understanding of what's going on and a very useful one. But it is only one element of everything that's going on. So let's look at everything else. The edges of the world kind of offer that. So, yeah. In a world where movement of people is considered something to be afraid of, in a world where multiculturalism is considered a bad thing, in a world where we are encouraged to look down on foreign groups with the same narratives that we see from two and a half thousand years ago, I think there are some lessons to be learned here, and one of them is this is what humans do. Why are you kicking off about it? Also, I hope people will start to go, well, hold on, am I just absorbing central narratives in the same way that historians have absorbed it from Rome and Greece? There's a thing here in Britain, I can't find it at the moment. There was a survey that went up, a bit of research on voting habits. We've got some elections coming up and they found that our. I've got to be careful here. It's not a far right group, but it is the furthest right of our political parties, which is something called reform. Gotta be very careful in our word, though. They basically stand on very much. Multiculturalism is a bad thing. Globalism is a bad thing. We've got this issue, you know, immigrants coming over here, stealing our jobs, taking our benefits, all that kind of have the usual narratives we're used to Reading, and you can read From Roman writers 2000 years ago, nothing new. They find that where their support is strongest, ethnic diversity is at its lowest. So to put it another way, the whitest places in Britain are the ones most afraid of foreign groups coming and taking things, whereas places that have. Have multiculturalism, that have diversity, they struggle to get a foothold. And this is something that kind of emulates the thoughts of the book, which is when you look at the edges of the world, when you look at what people actually are interacting with other cultures, we don't see this in the same way. Of course. You still get a sense of, I'm better than you, and, you know, we should still do things our way, and you get all that. But what we don't get is that vehement narrative, because that is usually based on illusions of culture. That is usually based on fake narratives, as you mentioned, for specific agendas. The Romans, the Greeks, the Egyptians were doing it for a reason, but that reason is not to accurately represent the foreign group. And I think that's as true today as it is then. Yeah.
- [54:52]
A
Fantastic. Thank you so much. For anyone who's interested in learning more about any of the taste studies that we talked about today or any of the case studies in Owen's book that we didn't even have a chance to get to today, of which there are many, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Owen's book, the Far Edges of the Known World. And thank you so much, Owen, for your time and for coming on to talk about your research and the really interesting kind of historical narratives and insights and perspectives that you put together in your book. So thank you.
- [55:34]
B
No, thank you. Thanks so much for bringing on to talk about it and also thanks for letting me talk about the nomadic groups. I've done a few interviews about quite a lot of interviews about this book, and they might be interested in, like, one of the sites. But, you know, the actual. Let's talk about the whole. Let's look at it through the prism of nomadic groups is this podcast has offered that as a unique perspective. And that's. That's brilliant to get stuck into.
- [55:57]
A
I did want to say. Sorry, I'll just keep this going a little bit longer. I did want to say that I really appreciated the site that you started off with around Lake Turkana, because that was actually entirely new to me. And even history that is kind of told from a nomadic perspective, which some authors have tried to do recently. Those histories start with sites like Gobekli Tepe in Anatolia in today's Turkey, which is fascinating site, very interesting for the history, history of nomadism and nomadic pastoralism. But I really liked what you did and how you framed it around going back to sort of where mankind started, back to where sort of the human species started, and looking at what's going on there in more recent, but still ancient history. And so that was a really fascinating counterpart in this different part of the world, a very different geographic region, with links to other sites developed by nomadic pastoralists, like Gobekli Tepe, like Petra, for example, like sites in Central Asia. So, again, more of these kind of connections on this very, very large kind of world level scale.
- [57:18]
B
No, no, I appreciate that. I appreciate that.
- [57:21]
A
And with that, finally, we're done. I will let you go. Thank you so much again.
- [57:26]
B
Thank you.