The Best Books on the Wider Ancient World

Before we get to the books, perhaps you could explain what we mean by ‘the ancient world. ’ What time period are we exploring here?

That’s a good question. Traditionally, the ancient world would begin with the invention of writing in Mesopotamia. In the UK, it would then stretch right through to around 410, when the Romans are said to have left Britain. But one of the points of my book was to look at human history as early as we can piece it together, which is long before writing. I start with non-literate societies.

I end the book in Ethiopia because that’s where I argue the ancient world actually ends. So we have artifacts from Aksum, this ancient kingdom in Ethiopia, in Anglo-Saxon burial grounds in Britain. The golden age of ancient Ethiopia is the early medieval period in Britain and Europe.

So we would be talking about around 3000 BC all the way to about 410-ish. That would be the traditional dating—but the whole point of the book is that that is a gray area, and it ends where you decide it ends.

What’s so interesting is that with history, I tend to think it’s all there in the primary sources, and you’re just analyzing written evidence. But in this period, knowledge keeps moving forward every year because of the archeology.

Absolutely. Archeology always pushes us forward. It’s constantly bringing out new information. It finds a new site, or it brings new context and new information to things we don’t know about from our written sources. But the latest innovations coming out from studies in Italy in particular, and the carbonized scrolls from Herculaneum and Pompeii, are bringing us new literary sources as well. It’s very exciting.

We’re able to go back further and further in time. We’re finding out a lot from teeth in prehistorical burial grounds.

It’s often mind-blowing. What I love about the archeological breakthroughs is that they’re often quite mundane, if you think about them for too long. Dental calculus—dirty teeth—is quite a mundane thing, but what it reveals about diet and the global food trade is fascinating. When I was writing my chapter on Bilsk in Ukraine, I was reading lots of research about tweezers. I was like, ‘I get the cultural importance, but a tweezer is a tweezer.’ I just love that what you and I would consider throwaway things in life reveal so much, thousands of years later.

Let’s turn to the books you’ve chosen. All of them are about places that you explore in your book. Most of them are, I think, academic books.

Yes, they’re academic, but they are aimed at broadening knowledge. This isn’t hardcore academic research. Most of the books I’ve chosen are syntheses of research, so they’re a really useful way to get into the specific evidence of what books like mine bring up in passing and with stories. If you’re interested, these books take you that step further.

Great. So first up, we’ve got the Scythians. You’re recommending a book by Renate Rolle called The World of the Scythians, from 1989. Do you want to say who the Scythians were and why you’ve chosen this particular book about them?

Renate Rolle is an archeologist. This book was originally in German and translated years later. In many ways, it was my introduction to the Scythians. She did a lot of archeological research on Scythian sites, and her research into burials and the bodies in them just blew my mind.

It’s only touched on in this book, but in her other research, she did a lot of work identifying women in burials. They had often been assumed to be men because they had weapons next to them, and injuries you associate with prolonged experience of combat. If these had been male bodies, we’d have had no problem categorizing them as warriors or warrior-esque burials—but some of the bodies are women.

That really opened up a conversation about the role of women in Scythian society and questions about the Amazon myth and whether or not the Scythians were perhaps the origin of that myth.

Rolle was my introduction to all this, so I absolutely love this book. Her emphasis on archeology over the written evidence just holds so much value. It’s an explanation of Scythian society as we understand it—and much of what she was saying in 1989 is still how we understand the Scythians.

It’s just a fantastic book. It’s a lovely introduction to all the different evidence and what Scythian society might have been like.

The Scythians were roaming over a huge area of the Steppe. Is that who they were?

It’s interesting because the Scythians were not a united group. They may not even have associated with each other. ‘Scythians’ is the title that’s given to them by both Greek and Roman writers, and Assyrian and Persian writers give us similar names. But it’s an archeological culture as much as anything else.

When we identify three particular types of artifacts in a single site, it’s called ‘the golden triad’ of Scythian culture. One is weaponry—a particular type of bow and a particular type of arrowhead or ax. There’s also a very specific type of horse bridle. Then, there’s a very particular type of art style known as animalistic art that’s very characteristic of Scythians. If you Google ‘Scythian art,’ you’ll see a very distinct style of fantastical animals.

If we see these three in the same area, we go, ‘Okay, this is Scythian.’ If you think about it, it’s quite a vague way of defining a culture, so we’ve got to keep that in mind.

The Scythians are presented as a very nomadic group. You could think of them as tribal groups, linked by language, maybe, and base cultures. Some of them may be moving around, but we’re not thinking Mongolian hordes sweeping through Europe or anything like that.

Interestingly, there is evidence (which I go into in my book) that some of them seem to have been static. These were nomads who didn’t move. It’s quite contradictory. Our written evidence and our archeological evidence start to disagree with each other.

The gold and the jewelry they made is absolutely beautiful, isn’t it?

It’s gorgeous. Historians don’t talk about this, but archeology shows us all the time that the Greeks and Romans really prized the metallurgy and especially the goldwork from the northern cultures. So not just Scythian, but also what you and I might think of as Celtic or Gallic. They’re good at what they do, and they are superior to the Romans and Greeks at it.

It’s just beautiful. Even today, you look at it and go, ‘I could wear that.’

Let’s turn to your next book, which is Wretched Kush by Stuart Tyson Smith. Tell me about the Kingdom of Kush and why you chose this book about this ancient civilization.

Wretched Kush is the standout book on the Kush, which was an urbanized culture to the south of Egypt in what was known as Nubia. It was predominantly in what is now Sudan, further up the Nile. Most of our written evidence about the Kingdom of Kush comes from the Egyptians, who were usually expanding into their kingdom or their area of control.

What I was particularly interested in for my book was the border. The Egyptians established a very clear border by building a series of forts. The investment in these forts was huge—you don’t see anything else like it in the wider Mediterranean until Hadrian’s Wall and the Roman Empire. The Egyptians were clearly worried about the Kush to the south.

This book is the perfect starting point to understand Kushite history. It’s about the archeology and what it tells us, and about the relationship between the Egyptians and the Kush through the perspective of the Kushites.

The book is using Egyptian evidence but tries to understand how they might be exaggerating or ultimately inventing the Kush in their own culture. They’re creating this bogeyman figure as a way of asserting their own ideology, belief systems and ideas about the pharaoh’s role of maintaining order and justice—where everywhere outside of his control is chaos. The Kingdom of Kush becomes an embodiment of that, in many ways. The title sums it up: ‘wretched Kush’ is what the Egyptians called the Kushites.

One interesting issue I had to tackle a few times was whether or not the ancient world had a concept similar to racism or not. The color of skin comes up a lot with the Kush in how they’re depicted. The Egyptians painted different cultures with different skin colors. It seems to be about who they are not. They have dark skin. We don’t have dark skin. Those people have light skin. We don’t have light skin. We know who we are because we’re not them. The Kush are a great example of how identities can be built culturally through opposition with others.

What were they like, the Kushites? What do we know about them?

The Kushites were originally a pastoralist, semi-nomadic group. They settled and built towns, but they maintained a lot of that pastoralist tradition and culture. For example, cattle were still widely acclaimed in their society, and one way we map just how much power or influence a person might have had is by the number of bucrania they are buried with (bucrania are the top of the cow’s skull with the horns still attached). There’s one person who is buried with nearly 5,000, which shows the importance of this individual. Also, through analysis of the bones, we can see that the bucrania came from a massive area around the Kush kingdom.

As is always the way with boundaries, things go in different directions, and we also see Kushite religion come north into Egypt. The cow goddess Hathor is argued by some scholars to possibly be originally a Kushite goddess, or maybe an amalgamation with one.

This book really digs into what we can know about Kushite culture. Much of that relies on the archeology, but what I particularly like about Stuart Tyson Smith is that he doesn’t ignore the written evidence, even though it’s Egyptian.

Is there anything left to see of Kush?

There is. The Kushites built small pyramids, and you can still visit some of those. It’s not the same as walking around Rome, and Sudan is not necessarily somewhere you can go and visit at the moment. But there are things to see.

Let’s go further east now and a book called The Origins of Ancient Vietnam by Nam C. Kim. Tell me about this book and how it fits it.

In my book, I have a chapter on the ancient city of Co Loa, which is in northern Vietnam. It’s not the kind of place that normally appears in an ancient history book. This is the most academic of the books I picked, and one of the reasons for that is because there is no other book that covers it. Much of the research on Co Loa is in Vietnamese or other languages.

Nam C. Kim is just a fantastic archeologist who is based in the U.S. but works regularly at the site, which is just outside of modern-day Hanoi. In many ways, Co Loa is like King Arthur’s Camelot; there is a lot of folklore about it. Nam Kim doesn’t dismiss all that. He’s very much trying to lay the groundwork: ‘Okay, what can we prove about this place? What’s going on here?’ And one of the things he did prove is that this is an older city than people had thought. That’s what a lot of research that has been coming out is showing.

This is just a fantastic book to really understand the state of ancient Vietnam. It’s not under the shadow of ancient China, which is Vietnam’s version of what so many of the other cultures in the Mediterranean have to deal with in terms of Rome and Greece (Co Loa is on the edge of the Han empire). The book still looks at the links between Chinese and Vietnamese culture in this period but sets aside the idea that China gave Vietnam culture and civilization. What the research from Co Loa shows is that the hallmarks of what we think of as civilization had already started to occur, not only in Vietnam but in Southeast Asia. Co Loa was the biggest example of this.

We also have evidence from just south of Co Loa down to the very south of Vietnam of Roman artifacts, so of Roman trade in the region. This brings into question what we mean when we talk about the ancient world. The Romans didn’t really know about Vietnam, but they did have contact with it. It’s not between the imperial court or between leaders—it’s between tradesmen. We even have Chinese evidence that suggests that Roman traders may have landed in Vietnam and made it to the Han imperial court in the second century AD.

We’re very quick to ignore much of the world, but if we can include these seemingly out-of-the-way places in our usual stories, it really opens up the idea of just how big and interconnected the ancient world was. Nan C. Kim’s work on this is just brilliant. It’s an absolutely fantastic book.

Can you still visit Co Loa?

Yes, you can visit it and walk around the sites. There are later temples dedicated to people like the Trung sisters, who were the two female warrior leaders that stood up to the Han empire—Vietnam’s answer to Boudicca, although one would argue more successful than Boudicca, even though they also failed.

Okay, let’s go on to the book about Indian history now, India: The Ancient Past: A History of the Indian Sub-Continent from c. 7000 BC to AD 1200 by the late Burjor Avari. I like the temporal ambition of this book: covering eight millennia.

It’s absolutely enormous in scope. It’s a fantastic introduction to everything you might need to know about ancient India. India is such a complex place, and its history is so complex that it is very easy to get lost in it or obsess about a particular part of it and ignore everything else. There’s so much going on. And although we may think of India as a single culture, that’s ludicrous—there are so many cultures and so many different languages, even now. It is a beautiful tapestry of history and innovation and artistic and religious movements.

Burjor Avari’s book is a brilliant introduction because it talks you through all of the main points, the key eras, the dominant ideas or religions or philosophical or political movements going on. It also brings in snippets of the evidence itself, so he’s not just telling a story. He’ll say, ‘Have a look at this image or have a look at this excerpt to understand what I’m talking about.’ I would recommend the book to anyone who wants to get started on ancient India. It’s my go-to book, unquestionably.

In your book, which part of India were you predominantly focusing on?

Taxila, which is in what we now think of as Pakistan. This book gave me so much of the context around what was going on. Taxila comes into European history because of Alexander the Great and his invasion of what is predominantly Pakistan now. Alexander didn’t have to invade Taxila because the rulers joined him and it came under Macedonian control. It then became part of one of the successor kingdoms. It is always through that Greek lens that it’s talked about.

But Taxila has a history earlier than that. It has an interesting position in Buddhist history as a center of learning. There’s been a movement the last 10-15 years of talking about the interchange between Greece and India, but usually from the perspective of the Greeks: giving knowledge and sculpture and artistic trends to India. I wanted to get a good understanding of the role of Taxila in Indian history from an Indian perspective and say, ‘Hold on, if things are coming east, surely things must also have been going west?’

I got interested in the presence of Buddhists in Europe. For instance, there’s a story of a Buddhist monk going to ancient Athens during the time of Augustus, in the first century AD. There’s also mention of Buddhists in Alexandria in Egypt, and recently, they’ve discovered a statue of Buddha in Berenike, which was a Roman Egyptian town on the coast of the Red Sea. Researchers are now looking much more at the way Indian ideas and learning and philosophical trends were influencing European cultures and traditions.

In your book, The Far Edges of the Known World, you give an overview of a number of ancient places. Did you do that because you felt they’d been neglected?

I have 13 chapters, and I picked 13 sites. I could easily have picked 13 other sites to replace them. It’s not so much that these particular sites are neglected; it’s that so much is neglected. What I was trying to find were 13 examples from different core sections of ancient history that highlighted, firstly, that all humans are dealing with the same stuff. That’s a common theme that comes through all of this—whether it’s cultural exchange, coexistence, cohabitation, the friction that comes with that, conflict, religious reform, political reform, or even climate change. All humans are dealing with these issues, and it’s fascinating to see how different cultures deal with them in different ways and how human ingenuity produces different results.

I also wanted to shine a light on examples that challenged our assumptions about the ancient world, in particular the classical cultures. For instance, the section on the Greek world looks at various examples in Crimea, Egypt, and France. In Egypt, the Greeks are the foreign ones. We never usually see the ancient Greeks from that perspective, as the unwanted foreign group. Whereas in France, their culture was held up as the epitome of sophistication. So we get the Gallic tribes trying to emulate Greek culture as an exhibition of their own power. Whilst in Ukraine, it’s more of a fight for survival for the Greeks, living in this land that they are not used to with these people who don’t live like they do at all. It’s a nice contrast. The history of the Greeks is not just people hanging around Athens eating olives and talking to Plato. There’s so much more going on.

We can say the same about the Romans and the Egyptians—all these dominant cultures where we build an image in our head of what they looked like. What I wanted to do with this book is not dismantle that. I don’t want to say it’s wrong, but it is a perspective. It is a set of lived experiences, and there are so many more that are just as interesting.

A lot is going on in Latin America at the time as well, like the Mayan civilization.

Absolutely. I tell you, we could have done all the continents! I had to be reined in at one point because if you wanted to extend the concept of the ancient world, we could even have looked at places like Micronesia and the city building on the reefs there. There’s just so much going on. And I suppose, the one core fundamental element of my book I wanted to get out was, ‘Look at all this stuff! Isn’t it interesting?’

Let’s turn to your final book. This is Foundations of an African Civilisation: Aksum and the Northern Horn, 1000 BC-AD 1300 by David W. Phillipson.

This is an absolutely fantastic book that takes you through Aksumite history, which is a history most people are not acquainted with And having gone through much of the story of Aksum in detail for my book, I’ve got to ask the question, ‘Why is it not talked about more?’

Aksum was a kingdom—an empire, really—in Ethiopia. It rose around the beginning of the reign of Augustus, so the turn of the Common Era is when it took off. Archeologically, we do know of life at the site before then, but what we think of as Aksum appears around that period, and then it just grows as a power and as an influence. And because of its position near to the Red Sea coast and close to the Indian Ocean, it’s a really important point on the ocean trade routes. So, as Roman trade came out of the Mediterranean through the Red Sea, it would pass Aksum and a port town that it had on the coast in what is now Eritrea.

And from there, it would continue to places further south. The furthest south it seems to have gone is a place called Rhapta, which is in modern Tanzania. Then it would also go east to India and beyond—maybe even as far as Co Loa, we don’t know.

So, Aksum grows, and as it does so, it evolves culturally. Because of the amount of Greek and Roman trade coming through, it adopted the Greek written script on some of its coinage and some of its communication. They also wrote in their own language of Ge’ez. We have different scripts used for different things, which is interesting. What coins would you write in Greek, and what coins would you write on in Ge’ez?

Aksum became a Christian kingdom around the fourth century, and then it entered its golden age of influence. It expanded into Arabia. It expanded even toward places like Mecca. All the while, Europe was going through the collapse of the Roman Empire. In Ethiopia, we have the height of Aksumite culture, history, and society, whilst in Europe, you have the split between the Eastern and the Western Roman Empires, and what used to be called the Dark Ages occurring.

Aksum continued to flourish up until the rise of Islam. There is a story that some of the Islamic refugees from Arabia, who had to flee in the early years of the Prophet Muhammad, came to Aksum for safety. As a thank you for this, Muhammad said Ethiopia was off-limits for jihad. And if you look at the history, it’s not until the Ottomans that anyone breaks that.

The Ethiopian church is one of the world’s oldest, unbroken Christian traditions. They’re so far south they avoid all the disagreements about Christianity that happened further north, and it comes out with its own incarnation: the Ethiopian church is unique in its faith and in its belief.

So Aksum is this fascinating kingdom. It’s described as one of the great empires alongside the Chinese, the Achaemenid Persian Empire, and the Romans, and we just don’t hear about it. The way we look at the ancient world, anything south of Egypt is often ignored as irrelevant. But when we start to look at places like Aksum, that just falls apart. These stories relate to important, wider issues: the rise of Islam, the fall of the Western Empire, the spread of Christianity, the various schisms, and the evolution of Christianity in different cultures. These are all relevant themes. I do not understand why Aksum and the Aksumites are not part of that story.

Is there something to visit in northern Ethiopia? Are there Aksumite ruins?

There are. I describe the large stelae in the book, on what is potentially a royal burial ground. You can visit the park. You can also see the Bibles that came from Aksum, the Garima Gospels, which are beautifully illuminated. There was an exhibit of them in Oxford recently. There was also the ivory trade—items that appeared around the world and, as I mentioned, ended up in Anglo-Saxon burials in Britain. It’s all connected.

It’s not as if these artifacts have disappeared, and that would explain why there’s no interest in Aksum.

Didn’t Aksum have a brief moment in the sun in the 1990s, when there was a book about how the Ark of the Covenant could be found in northern Ethiopia?

It did. It got absorbed into what can only be described as conspiracy theories and pseudo-history.

But there is a church in Ethiopia that claims to have the Ark of the Covenant. There is a tradition that the Queen of Sheba was from Aksum and that she had a son with King Solomon. That son was given it as a gift and took it back to Ethiopia. That’s why they claim to still have it to this day. You can visit that church, but you cannot see the Ark of the Covenant.

The Far Edges of the Known World by Owen Rees is published by Bloomsbury.