THE FAR EDGES OF THE KNOWN WORLD

Exploring vibrant cultures beyond the borders of classical Rome, Greece, Egypt, and the Middle East.

Historian Rees, a fellow at the University of Nottingham, writes that ancient Egyptians, Athenians, and Romans took for granted that the more distant you were, the further you were from civilization, but this was not entirely accurate. For example, ancient Egyptian armies spent thousands of years conquering or retreating from substantial Kush and Nubian kingdoms to the south. Contempt did not prevent traders and settlers from establishing thriving communities in barbarian lands. Massalia (Marseilles today) was settled by Greeks before 700 B.C.E., enjoyed good relations with the Gauls, and was even responsible for introducing wine to France. Readers aware of the havoc wreaked when Scythian horsemen descended from the steppes will learn of Olbia on the north Black Seacoast near Crimea, a thriving Greek city-state that not only absorbed Scythian culture but contributed to it. Not uncivilized at all, Aksum (today’s Ethiopia) was a substantial kingdom with its own brand of Christianity and a thriving trading center, Adulis, along the Red Sea. Wandering from his theme, Rees devotes many chapters to civilizations within other civilizations. Egypt depended heavily on Greek merchants. One consequence was Naucratis, the only port where Greeks were allowed to trade, a center of the “Egyptomania” that spread across the Hellenic world and is the subject of a long chapter. Another describes Taxila (in modern Pakistan), a kingdom at the farthest reach of Alexander the Great’s conquest. It managed to fend off Greek influence and become a center for expansion of the new Buddhist religion. Vietnam is arguably the furthest land of which the Romans had a vague knowledge. Rees calls it “the location for one of history’s biggest ‘what might have beens,’ where Rome and the powerful empire of Han China almost made direct contact with each other.”

Good ancient history off the beaten path.