Ancient Worlds: An Epic History of East and West
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15
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Average rating4
Acclaimed historian and TV presenter Michael Scott guides us through an epic story spanning ten centuries to create a bold new reading of the classical era for our globalized world. Scott challenges our traditionally western-focused perception of the past, connecting Greco-Roman civilization to the great rulers and empires that swept across Central Asia to India and China - resulting in a truly global vision of ancient history. With stunning range and richness Ancient Worlds illustrates how the great powers and characters of antiquity shared ambitions and crises, ways of thinking and forms of connections that only grew stronger over the centuries as political systems evolved, mighty armies clashed, universal religions were born and our modern world was foreshadowed. Scott focuses on three epochal 'moments' across the ancient globe, and their profound wider from 509-8 BCE (birth of Athenian democracy and Rome's republic, also the age of Confucius's teachings in China); to 218 BCE (when Hannibal of Carthage challenged Rome and China saw its first emperor); to 312 CE, when Constantine sought to impose Christianity on the Roman world even as Buddhism was pervading China via the vast trading routes we now know as the 'Silk Roads.'A major work of global history, Michael Scott's enthralling journey challenges the way we think about our past, re-draws the map of the classical age to reveal its hidden connections, and shows us how ancient history has lessons for our own times.
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Contains spoilers
A good book which gives an alternative view to how we view ancient history, comparing and contrasting the ancient Mediterranean and ancient eastern Asia. Michael Scott has clearly attempted a mammoth task in trying to give a general overview of Armenian, Roman, Greek, Chinese, Indian and Central Asian history and in my personal opinion in order to achieve such a task the book needs to be a lot longer. I found it difficult to read at times, this is not due to bad writing, it is just merely because I found some topics quite tedious. I do however find it impressive how Michael managed to compress all of this history into 360 pages, one can assume that you could write 2000 pages on this topic and still not fully get your point across. After reading some other reviews one individual makes a great point, by skimming over histories such as Chinese and Indian the only histories where you can really gauge a true understanding are the ones most europeans already know about such as Greek and Roman, this contradicts the whole purpose of the book which is more or less to say “what about other ancient histories?”.
You know how sometimes you open a package and don't get what you expect? Sometimes it's worse, and that's not great, but sometimes it's better, and that's always a plus to be sure. But sometimes, it's also nice to open a package and get exactly what you expected - and that's definitely the case with this book, at least for the most part. In the Introduction Scott promises that he's going to talk about how the ancient world was actually a lot more connected than we've always assumed, and that's exactly what he does. He shows how civilisations like ancient China, ancient Rome, ancient Greece, ancient India and the great shifting cauldron of cultures that's the Near and Middle East. These cultures tend to be discussed separately in schools and universities, but Scott suggests that maybe there's more to be gleaned by viewing them as connected instead of separate: a bigger, broader view of history that shows how humans do not and have never existed in isolation. That's something important to keep in mind, I think, especially in the 21st century.
