The borderlands of history

by Ben Soton

 
The Far Edges of the Known World – A New History of the Ancient Past: Owen Rees: Bloomsbury Publishing London 2025; 384 pp; hbk: £25

The ancient world is often seen as a history of empires and the cataclysmic clashes between them. These empires include that of Egypt, Persia, the short-lived Macedonian Empire of Alexander the Great and, of course, Rome.  Owen Rees’s new book covers the many places on the edges of those empires as well as those gaps in-between.
The book is part of a recent tradition in historical literature, which focuses on trade and cultural exchange rather than simply that of kings, queens and battles, and it is divided into four sections; Pre-history, Egypt, Greece, Rome and Beyond the Classical World.   
The author makes extensive use of Greek and Roman historians such as Herodotus, Ovid and Tacitus as well as philosophers such as Socrates and Plato, who apparently went to Egypt to sell oil  – well a man cannot live by words alone. 
The most influential culture in the classical world was probably that of the Greece.  Ironically there was never a Greek empire as such; the Macedonian empire of Alexander the Great only lasted a few years and its successor states, Ptolemaic Egypt and the Syrian-based Seleucid empire did not actually include Greece. What we refer to as the Greek world was a collection of city states, centred in the Aegean, covering much of the Mediterranean and beyond.  
Meanwhile classical Greece is viewed by those on the right as the blueprint for the superiority of the West. Although Athens was, indeed, the first place to promote a limited form of democracy it was a hierarchical society based on slavery, the subjugation of women and a chauvinistic attitude to those outside its parameters.  
Those outside the Greek and later Roman world were referred to as “barbarians”; one such group being the Scythians, a nomadic people who inhabited much of what is now Russia and Ukraine. The author devotes a chapter to the Ukrainian city of Olbia; a place where Greeks and Scythians interacted. Rees points to shared cultural similarities; for example Scythians following the Greek cult of Dionysus as well numerous examples of inter-marriage.  As a result there were no clear boundaries between the two groups.  Meanwhile cultural definitions are often a result of elite manipulation; whilst the interactions between groups of people often take place on geographic peripheries and amongst the lower orders of society.  In other words the most important boundary between people is that of class and not culture. 
Today we live in a world still dominated by empires but there are large swathes of the world no longer under their domination.  People’s China, Democratic Korea, Cuba and parts of South America, to name but a few.  We are told by our masters that these people are inherently different from us, comparable to modern day barbarians. Is this really the case?
I am told basketball is a very popular sport in Democratic Korea. Baseball is a popular sport in Cuba; both sports originated in the USA.  Likewise football is a popular sport in China, having begun in Britain.  It would seem ordinary people have more in common with each other than the elites who seek to divide us.  Maybe this has always been the case?