What is Ancient History?

"Ancient history," when it is not a pejorative expression for the irrelevant, is usually used to refer exclusively to the history of the Greeks and Romans. In this Zephyr salon, Walter Scheidel (Stanford, Classics and History) will be discussing the argument of his new book (What is Ancient History?) that this narrowness obscures the unity of ancient history as a global phase in human development: ancient history, Scheidel argues, is best viewed neither as the history of any particular people or region nor a simple summation of such histories, but as the formative era in which humans invented the shared foundations of our world, from farming, mining, and engineering to housing and transportation, cities and government, writing and belief systems. Though these foundations are so ubiquitous that they have become largely invisible to us, they all have contingent historical origins. Unfortunately, this exciting perspective is missed by the way ancient history is usually taught and studied, the result of both misguided fragmentation through specialization and the artificial isolation and idealization of what is ultimately only one part of ancient history, the history of Greece and Rome. It is time, Scheidel argues, to put ancient history back together again.

Dinner will be provided to all attendees. Please RSVP so that Zephyr can plan accordingly.

About the Speaker

Walter Scheidel is Dickason Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics and History at Stanford University. His research ranges from ancient social and economic history and premodern historical demography to the comparative and transdisciplinary world history of inequality, state formation, and human welfare. He is particularly interested in connecting the humanities, the social sciences, and the life sciences.