Name: What is Ancient History?
Price: 1182.00 TWD
Availability: InStock
Author: Walter Scheidel
ISBN: 9780691236650

Type

Physical Book

Author

Walter Scheidel

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Language

English

Pages

328

Format

Hardcover

ISBN13

9780691236650

What is Ancient History?

Walter Scheidel (Author) · Princeton University Press · Hardcover

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Synopsis "What is Ancient History?"

From one of today's most innovative ancient historians, a provocative new vision of why ancient history matters--and why it needs to be told in a radically different, global way It's easy to think that ancient history is, well, ancient history--obsolete, irrelevant, unjustifiably focused on Greece and Rome, and at risk of extinction. In What Is Ancient History?, Walter Scheidel presents a compelling case for a new kind of ancient history--a global history that captures antiquity's pivotal role as a decisive phase in human development, one that provided the shared foundation of our world and continues to shape our lives today. For Scheidel, ancient history is when the earliest versions of today's ways of life were created and spread--from farming, mining, and engineering to housing and transportation, cities and government, writing and belief systems. Transforming the planet, this process unfolded all over the world, in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas, often at different times, sometimes haltingly but ultimately unstoppably. Yet it's rarely studied or taught that way. Since the eighteenth century, Western intellectuals have dismembered the ancient world, driven not only by their quest for professional expertise but also by nationalism, colonialism, racism, and the idealization of Greece and Rome. Specialized scholarship has fractured into numerous academic niches, obscuring broader patterns and dynamics and keeping us from understanding just how much humanity has long had in common. The time has come, Scheidel argues, to put the ancient world back together--by moving beyond the limitations of Greco-Roman "classics," by systematically comparing ancient societies, and by exploring early exchanges and connections between them. The time has come, in other words, for an ancient history for everyone.

Walter Scheidel

(Author)

View Author's Page

Walter Scheidel is a professor of Humanities and Classics and History at Stanford University. His research spans from ancient social and economic history to premodern historical demography, focusing on inequality and state formation. He has written or co-edited 21 books and published more than 260 articles and reviews

Among his most notable works is The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (2017), which analyzes the evolution of inequality throughout history. Another notable work is Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity (2019), where he explores the fall of the Roman Empire and its implications for subsequent economic development. These publications fall within the genre of economic and social history.

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