Rees, Owen: The Far Edges of the Known World

When we picture the ancient world, we tend to envision the soaring pyramids of Giza, the Coliseum conquests in Rome and the bustling agora of Athens. Indeed, the classical authors who shape our understanding of the world considered the edges of these ancient civilisations the domain of monstrous humanity. For these writers, from Ovid to Herodotus, the outer reaches of the world was where civilisation, or their conception of civilisation, ceased to exist. But at the borders of the empires we now consider the ?heart‘ of civilisation were thriving, vibrant cultures - just ones we might not expect. In The Far Edges of the Known World, Owen Rees brings us into the world of these ancient borderlands where the impossible became the norm, where the boundaries of ?civilised‘ and ?barbarian‘ began to run together and where normally juxtaposed cultures intermixed, showing us that the story of the ancient world isn‘t nearly as straightforward as we‘ve been taught. Taking us along the sandy caravan routes of Morocco to the freezing winters of the northern Black Sea, from Co-Loa in the Red River valley of Vietnam to the southern reaches of Kenya, Rees explores the powerful empires and diverse peoples in Europe, Asia and Africa beyond the reaches of Greece and Rome. In doing so, he offers us a new, brilliantly rich lens with which to understand the ancient world.