Walter Scheidel, "What Is Ancient History?" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Aug 25, 2025

Walter Scheidel, Dickason Professor in the Humanities and an expert on Roman history and inequality, argues for a radical rethinking of ancient history. He emphasizes the need to broaden perspectives beyond Greece and Rome, showcasing how diverse global influences shaped our modern world. He critiques the compartmentalization of history, advocating for a more integrative approach that acknowledges the achievements of pre-literate societies. Scheidel highlights the shared foundations of humanity and calls for collaborative efforts in redefining the study of ancient history.

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INSIGHT

Antiquity As Foundations Of The Present

Ancient history should be reframed as the study of foundational processes that created our everyday institutions and technologies.
These bundled innovations (farming, writing, cities, states) created a pathway that shaped later human life globally.

INSIGHT

Foundational Innovations Have Mixed Outcomes

The long-term packaging of innovations produced both capacities and harms simultaneously.
This intensification created trade-offs and 'painted us into a corner' that shapes modern problems.

INSIGHT

Prehistory Is Part Of Ancient History

'Prehistory' is a modern construct that misleads us into ignoring pre-literate foundations of complex social life.
Village societies, monuments, and organized labor long predate writing and matter to ancient history.

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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.

New books in late antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Walter Schiedel is Dickason Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics and History

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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