Recent Ancient History Books: Roundup, Thoughts, & Recommendations
Reviews of some of my favorite ancient history books of the last couple of years.
The lifeblood of my intellectual being is history. It’s mostly entertaining and fun for me, in addition to being an intellectual exercise. All eras and places interest me, but in the last couple of years, my reading interests have been particularly dominated by ancient history. I keep up with contemporary events through magazines, newspapers, and social media, but to get into some elements of ancient history, you really need to get into books and scholarly research. I’ve also been working on my book on India, and a lot of that involves a deep dive into its ancient history. On top of that, I’ve visited ancient sites in India, Israel, and Turkey in the last couple of years. As a result of all this, I’ve been drawn more to ancient history than before, although current geopolitical and technological trends are beginning to shift my reading patterns in another direction.
One of the most fascinating things about ancient history is that there’s still a lot of mysteries that solving. Puzzles to be figured out. Light to be shined on darkness. Personally, I think the 19th century, or the 16th century, for example, are just as fascinating as ancient history, but these relatively well-recorded centuries do not have that element of exploration and discovery that ancient times do. For example, researchers are now using genetic evidence garnered from burials to determine the movements and migrations of ancient groups that previously we could only guess at.
The last couple of years saw the release of a fairly large number of interesting books on ancient history for a popular audience. Below, I list and provide thoughts on some, as well as some forthcoming works. One period in particular that I’ve become interested in is what scholars call Late Antiquity, roughly the 200 CE to 750 CE period, because this was the time of transition between ancient and medieval life throughout much of Europe and the Middle East. Fascinating to see how social life and thought evolved during these times.
Troy
A nice, witty, thorough but not too heavy introduction to the story of the Trojan War. Nothing new if one is familiar with the tale, but its nice to have it all together in one place. The author follows classical sources, so the story isn’t changed around as it sometimes is in movies. If one is interested in the historical Troy and late Bronze Age Anatolia, I recommend this book as well: The Trojan War: A New History by Barry Strauss. There’s also a new translation of the Iliad that came out this year, by Emily Wilson, that is making waves.
The Greek Experience of India: From Alexander to the Indo-Greeks
This is quite a valuable resource, because there are few primary sources from ancient India that specifically detail history, daily political life, or provide narratives of historical empires. Much of that information has to be either gleamed from inscriptions, references in religious texts, coins, archaeology, or Greek sources. This work is intriguing as it explores a lot of what the ancient Greeks—whose history is better preserved—said about India. Some of this requires further exploration as it raises interesting questions. For example, the Greeks recorded the existence of seven castes during the Mauryan period, instead of the traditional four-fold caste system that is usually elaborated in Indian literature.
Persians: The Age of the Great Kings
This is a very good, thorough overview of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (550-330 BCE), told from a pro-Persian perspective. This is the empire famous in Western history for its invasions of Greece, and for Alexander’s conquest of the empire. It was definitely the world’s first large, multicultural empire, of the sort that we think of when we think of Rome. Unfortunately, in the past, writing about this empire has been biased by the Greek sources, and even in this work, there is some speculation and filling in the gaps due to this source-bias. However, in the past few decades, there are now a lot of new sources for ancient Persia, including Babylonian cuneiform records, Persian cuneiform tablets, and deciphered Persian inscriptions. The author uses these to paint a detailed and sympathetic picture of the Persian Empire, perhaps to the point of being blinded by any potentially negative elements of the empire.
Lords of the Deccan: Southern India from the Chalukyas to the Cholas
This is a pretty good book, though it gets lost in the weeds sometimes. However, there are few books on ancient and medieval India that actually cover the particulars of its history, changes in its social and economic patterns, and the specifics of its regions, and not make generalizations about India as a whole (“from time immemorial, Indians lived in the same exact social hierarchy and followed the same exact religious practices without any change, evolution, or influence from the world”). This is one such book that treats pre-modern India in a historical sense. It focuses on the Deccan (the peninsula of South India)’s empires, but particularly on the Chalukyas, who dominated southern and western India for centuries (three separate dynasties ruled roughly the same area from modern-day Karnataka from the 6th to 12th centuries: the Chalukyas of Badami, the Rashtrakutas, and the Chalukyas of Kalyani). My ancestors lived under the Eastern Chalukyas of Vengi, an offshoot of the same dynasty, for whatever its worth. Good and unique window into an interesting time and place, during the classical era of Indian history.
Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World
I ended up loving this book a lot more than I expected to. The book mostly covers Greco-Roman book culture, including the composition of works, copying, and libraries, but is in the form of an large essay in which the author roves across multiple social and historical topics.
Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East
This is an interesting book that documents the lives of the people of ancient Mesopotamia based on cuneiform tablets that have been recovered from Iraq and Syria. Nice if one wants a dive into the lives of merchants, artisans, priests, princesses, builders, scribes, lawgivers, and so on. A pleasant read, focused on daily lives, not battles. It is surprising how much personal, individual, familial information is recorded on cuneiform tablets, which were not kept just for administrative purposes.
Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire
I looked forward to this book and found it interesting, but looking back on it after more than half a year, I don’t know how memorable it was in the long run. Don’t get me wrong, it was good, well-researched, and well-written, but portions of Assyrian history are so distant and remote, that at times, it feels repetitive describing that a certain king did a certain thing and then reading that another king a century later did a similar thing again. For much of its history, Assyria, while a powerful regional state, wasn’t a particularly notable or interesting place compared to its neighbors. But certainly, the final period of Assyrian history, when it developed into a great Middle Eastern Empire circa 900 BCE to 600 BCE is very interesting, and in that latter part of the book, you get more into the history. This is certainly the first attempt at real empire in history, though it was mostly a story of constant expansion and retraction for three centuries. Assyria is notable—although the author pushes back on this—for its exceptional cruelty, for its pioneering of ethnic cleansing and ethnic deportation that totally wiped out and changed the demographics of the Middle East and lead to the spread of Aramaic as the lingua franca. The empire failed because it could not impose the writ of its control over so many subjugated peoples by brute force, without strategies of local autonomy or co-option used by the later Persians and Romans. In the end, the empire fell almost completely as people who hated it rose up against it, though its people survive to this day as the Assyrian Christians of Iraq.
Rome and Persia: The Seven Hundred Year Rivalry
This topic interests me a lot, so I was glad to see a book released on this specific subject. The only other real rival and complex state near the Roman Empire was the Persian Empire in its various iterations. This book covers Roman relations with two empires based in modern-day Iran: the Parthian Empire (247 BCE to 224 CE) and the Sassanian Empire (224 CE to 651 CE). The former is obscure, almost at times lost to the sands of time, whereas the latter is well known, studied extensively, and looms extremely large in the consciousness of modern Iran. The dearth of historical information on the Parthians really shows in this book—it isn’t the author’s fault at all, of course. But the source bias is really heavily skewed toward Rome in the first half of the book, although important events occurred involving Parthia during this period, including the Battle of Carrhae (53 BCE) and Trajan’s conquests of Mesopotamia (117 CE). Often, it is hard to even tell how one Parthian king was related to another, and how the various branches throughout the empire were related. The nature of the Parthian state is also unclear, but it seems to be that of a decentralized empire with lots of local autonomy and semi-independent kings under the king of kings.
However, there is a lot of good, detailed information on the Sassanian Empire, and the author brings in recent archaeology to shed some light on the nature of the Sassanian army. There is cool information about a major fortification near modern Tehran showing that the Sassanians supported a huge, standing army, as well as some stuff on the Great Wall of Gorgon, now on Iran’s northeastern border, which protected Persia from steppe nomads. I also enjoyed the discussion of the nature of the Persian and Roman armies, how they used infantry and cavalry, and other such stuff.
The author also talks about a lot of other events that occurred in the Middle East during this period, such as Zenobia’s Palmyrene Empire, so the book is very comprehensive. There’s a great deal about Armenia, which was a major state at that time. However, I wish the author connected Roman geographical place names to their contemporary locations better, and also wish the author had attempted to describe some of these obscure kingdoms between the Persians and Romans in more detail. For example, we frequently hear about Caucasian Iberia (in Georgia) and Caucasian Albania (in Azerbaijan), names which are confusing, because they have naught to do modern Albania and Iberia. We know next to nothing about these places, even though they were fought over for years. Even if there is little in the records on them, I would have appreciated informed speculation.
I’ve read other books by Adrian Goldsworthy before, and I have always been satisfied and informed. This book fits that pattern. His style is readable, but someone totally new to Roman or Persian history could be a bit overwhelmed by the volume of information.
Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300
What an excellent, detailed take on how Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire and then Europe. It goes into a detailed breakdown of the nature of the Roman bureaucratic system in spreading Christianity, the pressures on the elites through the system, and the association between Christianity and state-building in post-Roman Western Europe. Thus, the book takes one through the processes and policies that lead to the spread of Christianity.
There was one interesting theory early in the book that caught my attention: that the Emperor Constantine was actually born or raised Christian and did not convert after winning Battle of the Milvian Bridge, as the story goes. This is hard to prove either way, but it is an interesting theory, and can explain why Constantine was so devoted to Christianity, even when it was not exactly advantageous to profess it at that time—it wasn’t a cynical move to consolidate the empire, but true faith.
The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction
Although the title of the book suggests that the volume focuses on medieval monks, most of the book actually focuses on late antiquity monks from the eastern part of the Roman Empire (Byzantine Empire), including the desert fathers. I was less interested in the history of monks, or their motivations, than with the meditation techniques described into this book. Most books on mindfulness and meditation come from a Buddhist or Hindu perspective. One very cool chapter in this book elaborated on a method of remembering things that monks used. They would “build” a model in their heads, often literally creating mental images of castles or houses or what not. And using these models, they would place the memories of whatever subject or book they would be trying to memorize, placing these memories, as though they were objects, in different parts of the house or different rooms. Like memories or thoughts that helped recollect other thoughts would be placed near each other in an associative manner. This would way of remembering things is individually tailored, and often ruminative, but I have tried it, and I found it quite useful in remembering things and studying. I quote the author:
I teach a class for freshmen in which we try out different medieval cognitive practices to help students tackle their first year of college. Their favorite exercise, by far, is meditation in the mode of Hugh’s Little Book. They pick a concept from one of their classes that they think is worth exploring—a little piece of organic chemistry, say, or coding or poetry—and they set up an imaginary construction site for it. To start building, they have to start associating, asking themselves how that one piece relates to other pieces, whether the connection is strong or weak, whether there’s more to analyze and build. All that work basically amounts to high-level studying, but rather than being boring or intimidating, it’s adventurous and immersive. It’s also highly memorable—as students appreciate on exam days. -Kreiner, Jamie. The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction (pp. 161-162).
Emperor of Rome
I have not read this book yet, but it has gotten good reviews, and Mary Beard is a well-known and popular classicist and author of Roman history. This may well be one of the most popular ancient history releases in 2023. In a review at the Wall Street Journal, it is mentioned that the lives of the emperors and the nature of being emperor are considered, along with a lot of spicy facts and anecdotes, which all sound promising enough.
The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium
This book is a blessing unto mankind. It strikes a great balance between a serious scholarly, academic work, and the needs of communicating with a popular audience. It is both very readable and informative. It covers history, economics, society, philosophy, religion, and biographies of rulers. I came back from Turkey wanting to read more about the Byzantines in detail, and this book had knowledge I never even knew that I wanted. Because the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire lasted for so long in such a strategically important area, this book gave good overviews of many other events: the Byzantine-Sassanid Wars, Slavic Expansion, the Norman kingdom in Italy, the Crusades, the Arab conquests, and the Turkish invasion of Anatolia. It also has some of the nifty detailed research on historical trends that I like: for example, early on, it estimates the population of the empire, the specific regions of the empire, and the ethnolinguistic demographics of the empire—Latin speakers in the western Balkans, Greeks in Greece and Anatolia, and in big cities, Egyptian (Coptic) in Egypt, Armenian in eastern Anatolia, Aramaic in the Levant, and Arabic at the edges of the Levant. People who prefer narrative history may not find this that interesting, but I love it. But there’s plenty of narrative history as well.
Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King
This book has just come out, so I have not read far into it. It explores the life of Ashoka, the Mauryan emperor of India who patronized Buddhism, using primary sources, most of all the inscribed edicts of Ashoka. Ashoka, his father, and his grandfather ruled over the Mauryan Empire, the largest empire in Indian history until the Mughals almost two millennia later, for a century. The empire’s nature, successes, and failures are very important in considering the trends of Indian history.
It is rare to have enough specific information of historical Indian figures—due to the paucity of surviving sources—that allows one to write a detailed work, as one can do with Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. Ashoka’s edicts and the other multiple sources on his life allow for a full-length biography that would be difficult for other Indian figures. The author mentions in his introduction that his purpose is to write a biography on Ashoka based on historical sources, and not hagiography found in later Buddhist sources, although these are brought in, along with Hindu treatises, and Greek histories. I hope that the work will be fair but also critical. There are many questions about Ashoka’s life and rule that often get glossed over in the rush—in most modern treatments of him—questions to be asked, such as, for example, what sort of policies and administration did he pursue so that his empire began to collapse soon after his death? And was his Buddhism an elite religion layered over the indifferent masses?
In any case, I regard Patrick Olivelle’s work highly. His translations of various works such as the Arthashastra have set the gold standard for modern English editions of Sanskrit works.
After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations (Forthcoming)
As this book is not due out until next year, I cannot review it. However, Eric Cline’s previous book on the same subject, the late Bronze Age, and the Bronze Age collapse, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, was an excellent, interesting, and intriguing book that dealt with both the particulars of the politics and international affairs of the late Bronze Age in the Middle East, as well as the more general causes of civilizational collapse. The book has grown to be very popular, and I have encountered a lot of random people who have read it. I cannot wait for the sequel and what it has to say about the survival of empires.
Professor Cline was my professor in undergrad. I minored in history, and about half of the history classes I took were related to ancient history. I took two excellent classes with him, one on ancient Greece, and one on the ancient Near East. While I had been interested about the subject before, taking Professor Cline’s class really got my jump started on some of the more technical and academic elements of the field, including the nature of archaeology, and deciphering cuneiform. Great stuff.
In addition to the above, here are some other interesting books in ancient history that I’ve read over the past two years, although they are not new releases.
Julian: A Novel
This 1964 book, which I read in 2020, has been one of the most impactful novels that I have read. Along with a handful of other books—mostly from my teenage days—this book has influenced my thinking, philosophy, and worldview.
Gore Vidal was a famous and prolific author, and needs no introduction, although people of my generation are much less likely to have read him than the previous generation. Vidal and V.S. Naipaul are the two late 20th century novelists whose works are the ones that I have enjoyed the most.
I have always been interested in the history of religion. In particular, I have been attracted to spirituality that both combines elements and beliefs in the gods of many civilizations with a search for uniting principles. A lot of this can be found in Hinduism, and Hinduism also has a philosophical theory that can accommodate both oneness and pluralism in the questions of metaphysics and customs. However, the ancient Greco-Roman tradition also did so, and perhaps if the Greco-Roman religion had survived to the modern day, it would have resembled Hinduism in this respect. For the Greco-Roman religion is so much more than just the mythology and stories that we read today. It was a deeper, interconnected web of ritual, philosophy, practice, and religion. One of the key figures in the attempt to preserve the Greco-Roman religion in the face of the spread of Christianity was the Emperor Julian. Although he was emperor for only two years (361-363 CE) before his untimely death in battle, more is known about him than most other emperor as he was a prolific writer and and his reign was a watershed movement in the irrevocable conversion of the Roman Empire from paganism to Christianity. The memory of him as an alternative to the path that the empire would take endured for centuries.
While this work is a fictionalized novel, it draws heavily on primary sources, including quotes from the Emperor Julian’s own work. It does seem imbued with the author, Gore Vidal’s own views, but this does not take away from its value as a thoughtful and meaningful work. Due to the influence of this book, I began to adopt the Sun as my patron deity. While the sun itself is not the topic of that many interesting stories, it is both an independent deity, and is associated with other deities throughout the world, such as Apollo and Vishnu (as elements of them). It is, to be honest, just really cool as a source of art, symbolism and metaphor. I’ve provided some interesting quotes from the novel below on the nature of the metaphysical and godhead.
On the nature of oneness:
“Homer believed much as we believe. He worshipped the One God, the single principle of the universe. And I suspect he was aware that the One God can take many forms, and that the gods of Olympus are among them. After all, to this day God has many names because we have many languages and traditions, yet he is always the same.” “What are some of the old names?” “Zeus, Helios the sun, Serapis…” “The sun.” My deity. “Apollo…” I began. “Apollo also had many names, Helios, Companion of Mithras…” Vidal, Gore. Julian: A Novel (Vintage International) (p. 27).
On interpreting the gods and the world:
“Old legends are bound to conflict. But then, we never think of them as literally true. They are merely cryptic messages from the gods, who in turn are aspects of the One. We know that we must interpret them. Sometimes we succeed. Sometimes we fail. Vidal, Gore. Julian: A Novel (Vintage International) (p. 87).
On reconciling the one and the many, monism and pluralism:
Now if this god of the Jews were indeed, as Paul claimed, the One God, why then did he reserve for a single unimportant race the anointing, the prophets and the law? Why did he allow the rest of mankind to exist thousands of years in darkness, worshipping falsely? Of course the Jews admit that he is a ‘jealous god.’ But what an extraordinary thing for the absolute to be! Jealous of what? And cruel, too, for he avenged the sins of the fathers on guiltless children. Is not the creator described by Homer and Plato more likely? that there is one being who encompasses all life — is all life — and from this essential source emanates gods, demons, men? Or to quote the famous Orphic oracle which the Galileans are beginning to appropriate for their own use, ‘Zeus, Hades, Helios, three gods in one Godhead.’ ” “From the One many…” I began, but with Maximus one never needs to finish sentences. He anticipates the trend of one’s thought. “How can the many be denied? Are all emotions alike? or does each have characteristics peculiarly its own? And if each race has its own qualities, are not those god-given? And, if not god-given, would not these characteristics then be properly symbolized by a specific national god? In the case of the Jews a jealous bad-tempered patriarch. In the case of the effeminate, clever Syrians, a god like Apollo. Or take the Germans and the Celts — who are warlike and fierce — is it accident that they worship Ares, the war god? Or is it inevitable? The early Romans were absorbed by lawmaking and governing — their god? the king of gods, Zeus. And each god has many aspects and many names, for there is as much variety in heaven as there is among men. Some have asked: did we create these gods or did they create us? That is an old debate. Are we a dream in the mind of deity, or is each of us a separate dreamer, evoking his own reality? Though one may not know for certain, all our senses tell us that a single creation does exist and we are contained by it forever. Vidal, Gore. Julian: A Novel (Vintage International) (pp. 85-86).
On the mystical experience that Julian had in the novel:
When the sun was at last above the horizon, Maximus opened the door into the mountain and we entered a small cave with seats carved out of the rock. Here Oribasius and I were told to wait while the fathers of Mithras withdrew into yet another cave, the inner sanctuary. Thus began the most momentous day of my life. The day of the honey and of the bread and the wine; the day of the seven gates and the seven planets; the day of challenges and of passwords; the day of prayer and, at its end (past Raven, Bride, Soldier, Lion, Persian, Courier of the Sun, and Father), the day of Nama Nama Sebesio….When the day ended, Oribasius and I stumbled from the cave, born again. It was then that it happened. As I looked at the setting sun, I was possessed by light. What is given to few men was given to me. I saw the One. I was absorbed by Helios and my veins coursed not with blood but light. I saw it all. I saw the simplicity at the heart of creation. The thing which is impossible to grasp without the help of divinity, for it is beyond language and beyond mind: yet it is so simple that I marveled at how one could not have known what is always there, a part of us just as we are part of it. What happened inside the cave was a testing and a learning, but what happened to me outside the cave was revelation. I saw the god himself as I knelt among sage bushes, the red slanting sunlight full in my face. I heard that which cannot be written or told and I saw that which cannot be recorded in words or images. Yet even now, years later, it is as vivid in retrospect as it was at the time. For I was chosen on that steep mountainside to do the great work in which I am now engaged: the restoration of the worship of the One God, in all his beautiful singularity. I remained kneeling until the sun was gone. Then I knelt in darkness for what I am told was an hour. I knelt until Oribasius became alarmed and awakened me…or put me to sleep, for the “real” world ever since has seemed to me the dream while my vision of Helios is the reality. “Are you all right?” I nodded and got to my feet. “I have seen…” But I stopped. I could not say what I had seen. Even now, writing this memoir, I cannot describe what I experienced since there is nothing comparable in ordinary human experience. Vidal, Gore. Julian: A Novel (Vintage International) (pp. 92-94).
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
The ideas presented in this book initially seem so wack that I was left speechless. The essence of the bicameral mind theory is that one hemisphere of the brain speaks to the other part. This appears as auditory hallucinations to a person. Ancient people were said to have such minds, and the voices they heard were deemed to have been the voices of gods commanding them what to do. The voices repeating commands helped keep people focused on task. Moreover, because these voices were often associated with gods or kings, people literally did believe that ancient idols, mummies, and so on were actually speaking to them. People did not have consciousness, or were not conscious of their consciousness, or rumination. Eventually, humans in increasingly complex societies grew out of the bicameral mind in order to function. Deceit, theft, and murder are all functions of the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
I don’t believe in the specifics of this theory at all, and one of its biggest problems is that bicameral mind societies should have existed in places that were not complex until the 19th or 20th centuries, but there is nothing to indicate that tribes in the Amazon have such a different mental process. The author has said more on the details of this theory, but I won’t get into it here. There’s a very good, nuanced discussion of the theory at Scott Alexander’s blog, Slate Star Codex, here.
But what the author, psychologist Julian Jaynes, has done is to open up to inquiry the question of what exactly was going on in the minds and psychologies of people in ancient times. Many ancient ways of thinking were utterly alien to us, and it is clear that the mindsets of many cultures are radically different and shape cognition in various ways that may not seem self-evident. One thing that I might be coming to agree with Jaynes on is that awareness of our consciousness may be a function of verbal language: you can only think through using words in your head if you already know a verbal language; but if you don’t have a verbal language, you can still presumably think the same thoughts in a non-verbal way. So this sort of mental awareness of consciousness is a product of the mind, whereas consciousness itself if beyond verbal awareness. This seems to accord with what some Hindu-Buddhist philosophers say about the nature of the mind.
Many people, including myself, were surprised to find out over the course of their lives that not all people speak to themselves in their heads, and do not have verbal, word-based conversations as a means of thinking. But you can think without words in your head. If anything, this sort of wordless, less-introspective thinking seems to be a function of pre-literate, pre-individualistic societies, whereas internal rumination might have become more common in the past few hundred years, especially as societies modernize. This is all just my speculation ultimately. This book really leads to more questions than answers, but they are good questions.
Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History
Nice little book that covers the history of elephants and how they relate to humans. A bit on the use of elephants in warfare, ecological role, ceremonial role, and some comparative historical stuff, such as the different ways the ancient Indians and Chinese handled their elephant populations: Indians preserved some forests specifically so that elephants could breed and live there, which is why elephants remained part of Indian warfare and economics until modern times, whereas in China, forests were cut down for rice cultivation, so did not develop elephant-using culture.
The Mahabharata
I’ve been reading the entire, unabridged Mahabharata in English for two and a half years now. I am nearing the end and intend to write more on it in a separate post or series of posts, so I won’t say much here. This Indian epic is vast, the size of many other sacred and epic words combined. It is of an encyclopedic nature and would be like combining the Iliad and Odyssey with the prose and poetic works of dozens of other Greek and Roman writers to create a literature that encompassed a major chunk of the mythology, religion, philosophy, and poetry of its time. There is a core Mahabharata, but it’s been expanded upon and added to so much that it’s hard to separate the various layers of the text out. Nonetheless, some chapters can be excerpted and treated as individual works, like the Bhagavad Gita. Look forward to more on this next year.