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When Cleopatra became queen of Egypt, in 51 BCE, the oldest pyramids that graced her realm, constructed in the 27th century BCE, had already been standing for more than 2,500 years. Cleopatra is one of the most iconic figures from antiquity, yet she is nearer in time to the present than she was to those first pyramids – by a half-millennium, no less.
This fact evokes a long ‘ancient history’ that is at once distant and familiar. Cleopatra stands as a direct link to some of the most famous Romans from antiquity: she was the paramour of Julius Caesar, lover and ally of Mark Antony, and inveterate enemy of Octavian, the future Augustus, who would capitalise on his victory over Antony and her to establish a hereditary monarchy at Rome. Cleopatra’s queenship also connects her to another legendary figure from classical antiquity, Alexander the Great. Alexander’s breathtaking subjugation of the largest empire the world had ever seen, the Achaemenid Persian Empire, laid the groundwork for the Macedonian kingdom in Egypt that Cleopatra inherited. Alexander’s conquests (334-323 BCE) also accelerated the diffusion of classical Greek culture, literature, philosophy and art – the core of what many in the West have long considered their heritage – across much of the Middle East and deep into Central Asia. Greek culture spread throughout Egypt, too, where those ancient pyramids were still dominating the desert skyline, precursors to later archetypal monuments from antiquity, such as the Parthenon in Athens (constructed in the mid-5th century BCE) or the Colosseum in Rome (80 CE).
When most of us think of ‘ancient history’ – when we think about it at all – we tend to think first of these ancient Mediterranean monuments, monarchs and generals. Today, the classical tradition is kept alive by splashy cover stories in National Geographic, a steady stream of ‘sword-and-sandal’ movies and cable series, casual references to the ‘Thucydides trap’ or the ‘Socratic method’, memes of men daydreaming about the Roman Empire and, perhaps above all, the omnipresence of neoclassical architectural forms in the public sphere. Greco-Roman monumentality anchors a robust set of associations and values. To pass through virtually any Western capital is to encounter an urban maze of marble columns, pediments, relief sculptures and domes, all of it, in its shared and easily legible idiom derived from Greece and Rome, conveying an unmistakable message of tradition, legitimacy and authority. ‘[T]he glory that was Greece,/And the grandeur that was Rome,’ evoked by Edgar Allan Poe in the revised version of his short poem ‘To Helen’ (1845), remains an animating ideal in our collective consciousness.
Until recently, this imagined world of ancient history – the world, in brief, of classical Greece and Rome, with an occasional glance towards Egypt – has been the one inhabited not only by the general public, but also by professional scholars. The de facto equation of ‘ancient history’ with ancient Mediterranean history, at least in most of the Anglosphere, has endured for many generations. But we are on the cusp of a dramatic shift in perspective that is producing a much bigger, broader and more exciting view of ‘the ancient world’.
Part of what is driving this expansion in perspective is an accumulation of evidence hinting at connections between the ancient Mediterranean and distant regions in Afro-Eurasia. We now know, for example, that trans-Saharan trade can be traced back to the first two centuries CE, at the height of the Roman Empire, when Roman products such as wine, olive oil and silver were exchanged – largely through merchants operating in the southwestern Libyan desert – for gemstones, ivory and slaves. Hoards of Roman coins have been found well beyond the frontiers of the empire, from Scandinavia to India. A papyrus from Egypt in the middle of the 2nd century CE records the details of two contracts for the import of various goods from India, including pepper, pearls, silk and gemstones, shipped to Alexandria from the port of Muziris in Kerala, southwest India. What all of this implies is a far-flung web of transimperial commercial contacts in the first few centuries CE.
Historians of the ancient Mediterranean are increasingly reckoning with a ‘global antiquity’
Such transcontinental connectivities can be found further away from the Mediterranean basin, too, revealing overlapping circuits of exchange that stretched all the way to South and East Asia. For instance, a 1st-century CE hoard uncovered in Tillya Tepe, in northern Afghanistan, revealed a stunning wealth of gold coins, jewellery and other high-value artefacts, with some objects bearing Greek stylistic influences, and others deriving from India (ivory) and Han China (bronze mirrors). This material formed the basis for a blockbuster exhibit at the British Museum, aptly named ‘Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World’. Further east, near the oasis of Dunhuang, at the head of the Hexi Corridor leading into the North China Plain, a cache of letters from the early 4th century CE written by Sogdian merchants and addressed to recipients in Samarkand, in Uzbekistan, detail the Central- and East-Asian trade in precious metals, spices and textiles, including silk. These ancient commercial networks can be traced all the way to the Pacific rim of East Asia. The most spectacular finds come from the port city of Guangzhou, in southern China, where the tomb for Zhao Mo, the ruler of the regional kingdom of Nanyue in the mid-2nd century BCE (137-122), contained a number of exotic objects, including African elephant tusks and a silver box with motifs and craftsmanship derived from Persia.
Inspired by these tantalising clues of long-distance connectivity, historians of the ancient Mediterranean are increasingly moving beyond the Greeks and Romans and reckoning with a ‘global antiquity’, encompassing not just the Mediterranean basin and its continental hinterlands – the core of the traditional ‘ancient world’ – but the whole of Afro-Eurasia (and, in its widest conception, the worlds of Oceania and the Americas as well). Conferences, seminars, publications, university research centres – the whole apparatus of academic knowledge production, in other words – have begun to establish the infrastructure of an exciting new field. What this new global antiquity properly entails, however, and how it might be relevant to 21st-century interests and concerns, are open questions.
The main backdrop for the new global antiquity is the transcontinental macroregion of Afro-Eurasia, especially the broad, temperate band stretching from the Mediterranean basin through the Iranian Plateau and Indian subcontinent to the Pacific Rim of China. Overland, maritime and riverine transportation systems together formed a complex communications network that embraced much of this space, enabling the sorts of contacts sketched above. The spine of the system was an east-west corridor, articulated into a series of overlapping, land-based routes. These overland routes connected Anatolia and the whole of the West Asian Fertile Crescent (the Levant and the Euphrates and Tigris river valleys) to the Iranian Plateau, with passages running up through the Hindu Kush mountain range and continuing into Central Asia. From there, a series of routes continued east through the Tarim Basin and Hexi Corridor (Gansu Province in northwest China). These routes then descended through the river valleys of the North China Plain before reaching the main population centres of ancient East Asia. When these pathways connecting the Mediterranean to East Asia were fully activated is difficult to say. We know that Chinese silk was reaching Mediterranean markets from at least the 1st century BCE, even if it has proven difficult to pinpoint its precise lines of movement. Nevertheless, we can think of this east-west corridor as an ancient ‘silk road’.
The Indian Ocean was arguably the geographical core of the premodern Afro-Eurasian world system
Impressive and cinematic in scope, the idea of an ancient ‘silk road’ captures the imagination. More important in fostering long-distance communication, however, was maritime connectivity. Prior to the industrial age, waterborne transport was always cheaper and faster than overland alternatives. For the sorts of long-distance routes that wrapped around this transcontinental region, this economy of movement was particularly important. Interior bodies of water, especially the Mediterranean Sea and its continental antechamber, the Black Sea, together with a lattice of navigable rivers and their tributaries, facilitated mobility in and around much of western Eurasia. Already by the 2nd millennium BCE, we can trace the long-distance, waterborne movement of gold, silver and tin from their sources in Atlantic and continental Europe, across the Mediterranean, to Anatolia and west Asia, where demand was high. Similarly, in East Asia, the major east-west river systems – enhanced by artificial waterways and canal works, constructed in the late 1st millennium BCE – channelled the regular movement of various bulk goods, especially grain, salt and iron, from producers to consumers.
The open oceans flanking Eurasia were not yet major, transregional connectors – a fully global network would not come to life until the Age of Discovery. The Indian Ocean, by contrast, was arguably the geographical core of the premodern Afro-Eurasian world system. The Arabian Sea in particular was a vital nexus of communications. It linked the shores of the Mediterranean, via the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf (and short overland and riverine routes), with the east coast of Africa, the southern shores of the Arabian Peninsula, the Indus Valley (which then joined up with the east-west land-based routes bestriding the Tibetan Plateau), and South Asia. Scholars refer to the Arabian Sea and its littoral zones as ‘the Indian Ocean World’. It was a lively and dynamic space of movement and exchange in antiquity. This is the context for the long-distance cargoes recorded in the Muziris papyrus; it is also the background to the spectacular wealth of Palmyra, the caravan city in central Syria that controlled much of the cross-desert trade in the first three centuries CE in silk and in spices from Arabia (cassia, cinnamon, myrrh, incense) and India (pepper). Though less intensively studied, the Bay of Bengal, which brought South Asia into contact with the Pacific Rim via the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea, probably formed a secondary oceanic core already in the first half of the 1st millennium CE.
The physical geography of temperate Afro-Eurasia, then, enabled a particular configuration of long-distance connectivities. But how extensively and how deeply was this transcontinental region interconnected in antiquity? Should we see ancient Afro-Eurasia as an integrated ‘world system’? We can reconstruct the broad contours of such a system in the Middle Ages, from the middle of the first to the middle of the 2nd millennium CE. This was the world brilliantly brought to light, and to much fanfare, in the recent ‘Silk Roads’ exhibit at the British Museum in London. What made the show so remarkable was quite simply the assemblage, in a single space, of a wide assortment of premodern objects that had travelled over vast distances before settling in far-flung locales. A humble, 6th-century glass bowl from Iran was found in Nara, Japan. From a shipwreck near Sumatra in Indonesia, divers recovered a 9th-century turquoise-glazed ceramic amphora from West Asia. There were luxury goods on display, too, including a spectacular 7th-century golden necklace found in the eastern Mediterranean with lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and rock crystal from Madagascar, and a remarkable set of 8th-century ivory chess pieces from South Asia discovered in Samarkand in Uzbekistan. These long-distance connections reached into the far west of Eurasia, too, as revealed by the fragments of a 10th-century Chinese silk tunic found in Sweden, or the 8th-century Central Asian silver vessels that made their way to Scotland.
Grand exhibitions like ‘Silk Roads’ help to underpin the narrative of a ‘global Middle Ages’, which is now a well-established field of scholarly enquiry. But when did this sort of transcontinental connectivity begin? Can we speak of a ‘global antiquity’ along similar lines? The answer depends in part on the regularity, directionality and intensity of transcontinental exchange across Afro-Eurasia prior to the middle of the 1st millennium BCE. For connectivity implies regular and sustained contact, and a genuine ‘world system’ requires a high degree of transregional interdependence. There are several indications of long-distance contact of the sort highlighted above, and some spectacular findings, but such indicators are not by themselves enough to posit an integrated ancient Afro-Eurasia, much less a fully fledged ‘world system’. What we really need now is more raw data; what we need, in brief, is still more archaeology.
With all of this evidence has come a radically new picture of the ancient economy, one that was dynamic and rational
That archaeological evidence from the ancient world might eventually enable us to speak more authoritatively about an interconnected global antiquity in Afro-Eurasia is no pipe dream; indeed, such evidence has had a decisive impact on similar questions in the recent past. In his highly influential synthesis The Ancient Economy (1973), Moses Finley put forward a ‘primitivist’ picture of the economy of the Greek and Roman world, defined by the absence of a market and the deep embedding of economic exchange within a prevailing matrix of social relations. The resulting view of the ancient economy as small in scale, stagnant in operation and backwards in orientation held sway for many years. This was important because it helped to build momentum for the proposition, then a revisionist one, that the seemingly familiar world of the ancient Greeks and Romans was fundamentally alien from modern experience.
When Finley was writing, there was not much archaeological evidence for regional and transregional trade in and around the ancient Mediterranean. A big part of his argument about the scale of the economy hinged on this relative paucity of evidence for large-scale exchange. But a generation of archaeological work has demolished this picture. We now have excellent evidence for regional and transregional trade and commerce, especially during the pax Romana of the first two centuries CE. A set of quantifiable indices – the circulation of coins; the number and distribution of ceramic containers carrying wine, olive oil and fish products; the number of shipwrecks found around the shores of the Mediterranean – tells an incontrovertible story of dramatically increased commercial exchange and economic activity at the height of the Roman Empire.
And with all of this new evidence has come a radically new picture of the ancient economy, one that was dynamic, rational and shaped by the forces of an honest-to-goodness market. It is perhaps not too much to hope, then, that a new generation of archaeologists – working mainly in eastern Africa and inner Asia – will generate enough new material to underpin a more empirically robust picture of an integrated ancient Afro-Eurasia, especially in the period from roughly 300 BCE to 300 CE. Whether political and economic conditions in these regions (or anywhere, for that matter) will permit such work in the coming years, of course, is hardly a sure thing.
In the meantime, we have at our disposal another powerful tool for thinking about ancient Afro-Eurasia in a ‘global’ framework: comparison. Comparative historical study of ancient states and societies differs from connective investigation of ‘global antiquity’ in its organisation around discrete times and places, or ‘cases’, as the preferred units of analysis. One advantage to this approach is that the cases chosen for comparative study need not be connected in either space or time – in fact, isolation of comparative cases simplifies the analysis since it is unnecessary to account for influence between ‘case A’ and ‘case B’. We might compare ancient Babylonian and early Greek astronomy, for example, framing the analysis in part as a study of cross-cultural exchange, but we might just as easily compare, say, the Mauryan and Aztec empires, fully ‘discrete’ historical phenomena and widely separated in both time and space, in order to gain a better understanding of both – or, indeed, of the characteristics of ancient empires as such.
As an illustration of the potential insights to be derived from comparison, let us consider the Roman and Han Chinese empires. At their respective heights, both between c200 BCE and 200 CE, each state claimed about 4 million square kilometres of territory, and each one ruled over something in the order of 60 million subjects. There are a number of structural similarities between them: centralised governments, standing armies, monetised currencies, elaborate literary cultures, and so on. Such similarities between two imperial systems on opposite ends of ancient Eurasia – which prevailed even in the absence of sustained, direct contact between them – can help us understand the basic parameters within which large states and configurations of power could coalesce under premodern conditions.
In China, the emperors’ authority was enhanced by invisibility. In ancient Rome, a model of rulership developed in which visibility was mandatory
But the differences between the Roman and Han empires can be equally illuminating. Consider, for example, the ideologies of rulership in the two imperial systems. In both empires, political authority was steeply hierarchical, and in both cases, the hierarchy was crowned by the figure of a ruling monarch who sat alone at its apex. The representational politics of these empires, however, differed sharply. In the Roman Empire, in every imaginable medium, political authority was explicitly, systematically and visibly represented, above all in the figure of the emperor himself. In Han China, by contrast, political authority was heavily veiled. There can be no better illustration of this dichotomy than the design of the central coinages of the two empires. The Roman imperial coinage was dominated by the portrait of the ruling emperor. Imperial coins, circulating from one end of the empire to the other, continually proclaimed the very fact of emperorship, and with it, the political authority of the whole system. Han Chinese coins, by contrast, had no visible markers of monarchic rule, and could almost be called ‘empty signifiers’, their monetary value entirely abstracted from the political authority that guaranteed it. And the same goes for imperial portrait statuary: omnipresent in the Roman Empire, virtually unknown in the Han. We are confronted here by two representational and discursive systems that are fundamentally opposed.
Grappling with this divergence in the relative visibility of monarchic authority in the two empires suggests some explanations, but also generates further questions. How did such a difference arise in the first place? We might turn to longterm historical trajectories. In China, a feudal monarchy going back to 2nd millennium BCE invested the institution of monarchy with a transcendent authority that required little formal justification, and that was in fact enhanced by invisibility. In the ancient Mediterranean world, by contrast, a long tradition of collective decision-making in open-air, civic spaces gave rise to a model of rulership in which accountability and visibility were mandatory. As a result, one might have guessed that Han rulers were mostly ‘invisible’ while their Roman counterparts were ‘everywhere’, symbolically. From such elementary observations, one could then bring other ancient monarchies into the discussion, aiming either to develop a deeper understanding of the Roman or Han cases, or (more ambitiously) to think comparatively about the visual representation of political authority in ancient monarchies more generally. Such analysis might in turn invite consideration of the similarities and differences between ancient and modern political systems and their respective representational regimes. The point is that even a simple comparison between two ‘cases’ opens up many new avenues of enquiry.
Comparative analysis, then, makes a useful complement to connective investigation in understanding the dynamics of ancient Afro-Eurasia. And explicitly comparative study, like the more traditional work establishing long-distance connections across Afro-Eurasia, is gaining momentum. What we can expect in the next generation of scholarship, I imagine, is a fuller, more colourful, and more interesting version of a ‘global’ ancient history that will of course include the Mediterranean – there is still much to discover about the Greeks, Romans and other peoples who inhabited this maritime intersection of three continents – but one that will take the whole of this intercontinental world (or worlds) as its proper subject matter. Nor should ancient historians remain confined to Afro-Eurasia: historical comparison of structures and developments in other parts of the premodern world, especially the Americas, promises to shed light on the deepest patterns of social and political change. Global antiquity, that is, can and should aspire to be fully global in the literal sense.
This is surely the most exciting development in the field of ancient history in many years. But there are also some risks associated with the new global antiquity, and we should not ignore them. One concerns the stubbornly canonical status of the ancient Greeks and Romans as avatars of ‘the classical’, with all of the historical and ideological baggage that comes with that idea. In principle, of course, the wider vision entailed by a ‘global’ antiquity, whether pursued in a connective or a comparative framework, should help to decentre Greece and Rome. This shift in perspective is long overdue, especially in the UK, Europe and North America. But some observers might worry that ‘global antiquity’ is just a decorative label that serves to elevate Greece and Rome in a new and sneaky way. The worry is not entirely unfounded. For if our connective studies are always oriented towards the ancient Mediterranean, or if the Greeks and Romans are always taken even implicitly as the default standards with which other societies and peoples are compared, then ‘the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome’ will find a new buttress of support, cast in contemporary idiom. And even if we view Afro-Eurasian connectivity from the perspective of the North China Plain, or conduct our comparative analyses in rigorously neutral terms, we may nevertheless run the risk of further entrenching an imaginary binary between ‘West’ and ‘East’. That would certainly be a retrograde move. Finally, we should acknowledge that the open-ended spirit of the new global antiquity can be exploited by authoritarian governments looking for respectable sources of legitimacy. Nowhere is this risk more patent than in China, which has sought to align itself with Greece as one of the two putative ‘foundational’ ancient cultures of Eurasia, while also organising showcase exhibits that reinforce one-sided nationalist narratives, such as the Chinese Archaeological Museum in Beijing, where the galleries tell a story linking the glories of China’s ancient past with the greatness of its present and future under the rule of Xi Jinping.
Humanity faces a number of acute challenges that will require transnational solutions
In coming to grips with the potential prospects and pitfalls of the new global antiquity, it is perhaps worth noting that our own global world has arrived at an inflection point – and this, as much as the latest archaeological discoveries, is surely driving contemporary interest in the global past. As a set of institutions, processes, relationships and ideals that has catalysed the worldwide circulation of everything from cellphones, financial instruments, American English and street fashion, to labourers, raw materials, Coca-Cola and microbes, globalisation has been the defining feature of post-Second World War global history, especially following a period of intensification beginning in the 1990s. The end of the Cold War, the advent of the internet, and the explosive rise of China as an economic powerhouse have turbo-charged global connectivity over the past generation, with the twin hubs of the North Atlantic and East Asia functioning both as engines and as beneficiaries of this current iteration of the global order.
But the tectonic plates that have supported globalisation are moving. A structure that we have come to live with and take for granted – regardless of our feelings about it – suddenly appears unstable. Reassertions of national sovereignty, often couched in the language of ethnonationalism, and increasingly aggressive, imperialist claims to strategic or resource-rich territories are beginning to reinscribe the importance of borders and territoriality in a world that had been chugging along towards an ever greater, transnational integration of capital, information and culture. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the chaotic imposition of sky-high tariffs on foreign goods imported into the United States – especially those from China – are only the most conspicuous examples of such territorial and nationalist retrenchments. The timing of such developments is unfortunate. For humanity faces a number of acute challenges that transcend national borders and that will require transnational solutions. The risks associated with climate change loom particularly large here. And this, too, has destabilised the globalisation framework. As we lurch towards the precipice of ecological collapse, some observers have argued that we need to jettison the human-centric conceit of ‘the global’ entirely and replace it with ‘the planetary’, explicitly oriented around the environment, as the key organising concept for thinking about the world and our place in it.
A ‘globalised’ vision of ancient Afro-Eurasia can hardly solve such problems, of course, but it can give us a useful perspective on them. It is not just that the new global antiquity is opening up countless new paths of historical enquiry into the deep past. It is that this new field is also generating a richer and more layered context for thinking about our own globalised world – considerably more complex than its ancient predecessor, to be sure, but shaped by similar dynamics of movement, exchange, connectivity and competition. Perhaps the ultimate promise of the new global antiquity is the prospect it offers for helping us appreciate our interconnected past, our collective heritage and, ultimately, our common humanity.