Episode Details

We are super excited for this conversation. Owen Rees is the founder of the website badancient.com and we’ve been lucky enough to write a couple of articles over there on some misconceptions about the ancient Romans. So when we heard that Owen had a book coming out, we absolutely wanted to have a chat.

Special Episode – The Far Edges of the Known World with Owen Rees

The Far Edges of the Known World is coming out through Bloomsbury Press February 2025 and is all about what’s happening beyond the traditional centres of power that are the focus of historians such as Greece and Rome. What becomes clear in this conversation is that the written sources produce a focus on the centres of power for historians and that the archaeological record is critical to appreciating what’s happening in areas that weren’t the centre.

We start with a little bit on Ovid’s poor attitude to being in Tomis on the Black Sea and what that reveals about Rome BUT also reveals inadvertently about that society. There are generalisations about what place is where to navigate – where was Libya or India really? There's also plenty of scope to dip into the particulars of the archaeological record. To get a sense of the breadth and depth of Rees’ work we have a chat about:

• Ancient Sudan and what is happening through the cataracts along the Nile beyond the sway of Egypt. This includes thinking about the Kushites as well as the nomadic peoples of the region
• The limits of the ancient language and then our contemporary loaded terms ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarian’
• The fascinating city of Olbia, which seems to have been a meeting point between the Greeks and the Scythians resulting in a unique cultural nexus that feels effects of changing geopolitics when it comes to the Macedonians, the Persians, and the Romans

Things to listen out for