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.
