#1170 Walter Scheidel: What Is Ancient History?
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Why times can differ in your player
Hello everyone, welcome to a new episode of the Decenter. I'm your host as always, Ricardo Lopes, and today I'm joined by Dr. Walter Scheidel. He is Dickinson Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History at Stanford University. And today we're talking about his most recent book, What is Ancient History?
So Dr. Scheidel, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to everyone. Thank you for having me. So we're going to go through the main arguments that you present in the book in regards to how we deal with so-called ancient history and even what that means.
But to start off with, why do you think that studies of ancient history tend to be so restrictive? and focus almost exclusively on Rome and Greece. I think there are a number of reasons. It hasn't always been like this. So if you go back a few centuries, even in Europe, even in Western Europe, when people looked at antiquity, they would not just look at the Greeks and Romans, they would look at the Hebrew tradition and the Old Testament, what little was known about Egypt and so on.
We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (47 minutes, 7,739 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.
No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.