flâneur

Uncovering a global ancient history beyond Greece and Rome | Aeon Essays

aeon.co · 4,239 words · saved by 1 readers

A model chariot discovered in Tajikistan, dating from the 5th-4th century BCE. Courtesy the British Museum, London is Class of 1955 professor of history and director of the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Imperial Ideals in the Roman West: Representation, Circulation, Power (2011) and editor of A Cultural History of Western Empires: Antiquity (2018), among others. Edited bySam Haselby Listen to this essay 28 minute listen 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 t

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…

saved by

related reading