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Ancient history

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For other uses of the word ancient, see ancient (disambiguation).

Ancient history is the study of significant cultural and political events from the beginning of human history until the Early Middle Ages.

The term classical antiquity is often used to refer to ancient history since the beginning of ancient Greek history in about 776 BC. This coincides roughly with the traditional date of the founding of Rome in 753 BC, the beginning of the history of ancient Rome.

Although the ending date of ancient history is disputed, currently most Western scholars use the fall of the Western Roman Empire in AD 476 as the end of ancient European history.

The span of recorded history is roughly 5 000 – 5 500 years, with Sumerian cuneiform being the oldest form of writing discovered so far.
Thus, this is the beginning of the history in the universal acceptation of all historians.

The times before writing belong either to the protohistory or to the prehistory.

The study of ancient history

The fundamental difficulty of studying ancient history is the fact that only a fraction of it has been documented, and only a fraction of those recorded histories have survived into the present day. Literacy was not widespread in any culture until long after the end of ancient history, so there were few people capable of writing histories. Even those written histories which were produced were not widely distributed; the ancients, not having the luxury of a printing press had to make copies of books by hand. The Roman Empire was one of the ancient West's most literate cultures, but many works by its most widely read historians are lost. For example, Livy, a Roman historian who lived in the 1st century BC, wrote a history of Rome called Ab Urbe Condite ("From the Founding of the City") in 142 volumes. Only 35 still survive. Historians have two major avenues which they take to better understand the ancient world: archaeology and the study of primary sources.

Archaeology

Main article: Archaeology

Archaeology is the study of material remains in an effort to interpret and reconstruct past human behavior. In the study of ancient history, archaeologists excavate the ruins of ancient cities looking for clues as to how the people of the time period lived.

Some important discoveries by archaeologists studying ancient history include:

Primary sources

Perhaps most of what is known of the ancient world comes from the accounts of antiquity's own historians. Although it is important to take into account the bias of each ancient author, their firsthand (or primary) accounts are the basis for our understanding of the ancient past.

Some of the more notable ancient writers include:
Herodotus, Josephus, Livy, Polybius, Suetonius, Tacitus, Thucydides and Sima Qian.

Chronology

Prehistory

History

Some important events:

The older Ancient history

The latter Ancient history

End of ancient history in Europe

The date used as the end of the ancient era is entirely arbitrary and is a matter of some dispute amongst historians. Some other dates that are given for the end of antiquity are:

Some prominent civilizations of ancient history

Europe and the Mediterranean

East Asia

Central and Southwest Asia

Saharan and Sub-Saharan Africa

The Americas

References and further reading

  • [1] Everyman His Own Historian, Carl Becker (1931) Speech delivered to the American Historical Association
  • Eyewitness Testimony, Elizbeth Loftus, Harvard, (1996)
  • Decoding Ancient History : A toolkit for the historian as detective, Carol G. Thomas, D.P. Wick, Prentice Hall. (1993)
  • Changes in the Roman Empire: Essays in the Ordinary, Ramsay Mac Mullen, Princeton (1993)
  • Greeks and the Irrational, E. R. Dodds, U of Calif Press (1964)
  • History of Magic and Experimental Science, Lynn Thorndike (1923)
  • Enemies of the Roman Order: Treason, Unrest & Alienation in the Empire, Ramsay Mac Mullen, Harvard (1966)
  • [2] Directory of Ancient Historians in the USA
  • The Idea of History, R.G. Collingwood (1946)
  • What is History?, E.H. Carr (Becker 1931, Loftus 1996, Mac Mullen 1990, Thorndike 1923, Mac Mullen 1966, Thomas & Wick 1993)
  • Project Livius. Articles on Ancient History

See also

The Wikibook [[wikibooks:|]] has a page on the topic of: Wikijunior Ancient Civilizations
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