The Far Edges of the Known World with Owen Rees

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

• Women? In military forts? Shocking stuff!
• Vindolanda and it’s amazing cache of letters of everyday life
• The nomadic Medjay being paid to police other nomadic groups
• The way that conquest can produce redefinition of self – case in point Rome and Briton
• The challenges of the British accent when it comes to Ancient Rome on screen
• A penchant for trousers
• The development of coinage in Olbia
• The challenges of writing a book about the edges of the world

Author of The Far Edges of the Known World: A New History of the Ancient Past, Owen Rees

Music Credits

Our music is composed by the amazing Bettina Joy de Guzman.

Automated Transcript

Lightly edited for the Latin and our wonderful Australian accents!

Dr Rad 0:15
Welcome to the Partial Historians.

Dr G 0:19
We explore all the details of ancient Rome

Dr Rad 0:23
Everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battled wage and when citizens turn against each other. I'm Dr Rad

Dr G 0:33
and I'm Dr G, we consider Rome as the Romans saw it, by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories.

Dr Rad 0:44
Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city.

Dr G 0:50
Hello and welcome to a brand new episode of the Partial Historians. I am one of your hosts, Dr G

Dr Rad 0:58
And I am Dr Rad

Dr G 1:00
And we are very excited to sit down today with Owen Rees to talk about his new book ‘The Far Edges of the Known World'. Even the title sounds very impressive. I'm like OoOoo. Owen Rees is an ancient historian. He held a Leverhulme early career fellowship at the University of Nottingham, and is a lecturer in applied humanities for Birmingham Newman University. He is the founder and lead editor of the website badancient.com which brings together specialists to fact check common claims. I'll say that again, which brings together specialists to fact check common claims made about the ancient world. We are absolutely thrilled to talk with Owen about his new book, ‘The Far Edges of the Known World, which is published by Bloomsbury Press. Welcome Owen.

Owen Rees 1:57
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

Dr G 1:59
An absolute pleasure. So to get us softly into this topic, because I feel like this topic is actually huge, I'm wondering what sparked your fascination for this idea of borders and edges when it comes to the ancient world.

Owen Rees 2:16
Yeah, it's a valid question, because it's not really talked about a lot, or when it is talked about, it's often in terms of conflict. So especially in the Roman Empire, we think hard borders, conflict and wars generally. So I mean, put it simply, it bugs me that the ancient world is always done from cultural centers. So every time we talk about ancient history, we talk about Athens, we talk about Rome, Alexandria, places like this. And that's all fascinating and interesting stuff, but I'm always struck with the kind of question in my head of, well, what about everyone else? What's everyone else up to? And how do these highfalutin ideas that people are coming up with like Plato and the like. How does that play out for, shall we say, normal people around the world? So first of all, it was to kind of get away from the obvious stories and the obvious narratives of the ancient world, ones that you know, we've all read, listened to and watched and kind of grew up with. I suppose another aspect was I was I was really interested in the idea of the ancient world being the whole world. You know, we often talk about, we study the ancient world, we love the ancient world, but all we really talk about is the Mediterranean, or the Mediterranean basin, really. So, you know, Egypt, Italy, Greece, maybe a bit of Turkey

Dr G 3:39
Guilty as charged.

Owen Rees 3:41
Yeah, we all do it. We all do it. And I just, I wanted to move away from that. And I mean, ultimately, I think it also played into an obsession of mine, which is, I love underdogs. I've always loved underdog stories from, you know, sort of watching films growing up in England, you know, watching films like Zulu, and I find the Zulus much more interesting than than the British forces, you know, sort of watching westerns. And it was never the cowboys I was that interested in. My siblings used to always take the mick that I always supported the losing side, but I always just found their stories more interesting, and I found their cultures more interesting. So that's kind of like underpinning, shall we say, of what interested me in this. But otherwise it's from a historical point of view. I hate inconsistencies. And what you often find when you read about Roman culture, Roman law, Greek culture and Greek laws, is they stop applying the further away you get from Greece, from Rome. I mean, a classic example from the Roman period is the idea of the imperial army, in particular, soldiers. It's illegal for soldiers to marry, not allowed to marry, and this has influenced the way archeologists have studied numerous. Forts and numerous sites over the years. And if anyone had ever thought early on to look at places like Egypt, for instance, we have loads of evidence in the Greek language that Roman soldiers are married, and then it turns out they're just not married in the Latin language. So you get this lovely interplay of an accepted rule breaking and almost like, Okay, well, we can't officially say it, but of course you are. And as a result, like studies of Roman thoughts over the past 20 years have started realizing that perhaps you know, evidence of women or children in forts doesn't need to be explained with strange excuses. And actually, maybe they were supposed to be there.

Dr G 5:46
What. What are the women doing there?

Owen Rees 5:50
I know, what is this chaos?

Dr Rad 5:53
There's a keep out sign, very clearly on the door.

Owen Rees 5:59
So it was, yeah, it was just, I think looking at the board has just challenged a lot of what I grew up thinking I knew about the ancient world, what other people taught me about the ancient world. And I just found that really interesting. The way I often sell it to other people is from a more general point of view. If you look at the ancient world and only look at the center, you are basically committing the cardinal sin of a traveler who goes to London and thinks they've seen Great Britain, you know, goes to Sydney and so think they've seen Australia, and you just haven't. You've seen something amazing. You've seen something flamboyant and spectacular and culturally fascinating, but you have not seen everything, and you have not seen anything close to everything. And so that was kind of what inspired the idea of the book in the first place.

Dr G 6:49
Oh, that is really cool.

Dr Rad 6:50
It is. And so for people who would like to pick up a copy of your book, you're going to take them to places across Africa, the Caucasus, and Asia. But as Roman historians, we're very aware that there are the very serious limitations when it comes to the way that Roman perspectives can be imposed, and the kind of world that is created from Roman sources. So what were the challenges that you encountered when researching these edges of the world? And how did you tackle those challenges?

Owen Rees 7:21
Oh, there were quite a few. I'll be honest with you, I suppose the biggest. I'm a historian by background. So my main bread and butter are written sources, you know. So I think Herodotus, think Plutarch, you know, people like this. This is, this is where I spend my time. When you start going to the edges of the ancient world, there's a lot less of it, and those written sources are either less interested in what's going on at the edge or have a very skewed perspective of what's going on at the edge. So first thing I had to embrace very early on was that archeology was a much closer friend than sort of the standard historical text I'm used to working with. So that's the first thing, but the second thing, this kind of opens up opportunities. So we don't have large narratives from all these kind of sites. I There are no large narratives coming out of Ukraine in the ancient period that just aren't but what there is alongside the archeology in some of these sites are fascinating written sources that don't appear anywhere else. So oddly enough, whilst we we obsess over Greece and Rome, our best evidence, in terms of the amount of evidence and in terms of what it tells us about everyday life, comes in the Roman period from two places, really, to my mind, one is Vindolanda. So that's a Hadrian's Wall in the north of England, where we have surviving written tablets from a fort. So we have a remarkably large cache of letters, basically, and notes from a Roman fort telling us what's going in and out, telling us what's happening. It's really boring, but it's really fascinating at the same time. And that's what I love, because, you know, life isn't always exciting. So you know, there's lovely letters of people complaining they haven't been sent socks, and things like this. It's just amazing. If you haven't seen it, anyone listening, you gotta have a look. They're great fun. But the other site, well, the site I look at, but actually it's the entire region of the Faiyum region in Roman Egypt. So when Egypt is on Roman control, you've got the Faiyum Oasis, which is to the west of, or southwest of what is now modern Cairo. Amazing place to go. And we have just a remarkable amount of papyri. So you know, the written paper from Egypt just stored in people's houses whilst they kept them safe. So these are, like people's personal archives, really. So it's documents that they want to keep safe, things that are important to them. Some of them are like contracts. Some of them are personal letters between like themselves and their mother or their father, who might have died by that point. Some of them are just sort of family papers. So we've got all this amazing evidence just sitting there telling us about normal people, normal life, everyday life. So whilst I had to get away from this idea that history has to be grand narratives to write this book, what I get to really embrace is those small personal narratives and those little snapshots and stories of just normal people. And that's just something we don't really get to hear much about in the ancient world. But going back to, like your point on Roman writers and the world they're building us. This is such an important point, because often when they talk about the edge of the world, one the really vague, and this is infuriating. I had to, I had to work with a map illustrator, and they were like, you mentioned Ethiopia as a region. Where is it? And I was like, south in Libya. And they're like, Okay, so the country of Libya, no, Libya is a random continent. Kind of makes up most of Africa at this point, but doesn't include Egypt most of the time. And they're like, so where is Ethiopia in that? I'm like, to the south, like, where that's that's all they tell us. So, you know, you got the it's the same with you mentioned the Caucasus. The Greeks and Romans talk about Scythia, which is very vaguely north of the Black Sea, and to the east. And that's kind of it. It can be as big or as small as you want it to be, depending on what you're talking about and who you're talking who you're talking about. So they do talk about these things in general terms, because often what they're talking about is very, very far away land. So when they talk about skiffia, they mean very far away to the north and the east. When they talk about Libya, they mean very far away to the south. When they talk about Ethiopia, they talk about even further away to the south. India is my other favorite, because we think of India. India is a very clear place. The Romans, the Greeks, knew about India. They went to India. They traded with India. They must know what India is when they talk about it, and they do not. Sometimes, it includes Arabia the Arabian Gulf. Sometimes they're talking about much further east than India, you know, the unknown lands of Southeast Asia, Vietnam, maybe even China. Sometimes. So they're not always, they're not consistent in their terminology at all. And I suppose the final point, really, when dealing with this is Roman writers in particular, if they're talking about the borders, it's usually to make a point about something else. And so we're always stuck with that question, how accurate a reflection are we getting about the place they're talking about? Some of these things can be overcome with archeology. Some of these things can be overcome with other evidence. Some of it has to be left kind of open ended. Ovid is a good example of this, and his description of a town called Tomis, where we don't have loads of evidence about Tomis, but we know he's wrong, but how wrong we're not quite sure, but definitely incorrect.

Dr G 13:31
Yeah, I was going to say you've led me straight to this idea of Ovid's perception of Tomis on the Black Sea, where he gets exiled to because he's clearly not having a good time. He is most upset to be here, and he believes it's probably the worst place ever, at least that's the kind of impression you get from the letters that he writes back to the city, being like, please, please, please, guys, this exile needs to end. I cannot stand another minute here, but it seems to be at least in the way that you're describing it, is that maybe it's quite jarring for him because he doesn't get to live the life that he prefers or is used to anymore. It's not so much that he doesn't understand the place, it's just that it's not something he wants to experience. So I'm wondering like, is Ovid a bit emblematic for some of these problems we get with our bigger written sources when it comes to thinking about the edges of things?

Owen Rees 14:27
Yeah, I think is he is indicative of the issue I may so much so he bookends my book for a reason. He really sums up not only the problem we have with Roman writers, Greek writers, Egyptian all these different people. But also, I think he's indicative of the problem historians have where we're so stuck on focusing on what's not going on, or what it doesn't look like, much like he does, we kind of miss it for what it is. But Ovid's, Ovid's a fascinating guy. He comes off a bit badly in my book. I think I went for him a little bit because he's held up in this kind of canon of Roman writers, and he is a moany so and so. But I think you're right. I think what he's moaning about is things not as they are, but also it's because he wants to go home. So so much of his poetry, so much of his letters, are about convincing people to petition on his behalf, send me home from his exile. So he portrays it in the most horrific ways. And if you read this, you just think, why would anyone ever go there? It is a nasty place. It's constant war, constant freezing. They can't even grow grapes. They don't speak Greek properly, which is laughable, because it's a Greek city. You know, he's moaning about all these things, and it's just fantastic, is this idea of I'm too good for this place? That's kind of how he presents it. But on the same token, I'm not always 100% convinced. That he's reflect not just the reality of the town, but his own reality in that town. So for instance, we know he brags at one point of writing a poem in a local language. So we get this idea he is learning local languages. He doesn't need to know the local languages. Greek is a standard language. He learns like a Gatic language, but he's not in learning. He's mastered it enough to do his poetry. We know he serves in the militia. One of the things he moans about, they made me do military service, which I got out of him Rome. So there's no doubt he's actually getting quite involved in the community around him, but he will never let on these in any way enjoying it, or any way settling in. But the other thing it's the interesting one, something we get a lot at the borders when people from the center so these kind of figures go there is this idea of being forgotten, this idea of no one will know what's going on, because no one really understands the edges, and if I'm there, they'll forget me. And Ovid has this kind of paranoia that he'll be forgotten, and that mediocre poets in Rome will be remembered better than he will. And of course, that's we know in hindsight, that's not true at all. So his greatest fear of being left at the edge just doesn't come true in the slightest, if anything, his time in exile are, I mean, I think some of his best work, I don't think every academic would agree with me there, but they're certainly, historically, the most interesting pieces of work he does. So yeah, Ovid, absolutely, he is emblematic of a lot of the issues where we're seeing, but not just from the ancient world itself, but also from our own perspective.

Dr Rad 17:46
As podcasters from Sydney, we kind of get that feeling, always, you know, our timing is just always off. We're always, you know, in another day, in another time zone. It's,

Owen Rees 18:02
Yeah, but you'll never be forgotten. You know, remember that.

Dr G 18:05
That's the dream.

Dr Rad 18:07
We are writing the most epic podcast known to man, so… In scale, I mean in scale. So turning our attention away for a moment from the Romans and their world and their perspective, you also take the reader through some of the details of the borders that emerge in parallel to the cataracts along the Nile River in ancient Sudan. Can you take us through some of the details of the edges of the world as conceived in ancient Sudan?

Owen Rees 18:35
Yeah, it's an interesting one. So for the cataract. So we're talking about these kind of insurpassible parts of the Nile cataracts. So they're basically heavy rapids. There's boulders and stones. It's just sort of harder to get through. It's not just like a direct route, shall we say. And further south from these cataracts, you enter what's generally thought of as Nubia, the lands of Nubia and during, I mean, this is like second millennium, well out of our wheelhouse for Greek and Roman historians. But second millennium BCE, where Egypt, you know, has built its pyramids, have all this beautiful monuments, and the pharaohs have well and truly established themselves on the throne. But to the south, in Nubia, we have a another kingdom called the Kushite kingdom, who are growing a fascinating place. The archeology of this area and this sort of Kingdom and the towns they build are absolutely phenomenal, but like, there's no written texts to work with. So unfortunately, it's one of the kind of curses of living at the edge. Your story is told by your enemies, and Egypt is the the writer of the history of the Kush. To put this in context, they generally refer to the Kush as the ‘wretched Kush'. That's their name for them. So that kind of gives you an idea of the storyline we're getting. So Egypt keeps trying to push its influence further and further south, moving up the Nile, and it does this by building a series of forts along the cataracts, really. I mean, you can see this as expansion. You can see this is imperialist expansion. That's certainly what it becomes later in the New Kingdom. But at this point, I'll often visualize this as almost creating a buffer zone. So they're trying to create an area where the Kush are pastoralist people by origin. Even though they're now building their towns and stuff, they still have sort of this semi-nomadic underpinning to their life. So movement around is quite a common thing, and sedentary cultures, urbanized cultures, generally, do not like nomadism because it doesn't abide by the rules of borders and things like that still true to this day, let's be honest. So they build these forts, and they create this kind of middle ground within it. And what I found fascinating about this is we have a perfect example of stretch of land where the two cultures kind of mash and mesh and intermingle. And rather than look at the Egyptians from their perspective further north, and rather look at the Kush from their perspective further south, I was fascinated by what was going on here, in this in this middle ground, in this buffer zone, and ultimately what we get is Egyptian garrisons, settling, raising families. And kind of setting themselves up in just normal life. It's just normal garrison life. It's not always very exciting. There's generally a lot of raiders, bandits, but also just trade. So it's that, it's that snapshot of the everyday, which I love. But we also get some lovely characters and some lovely events for anyone who's, if you fans of ‘The Mummy'?

Dr G 22:09
Ooo yeah

Dr Rad 22:09
Ah yes

Owen Rees 22:11
Yes, what do you take me for? But also, I've just, I've just got into Assassin's Creed Origins, so I'm obssessed at the moment with the Medjay

Dr G 22:21
Yeah, beautiful. I love that game.

Owen Rees 22:23
Yeah, brilliant game. And they're brilliant characters in ‘The Mummy', where the Medjay first kind of appear at this border as a group. Historians aren't 100% sure who they are in terms of ethnicity, but the general consensus at the moment is that they are one of the nomadic Nubian groups floating about in this region, in this area. So they're not Kush, and they're not Egyptian, they're this nomadic group, or one of many nomadic groups, and they're called the Medjay, and they turn up in the the fort records, basically, of people moving about, and this is where we first start to see them used as like a rudimentary police force. And to give you an idea of the kind of complexities of what's going on and the lack of simplicity of us versus them, the Medjay who form part of this nomadic Nubian group are often policing other nomadic Nubian groups in the area. So they're like enforcing Egyptian rules on it, because ultimately the fort brings food, it brings money, well, it brings support, it brings income of some sort. And so it makes more sense for them to look to the Egyptians for basically work. So we get individuals like this, but also we see in the force themselves. We mentioned them earlier with the Roman forts, but we get these, these people. They're called women

Dr G 23:54
What?

Owen Rees 23:55
And they do, they do exist in history.

Dr G 23:57
Again? What's going on?

Dr Rad 23:59
Just break this down for a second. Wo-men. I think I might have heard of them, yeah.

Owen Rees 24:05
Have you heard of them? My academic background is military history, and you'd be amazed. Well, you won't be amazed how many books to where they don't appear.

Dr G 24:16
It's incredible.

Dr Rad 24:17
We sympathize, we sympathize, yeah.

Owen Rees 24:19
And at the forts, what we see is Nubian women, even possibly Kush women, entering the forts and living in the homes of Egyptian soldiers and men. There's no reason to not presume that they've actually intermarried. So again, what we see, you know, away from the narratives of the Egyptians, where there's ‘wretched Kush' and they can't be trusted in the region, and they should all be killed because they're animals, we see the borders soldiers who are supposed to be kind of enforcing that and epitomizing that ideology, marrying them, living with them, having kids with them. And I just, I just find that amazing. I find it beautiful. I just think it's, it's a fascinating inversion of what we expect.

Dr Rad 25:07
It's almost as though when people actually get to know each other instead of believing what they're told. They actually find that humans are quite similar and they can get along with,

Owen Rees 25:22
I mean, you said it not me. I don't want to get in trouble.

Dr Rad 25:25
These are the kind of mind blowing ideas that people come to the Partial Historians for, you know,

Owen Rees 25:30
This is it

Dr G 25:32
Oh, boy.

Owen Rees 25:34
This is it. This is beautiful stuff. It is beautiful stuff, um, but like, within the sort of historical narrative. I mean, ultimately, Egypt goes through its own periods of chaos. And during that chaos, we see the borders fluctuation. So during one of those periods of chaos where Egypt has basically an incursion from the north, the Kush push further north and actually take control of a lot of these fortifications.

Dr G 26:00
Uh oh

Owen Rees 26:01
Now, yeah. To put this in kind of perspective, these forts are enormous, like they're absolutely amazing in size, in scale. I mean, really, we see nothing like it in the ancient world until, like the Roman structures, 1000s of years later, in terms of fortifications on the borders, and in terms of the investment that goes into it, there's nothing quite like them, but the Kush basically walk into them, because the Egyptians have to focus on what's going on further north. And again, you're like, Okay, so the Kush have pushed north taking control. This is going to be a bloodbath. Are they even going to keep the forts. What's going to go on? There is no archeological evidence that there is any destruction.

Dr G 26:47
Wow

Owen Rees 26:48
At all. So it very much creates this impression they just kind of walk in. And we even have examples of Egyptians at the forts who keep their jobs.

Dr G 26:59
What?

Dr Rad 27:01
Now that's the kind of job security that I envy.

Owen Rees 27:05
Exactly, exactly. I mean, from a pragmatic point of view, if you've got an infrastructure in place and they're happy to stay in place, there's no need to change it. So you know, as long as they're not leaving and they're not constantly out to try and get you and to try and overthrow you. Why wouldn't you keep them in place?

Dr Rad 27:22
Is Elon Musk listening?

Owen Rees 27:22
You're gonna get me in a lot of trouble! So, yeah, so we, so what we basically see is people go right, like my dad was here under the Pharaoh. I'm now here under the Kush happy days. Let's just keep going. Because ultimately, what happens, this is what I love about the borders. What happens at the border is that's life. Life isn't what happens to the south or to the north. Life is what's going on there and then. And you know, they're not going to uproot themselves if they've got family there, if they've got lineage there. If they you know, they've been there six, seven generations. This is their home. This is their homeland. It's at that point where you see where loyalties really lie. Now, that's not true of all the sites I talk about in my book, and that in itself, is interesting because it gives you an idea of how, I don't know how deep people will put their roots when they come to the edge, you know, how do they see their time there? But at the fault, we see quite these kind of thoughts. We see quite clearly people that's home. So, you know, why would they leave just because another king is asking for tax rather than the previous king who was asking for tax? You know, it's that kind of perspective. So I think that was it really. I wanted this kind of fortification, boundary, these barriers. I wanted to look at it rather than through a lens of conflict and through a lens of imperial or political power. I wanted to see it through everyday life. I wanted to see it as normal and just how life went on even in places like this.

Dr G 29:04
I love this sense of pragmatism about daily life that is coming through and is a real thread through this whole book, actually, because it's kind of like, what sort of decisions do you make when you're not the powerful person, when you're not the person writing the laws? And you find yourself, you know, well, I've been sent to this for it, and I guess I'll figure out life from here. And, you know, opportunities come along, you make some friends, you meet a girl, it's kind of nice, and all of a sudden your family's been there for like, two or three generations, and you're like, Oh, it's good here. You know, we're these kind of people now.

Dr Rad 29:38
I think it also speaks to the universal human hatred of moving.

Dr G 29:45
There's nothing worse than having to pack up all those boxes.

Dr Rad 29:49
I hate it, and I'm glad to know that people in the ancient world hated it too.

Owen Rees 29:56
Well. There we go. They are just like us,

Dr G 29:58
So similar. And you touched on this idea of language with this idea of the ‘wretched Kushite', and I think this leads us really nicely into thinking about these really loaded terms that we tend to get when we think about the center versus the edge, and that idea of the ‘civilized' center and the ‘barbarian' edges. And these sorts of terms are hugely problematic, obviously been repurposed in terrible ways throughout all of human history, even recently. And I'm interested in how a study like yours can help us combat this sort of us versus them dichotomy that comes through in that kind of language use?

Owen Rees 30:41
Yeah, I think it ultimately, it rips it apart. Absolutely rips it apart. It shows it for what it is, which is a rhetoric of privilege, basically from the center, because they can think like that, because the only I mean classics, classical, Athens for fifth, fourth century. Athens, a good example of this, if you are Plato, living in, you know, walking around, Athens the only barbarian, one of the better word, the only foreigner you will meet is predominantly either a trader or an enslaved person. That's pretty much it. So you can have these kind of views, you know, of foreign peoples, because it doesn't really affect you day to day. But when you look to the edges, where, you know, like we were talking about you, you end up marrying these people. You end up living with these people. These people become your friends. These people become your colleagues. These people become your network for trade. You just can't you just can't think like that, or you can't internalize all those beliefs of well, you can definitely internalize your belief of your own superiority, but you can't really internalize the belief of their innate inferiority in every way. So the idea that the barbarian person is intellectually inferior, morally inferior in just every single possible way, it just doesn't make day to day feasible. So the distinction very much kind of falls apart when they live side by side. So we we see this in particular in the book or two sections on Greece, the Greek world and the Roman world. And it just falls apart time and again as you look at it. I mean, ultimately, barbarianism as a construct and civilization as an idea are usually. They usually appear in the ancient world to justify something or to garner support for something. So think about, you know, the anti-Gaul rhetoric just before Caesar's invasion. Think of the anti-Persian rhetoric after the Persian Wars in classical Athens. It's all to justify things that are either happening or are going to happen or have happened. So you've got to see it for the ideological rhetoric is what I find quite interesting about it is, if you, if you take it at face value, it kind of counters a lot of stories we tell ourselves about our own history, maybe not Australia.

Dr G 33:11
Oh, I think definitely Australia.

Dr Rad 33:13
Oh I don't know about that

Owen Rees 33:15
I'll leave that with you, but a classic one in Britain. So British British history. One of the key parts is the Roman invasion. We don't talk about ourselves as an invaded imperial opponent. We don't talk about stuff like that. So what we inherit, in terms of the ancient history from Roman period, is that we take the role of the Romans, which is quite odd when you think about it, because we were not the Romans.

Dr G 33:49
I don't want to say that this is a classic English move, but

Owen Rees 33:55
It definitely is. But what we don't talk about, for instance, and I love this, doing the research for the book is just how much Britain is a backwater of the ancient world, just how looked down on, just how how much it is looked down on, like to the point where, before the Roman expansion, really, the Greeks aren't even convinced it's real, because it just sounds so horrific.

Dr Rad 34:19
It rains ALL the time

Owen Rees 34:24
I know, and it's not wrong, so we know that. But the other thing is, ultimately, it's the edge of the world. I mean, even the early Roman, sort of early Roman, imperial writers talk about it as literally, the edge of the world. So it gets to this point where, okay, we accept it probably is real. But God, no human would live any further than that. And it's just, it's just amazing. So you know, what we inherit as British people is this story from the Roman perspective, about Roman power. What we don't inherit is the Roman perspective on Britain itself, which is like this is not a very great place to be, very great place to be. And I just love that. I love that I love not only the history of the ancient world, but also how the ancient world is translated into the modern day, and what bits of it we like to choose and what bits of it we like to ignore. But in terms of the barbarian civilization, yes, I mean, the ancient world is the foundation of it. To this day, you've kind of alluded to it already. I've said it outright. Britain has, for a long time considered itself the inheritor of the Roman Empire. You know, if it's not Britain, it's Napoleon. If it's not Napoleon, and it's bloody the Third Reich. Everyone wants to be the Roman Empire. Everyone wants to be the harbinger of civilization, shall we say, and make themselves the inheritor of what they consider the lineage of civilization. And when you look at the edge of the world, you just kind of see how ridiculous an idea that really is.

Dr Rad 36:00
I think somebody needs to Hollywood that, because I don't know if you noticed, but the Romans always have British accents.

Dr G 36:10
This does – as a side note – this does weird out my Italian husband, he cannot watch HBO's Rome because he is thoroughly baffled by the representation of Romanness through the English accent.

Owen Rees 36:24
Well, did you see the whole complaint about Denzel Washington and Gladiator 2, having basically the New York accent, I think it's the New York accent

Dr Rad 36:33
I think he talks like Denzel

Owen Rees 36:36
Yeah he does, it's his voice. And I just love it, because people are like, this is the wrong accent. And everyone's like, you mean British, don't you? You mean he hasn't got a British accent, which is just ridiculous. Yeah, fair point.

Dr Rad 36:48
Yeah, well, look, you know, I have to defend it, because that's what Kirk Douglas was going for with his whole casting thing. He had real issues with certain people he wanted to cast you didn't have the right accent. He was like, Oh, the British versus American accent. It's so important, it must be preserved at all costs, regardless of acting ability. Moving on, though, we really loved the chapter on the city of Olbia, which was located in what is now Ukraine. Olbia draws influences from many peoples, and the result is a layered culture. Can you take us through some of the key moments in olbia's ancient history as a city at the edges?

Owen Rees 37:30
Me, yeah, so we're looking at, literally at the very edge of what is now Crimea, and it's set up as a marketing a market city, basically, to kind of capitalize on the trade of the Black Sea and to try and push Greek trade further north into what is Scythia. So the land of the Scythians, this elusive conglomeration of various nomadic, semi-nomadic and static groups that the Greeks aren't 100% sure who they are. And Olbia goes through – like the history of Olbia is just fascinating. I fell in love with the city whilst writing about it, because, basically: it sets itself up, has to deal with the Persian expansion in the region, survives the Persian Wars, but we don't know how, in what way. We don't know if it sides with the Persians. We don't, we don't know what it did to get by. It then has to deal with ancient Athens expansion in the Black Sea. That's when the city becomes democratic, because Athens doesn't really give you a choice with this. It then basically, can't we cope with being democratic? So it relies a lot on the patronage of rich individuals. It then has to deal with the expansion of Alexander, Alexander the Great, the Macedonians. It survives that it looks to Scythian kings for one of a better term for support and for protection over time. But in the end, it's abandoned for a period. We're not a hundred percent sure why. It just kind of stops being a useful place to be. Too much conflict in the area is not worthwhile. And then, interestingly, some of the Scythian groups actually implore Greeks to come back and re establish it. So Olbia is re established, and that's when we get the Romans interacting with it. And there's a beautiful moment where one of our Roman writers is complaining because he goes there meets a Greek guy, young lad who's Greek, is very bad, apparently, and is dressed like a Scythian which is a fascinating moment, because the Scythians wear the most effeminate of clothing known to the ancient Mediterranean.

Dr Rad 39:51
Is it pants?

Owen Rees 39:52
It is pants, it is trousers, and he's described wearing them. He also described as holding a cavalryman's sword as well. Very unusual, very unexpected, and it's just the perfect encapsulation at Olbia of what's going on, which is Greek people clinging to Greek identity, but adapting and embracing Scythian or local traditions as well. And we see this in a few ways. So we see in the coinage. Coins are not always the most exciting of things, but they tell us a lot. And at Olbia, they tell us an amazing story where the first coins we see at Olbia aren't round coins like drachma and things like that. They're actually shaped like arrowheads and dolphins. There's a lot of speculation as to why it might be related to cult of Apollo. These are two symbols of Apollo in the region, but there are also two symbols that relate closely with the culture of the non Greeks in the region. Let's call them Scythians, who put a lot of stock in archery as their sort of military prowess. And the dolphins is a local symbol because of the population in the Black Sea. So there is an argument that's been made that this is possibly evidence of them trying to get local groups to embrace a financial system that they don't have. So Olbia, the Greeks at Olbia are creating a monetary system that they can relate to and use in some way, which in itself, is interesting. So by the time we get proper coinage, so the kind of round drachma in Olbia, what we see are symbols that relate to Scythian culture. So we see a distinctive bow. We see a distinctive bow case imprinted on the coins. We also see a particular axe, the sagarius, which is not Greek. The Greeks are not interested in it. This is about this is clearly about giving a iconographic marker, an image that the Scythian groups or the local groups in the area understand what it is. And I just find that amazing. And it kind of feeds into something Herodotus, so the father of history tells us about the region and about the city. He describes a group living near Olbia. In his list of Scythians, he gives a long list of different Scythian groups, and in it, there's one which he describes as Greek-Scythians, which doesn't make a lot of sense if you think of it through the perspective of barbarians and Greeks and separations. So what does he actually mean about this? And so it was, you know, maybe they're living more of a sedentary agricultural life, maybe saying, well, that's going on, but maybe it's because Greece and Scythians are actually intermingling and living together and marrying and intermarrying. And this is actually supported by a later inscription at Olbia, which talks about a group called the ‘mixellenes', literally the half Greeks who live just outside of Obia. So we have this kind of archeological verification, corroboration, really, of what Herodotus is talking about, yes, Greeks and Scythians. This isn't pie in the sky hippy nonsense. These people are actually living together, marrying, intermarrying, raising families like this is reality. This is what's going on. And to kind of come back to both your points earlier, this contrast this with the center to this point is Athens. In Athens fifth century, fourth century. Plato has a little mini rant in one of his works about intermarriage, and he refers to a group called the ‘mixebarbaroi'. So the half barbarians, and I think this perfectly encapsulates the difference between the center and the edge. So in the center, if you intermarry with foreign peoples, you're a half barbarian. At the edge, if you're intermarry with other people, you're half Greek. Don't get me wrong, you're still not Greek, you're still not quite us, but it just gives you that inverted perspective that you see at the edge. If we only listen to Plato, you would think that was all there was.

Dr G 43:52
I do like this idea that not only is there sort of, like fine, sort of definitions within this, because that speaks to like people trying to like, find their identity and position themselves in particular ways. And Herodotus seems to be picking up on that as well. But you've mentioned a couple of times now that when we get out into this sort of really eastern section, that there is a sense from people from the center that the Greek is spoken differently, for sure, and the idea that the accent is shifting, and that maybe the language is bringing in loan words and things like this from the surrounding areas. And it's not that they're not speaking Greek, but it's not, it's not the Greek of the center, for sure, by the sounds of it. And to tie this back into thinking about your own journey as an author, this book takes us through heaps and heaps of places, and I feel like the thing that you would want to do to prepare to write for this book is to do a lot of travel and get to these edges and really, really come to grips with it from in the topographical sense, you know, just feel what it's like to be in these places as well, because that would also decenter you as an author from your position in your natural center. And I'm interested in the sort of challenges that you have found in writing this book when it comes to that kind of thing.

Owen Rees 45:22
Yeah, this book was not pitched at a good time for what I wanted to do, because you're right, I had, I had real plans to be a jet setting historian. I was going to live my dream since I was a kid. I was going to go around the world, go to all the ancient sites and just write stories about them. It was going to be amazing. The first planned trip I had. So I've got chapter on ancient Vietnam, and I was like, It's the one place I've never been. I've never been anywhere like it. I've got to get to Vietnam. And I planned out the entire trip, and then the COVID lockdowns happened.

Dr G 45:54
Noo

Owen Rees 45:56
Yeah. So that was great. So that scuppered that plan. It scuppered my plans to go to Ethiopia. It scuppered my plans to go to Morocco. I had ambitions, and every time lockdown was lifted, I was like, Okay, I probably won't get to Vietnam. Now, let's try Ethiopia. Okay, next lockdown. I won't get to Ethiopic Morocco. That's just down the road a bit. Let's try that next lockdown occurrence. By the time all restrictions were lifted, my deadlines were looming, so I had to readdress my expectations and my ambitions. So I was like, fair enough. I won't be able to get to that. I've got to look but I've got to look nearer to home to get to some of these sites. I'll go to Ukraine. I've got two chapters in the book. I'll go to Ukraine. As I came up with that plan, Putin, tanks crossed the border. So that's scuppered that plan. Another idea was I'll get to Israel. That was a terrible idea, Sudan, that was never going to start. Basically everywhere I wanted to go, either terrible things that were happening started happening, or, in hindsight, went on to happen. So that was that was a bit of a problem.

Dr G 47:15
Sounds like you're a powerful figure, Owen on world history and current affairs.

Speaker 1 47:21
You don't want to appear in my books, but I'll tell you that. Tou don't, you don't want to be named in my books.

Dr Rad 47:25
It seems like not a coincidence that all these places you wanted to go are still areas where sometimes you can't.

Owen Rees 47:35
Yeah, there is something to be said for the edges of the world haven't changed that much in our own perspective, and that in itself, is very interesting, and we do not have enough time to explore that one. But yeah, it is interesting just how many of these places are still considered these sort of no go places or problematic places or difficult places, rightly or wrongly, they still hold these reputations. And as you can kind of see, some of these reputations go back 1000s of years. I mean, to get around it, I ended up having to rely on a massive network of historians around the world, archeologists around the world, many of whom I've never met, never spoken to. And bless them, they were so supportive and so helpful, because, yeah, we were all in the same boat. Anyone who wanted to write about any of these places, we were in the same boat. We couldn't travel. So as a result, I was able to tap into that and be sort of fed and guided to a lot of the cutting edge research. So a lot of academics were bored during lockdown, and so anyone who spoke to them about their own work got very excited. And so there was a lot of zoom calls because they wanted to talk to anyone, and they were like, have a look at this draft that I'm publishing in two years time. Have a look at this draft of stuff I've just found when I was last in Vietnam and all this kind of stuff. So the book, one of the things I liked about putting this book together was it was fed by a lot of the very, very current research coming out. And from my perspective, from your perspective, and all the amazing work you do, I think part of our job is to kind of translate that for the public and feed it to them in some way. So I love the idea that we're not, you know, I'm not feeding them a narrative that's been around for 10, 15, years in academia. Some academics will read some of this stuff and not know that's been discovered yet, not know it's come out, which is just beautiful, because I think the public should be, you know, as much of the forefront as everyone else.

Dr Rad 49:38
Absolutely. And that segues nicely into a question we thought we used to sort of wrap things up, which is, what questions or ideas would you like to leave listeners with when it comes to them thinking about the boundaries and the edges of the world?

Owen Rees 49:57
I suppose I'd love for you to be left with the same question that started the book. I don't like to think I've answered it, because it was an open ended question, but ultimately, my first question when it came to this book was, okay, we know Greece, we know Rome. What else is going on? So I talk about, I think it's 13 sites around the ancient world. I could have picked a completely different 13. And I just, if this book is to inspire anything, I want it to inspire inquisitiveness. There are lots of works, lots of podcasts, lots of documentaries about these other places. They're just not the big, famous ones that everyone's kind of reading and watching and listening to. So kind of, you know, follow your inquisitiveness, because ultimately, that's what history is. I mean, history literally means inquiry. It is to be inquisitive. It's not to tell narratives and have answers. It's to ask questions and to keep exploring. And that includes people who just love history. You know, it's not just academics and scholars. So I suppose the other thing, which I'm glad you two picked up on as well, so it's we read a lot about ideas in Rome, in Egypt and Greece and all these places. Lot of ideas. How does that play out in reality? How does it play out in the other sides of the world? You know, it's all well and good thinking. You know, what life is like in London? What's it like in rural Scotland? You know, as for the British example. So kind of, yeah, follow your own interests, follow your own inquisitiveness, follow your own questions. And I suppose the final thing for this, and we kind of touched on it at the end. Does any of this stuff sound familiar? You know, we're talking about life at the edge. We're talking about all these regions. We're talking about all these regions. We're talking about conflict, but we're talking about fear of foreigners, which is very easy to say when we live in the urban center, fear of migration, fear of movement of peoples, fear of nomadism. In Britain, we one of our most persecuted ethnic groups, or sort of ethnic minority groups, are the Gypsy, Romany and traveler community, the antithesis of sedentary life, constant movement. You know, we can get very focused on why people don't like them right now, but actually, are we hearing a lot of the same themes, a lot of the same ideas from 2000 plus? I mean, even easier 4000 years ago, are we just rehashing the same fears and the same concerns, and when we start to realize why they did it in the ancient world, you can then start to ask questions of rule. Is that why we're doing it now? You know, ancient history has a currency in the modern world. It has a pertinence in the modern world. And I think books like this kind of encourage us to ask those questions and to look a little deeper at our own, our own perspectives, as you both kind of rightly pointed out with me.

Dr Rad 52:50
No, well, I mean, I think this is the thing in that we've talking talking a lot about barbarism and civilization and those sorts of ideas as teachers of ancient history, I'm sure we've all encountered I know I have plenty of students who look at the past and say, Oh, how ridiculous they were. So backwards. We've got all the answers now, and I constantly have to ask them now. I'm like, Okay, if we have all the answers, then why is it this time period that's facing an existential crisis in the form of climate change, which people are still actually taking the time to argue about. I mean, do we have all the answers? If we do, I'd love to have a look at them.

Dr G 53:32
Please show me that book.

Dr Rad 53:33
Yeah, exactly. So when people, when people do, say to you, when they encounter something that's very strange about the ancient past, obviously, there's nothing wrong with laughing at the way that humans behave at any time period or in any place. But it is that idea that a lot of people have that now is the best and the past has to be there for the worst, so…

Owen Rees 53:53
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, I think the other thing, I suppose, one of the other drivers of this book, so you mentioned in my introduction, my lovely introduction, by the way, appreciated that where I run this website, badancient which is website dedicated to kind of debunking a lot of misconceptions about the ancient world. Now this isn't just pyramids being built by aliens and things like that. It's also perspectives. So we get asked questions from not a naive perspective, not even an ill informed perspective, but a narrow perspective. And the answer isn't that you're wrong about a question about Roman culture or Egyptian life or anything. It's not that you're wrong, but it's that you're only giving an answer based on life for 5% of the people. A classic example would be if you look at the Egyptian evidence, I mentioned in Roman Egypt all these amazing papyrus papyrological evidence we have. We've got a lot of it, which shows independent women living normal independent women lives. But you know, it's the classic, isn't it? If you pick up any ancient history. Book about Greece, Rome, Egypt, anything like that, you'll generally get this impression that women may stay at home, women have no autonomy, women have no authority, and there is some truth to bits of that, but we shouldn't limit their potential in our own storytelling of them and our own narrative of them when the evidence shows us differently. So in there's a lovely village called Karanis, which is a very poor village in Faiyum in Roman Egypt. And we have evidence of women running businesses. We have evidence of women living entirely independent of men. In one of the census records, we have all female households. So Roman history tells us there has to be a male guardian at all times. It has to be a son, if it's not a father, if it's not a husband, but we have census records. Well, that's just not true. There are still legal issues. They have to officially have a guardian. But that doesn't look the same in normal life. You know, it's a paperwork issue rather than an everyday issue.

Dr G 55:58
That's fine, you make a statue, you call it a dude, and you'll be like, that's the man, don't worry about that.

Dr Rad 56:03
I'm thrilled to hear that Destiny's Child would have been very at home in this place.

Owen Rees 56:11
So yeah, so it's – completely lost your train of thought – But ultimately, this is this is it. So when we have our laughing moments in the classroom or in conversations about the ancient world ago. They're very backwards, they're very this, they're very that. Yes, we got to ask questions about ourself. Yes, we can ask questions about how different are we really with a lot of these topics. But the other question is always worth asking, which is, well, how much of that is just an elite male perspective of what they think life should be like. Because on the edge of the world, evidence tells us differently.

Dr Rad 56:45
Yeah. I mean, if we had only left behind the blog of someone who was part of, like, a, you know, men's rights group, and that was it for for you know, a lot of civilization, I think our perspective on what was happening now would be quite different.

Owen Rees 57:02
Yeah, I love the idea that Aristotle was just a blogger, really angry blogger, in the basement of his mom's house,

Dr Rad 57:10
and that Pliny the Elder was just a kook.

Owen Rees 57:14
No one took him seriously.

Dr G 57:16
He was all over the trivial details, that's for sure.

Owen Rees 57:21
That's right, it belongs on Reddit.

Dr G 57:24
Well, thank you so much for joining us, Owen, this has been a real treat, and I'm very excited for people to get your book ‘The Far Edges of the Known World' into their hands and to get their eyeballs on the page and to do as much exploration of this kind of topic as they can, because there is so much fun to be had. I think, in coming to grips with like, what is life actually like when we don't just read elite men.

Owen Rees 57:59
There's the tagline, yeah, brilliant. Thank you so much for having me. I've really enjoyed this.

Dr G 58:12
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Partial Historians. You can find our sources sound credits and transcript in our show notes over at partialhistorians.com. We offer a huge thank you to you, if you're one of our illustrious Patreon supporters, if you enjoy the show, we'd love your support in a way that works for you. Leaving a nice review really makes our day. We're on Ko-Fi for one off or ongoing donations, or Patreon, of course. Our latest book, ‘Your Cheeky Guide to the Roman Empire', is published through Ulysses Press. It is full of stories that the Romans probably don't want you to know about them. This book is packed with some of our favorite tales of the colorful history of ancient Rome. Treat yourself or an open minded friend to Rome's glories, embarrassments and most salacious claims with ‘Your Cheeky Guide to the Roman Empire'.

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