For the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, it was clear what the civilized world was: that was where they lived. That civilization also stopped somewhere. People who spoke an unintelligible language lived there, worshiped the wrong gods and wore weird clothes.
In his book The distant corners of the world views the British historian Owen Rees – teacher at the University of Birmingham and manager of the website Bad Ancientwhere nonsense about antiquity is exposed – what happened in the areas where the ‘civilization’ clashed with the rest of the world. It turns out that boundaries were porous and that using, objects and people (mostly women) migrated plenty of migrating from one area to the other.
Rees structured his book around a number of these types of border areas, including the big cataract in the Nile, where the empire of the pharaohs that hit the Nubians; The city of Olbia in Ukraine, where Greek settlers lived alongside scytic riders; And the Wall of Hadrian in Scotland, with which the Romans wanted to keep the pics out of their empire.
Interesting things happened in these places, Rees notes. Because they were so far from the cultural center of a civilization and there was therefore less ‘critical cultural supervision’, here melt crawls from which everything bubbled up.
In the city of Meggido (the Biblical Armageddon) in Israel, for example, unique religious expressions took place while Judaism had long gained foothold there. And in Aksum in Ethiopia, Greek was written and a unique form of Christianity was created – founded by the son of the famous Queen of Sheba, who would have taken the Ark of the Jerusalem covenant.
The intellectual and spiritual heart of Buddhism was in ancient times in Taxila (in present -day Pakistan). Under Greek influence, the human form of Buddha was created here, in the style as it is now known everywhere. Cultural influence was not a one -way traffic, Rees emphasizes. Buddha statues were found in the Greek-Roman Egypt and Greek and Latin sources contain references to Buddhist monks in some places.
“The dichotomy between civilized people and barbarians where our elitist [Griekse en Romeinse geschreven] Sources were so convinced is no longer acceptable to us, “Rees concludes at the end of his easily written book.
Ovidius thought very differently about that. The Roman poet was exiled to Tomis on the Black Sea and complained about it in letters. “He had never learned that outside the shielded center of a culture you cannot survive without multiculturalism,” Rees Rees explains the message of his book very much.