What is Ancient History?

Ian Morris & Walter Scheidel

Abstract: Every society has told stories about ancient times, but contemporary ancient history was the prod- uct of two main developments. The first was the invention of writing, which made scholarly study of the past possible, and the second was the explosion of knowledge about the world from the eighteenth century on- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/145/2/113/1830927/daed_a_00381.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 ward. Europeans responded to this explosion by inventing two main versions of antiquity: the first, an evo- lutionary model, was global and went back to the origins of humanity; and the second, a classical model, treated Greece and Rome as turning points in world history. These two views of antiquity have competed for two hundred and fifty years, but in the twenty-first century, the evidence and methods available to -an cient historians are changing faster than at any other time since the debate began. We should therefore ex- pect the balance between the two theories to shift dramatically. We close by considering some possible areas of engagement.

Ancient history is the study of beginnings, and is thus organized around two central questions: 1) how to define the subject matter whose beginning is be- ing studied; and 2) what that beginning means for the world that the studiers live in. Across the centu- ries, the answers ancient historians have offered to these questions have changed significantly, largely in response to new evidence and new methods. But now, in the twenty-first century, the evidence and IAN MORRIS is the Jean and Re­ methods available are changing faster than at any becca Willard Professor of Clas­ sics at Stanford University and a time since the eighteenth century, and we should Fellow of the Stanford Archaeol­ expect the answers ancient historians offer to do the ogy Center. same. Ancient history has always been with us because, WALTER SCHEIDEL is the Dick­ ason Professor in the Humanities so far as we know, every society has had stories about and Professor of Classics and His­ its beginning. In the absence of writing, howev- tory at Stanford University. He is er, ancient history could never be much more than also a Catherine R. Kennedy and myth-making. Such stories usually describe the Da­n­iel L. Grossman Fellow in Hu­- world’s creation and peopling, as well as the origins man Biology. of the particular group telling the myth. Since most (*See endnotes for complete con­ adults in the world were still illiterate as recently tributor biographies.) as 1960, for most of our time on earth, these hazy,

© 2016 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences doi:10.1162/DAED_a_00381

113 What is once-upon-a-time worlds–worlds which of radicals, especially in France and Scot- Ancient Aboriginal Australians describe with the land, were responding to the anomalies by History? wonderfully­ evocative term “the dream- proposing a new paradigm. time”–were the only ancient history pos- What if, they asked, the hunter-gather- sible. ers and herders that missionaries, traders, Writing introduced vastly superior evi- and conquerors had met in other conti- dence for antiquity, and every literate civ- nents were actually survivals of how every­- ilization has produced its caste of ancient one had once lived? What if, rather than historians. Remarkably, though, almost all representing the beginning, Jesus and the of these groups did much the same as other moral exemplars of antiquity were

their predecessors with the available data, really just actors within one stage of histo- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/145/2/113/1830927/daed_a_00381.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 choosing a particular piece of their own ry? And what if history had really begun ancient history and pronouncing it exem- with a worldwide state of nature and had plary. The best example of this is proba- then improved, until humanity reached bly the case of China, where, by the first the heights of enlightened Paris and Ed- century bce, scholars had already nom- inburgh? inated the sage Confucius, who lived in This wild new theory, which its cham- the fifth century bce, as an ancient par- pions called philosophical history, shook up agon of virtue. This anointing took place salons all over Europe. But by the 1750s, it even though–or perhaps because–Con- was already generating a backlash. Philo- fucius himself claimed merely to be reviv- sophical history, its many critics (particu- ing the virtues of a still earlier paragon, larly in Germany and England) observed, the Duke of Zhou, of the eleventh cen- had not actually proven that humanity had tury bce: “I transmit but do not create,” climbed from foraging, through herding Confucius wrote, “I am an admirer of an- and farming, on to the current age of com-­ tiquity.”1 Confucius’s popularity went up merce. To them, the whole endeavor should and down, but until well into the twenti- really be called conjectural history, not philo- eth century, the texts attributed to him re- sophical history. mained at the center of elite education in What was needed, these critics argued, China. was not just-so stories about civilization’s emergence from so-called “savagery,” but In this way, each civilization produced its serious scholarship–like that being done own version of exemplary ancient history, at the time on the literature and sculp- and until the eighteenth century, no seri- ture of ancient Greece and Rome. Faced ous challenge to this way of thinking about with the mass of new facts being generat- the distant past appeared. Only then, and ed by philologists and connoisseurs, con- only in Western Europe, did new facts jectures about hunter-gatherers were re- make such stories of beginnings seem in- vealed as not just unprovable, but also un- adequate, and thinkers responded by com- important. What really mattered to these ing up with two new ideas that have dom- reformers was that two-and-a-half-mil- inated ancient history ever since. The ba- lennia earlier, the Greeks had invented a sic problem–and opportunity–was that unique civilization based on the princi- ever since Marco Polo came back from ples of reason, freedom, and beauty. The Cathay in 1295, evidence had accumulat- towering intellects of ancient Greece– ed that there were things in heaven and Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides–had earth that just did not fit into Europe’s ex- wrenched humanity out of its long slum- emplary history; and by the 1720s, groups ber. This, and not conjectures about Am-

114 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences azonian hunters, was the beginning we never existed, human life, and the right Ian should be studying. conduct of it, would have been in their es- Morris 5 & Walter sentials exactly what they are now.” Scheidel In one sense, classicists of the eighteenth Many evolutionists, including Marx and century could legitimately be accused of Weber, granted Greece and Rome a big- trying to go back to an exemplary mod- ger place in the story than this. However, el of antiquity, but in another sense, they by 1900, it was clear that cultural evolution, were moving far beyond it. They accept- as the theory came to be known, was not ed the emphasis of conjectural historians going to collapse like conjectural history; on comparison with the new data coming it was able to organize far too many facts, in from other continents, but insisted that and its theoretical frameworks were far too Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/145/2/113/1830927/daed_a_00381.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 what that comparison actually showed was robust for that. The invention of radiocar- that the Greeks and Romans were incom- bon dating in the 1940s and the calibration parable. When Johann Joachim Winckel- revolution of the 1970s provided a global mann in 1755 contrasted the “noble sim- framework for comparisons, and fossil and plicity and quiet grandeur” of the Greeks dna data pushed the story of mankind’s with the decadence of Etruscan and Egyp- beginnings back millions of years. tian art, he saw it as evidence for the com- Despite the high quality of much of plete superiority of the Greeks; and by the scholarship being done on Greece and 1808, Wilhelm von Humboldt was ready to Rome, the twentieth century was one go much further.2 “Our study of Greek his- long retreat for the classical vision of an- tory,” he wrote, is “a matter quite different cient history, in part because evolutionism from our other historical studies. For us, the proved vastly more exportable on the world Greeks step outside the circle of history. . . . stage. Herbert Spencer was one of the first We fail entirely to recognize our relation- English-language nonfiction writers to be ship to them if we dare to apply the stan- translated into Chinese and Japanese, and dards to them which we apply to the rest his work quickly spawned Asian imitators. of world history. . . . [F]rom the Greeks we European classical scholarship did have take something more than earthly–some- a significant impact on the methods of thing godlike.”3 Asian ancient historians (China’s “Doubt- Unable to compete with classicists’ meth- ing Antiquity” movement and Japan’s To- odological sophistication and weight of kyo and Kyoto Schools all drew inspira- data, conjectural history collapsed in the tion from European Quellenforschung, the early nineteenth century. However, it is philological analysis of sources) but its hard to keep a good theory down, and as in- core claims about Greco-Roman excep- formation from other fields of scholarship tionalism were largely ignored. continued to accumulate, it soon came Within Western education, evolution- back revived and revised. In the 1850s, ary and classical approaches to beginnings Herbert Spencer, the first theorist to use coexisted, the former mostly colonizing the word “evolution” in something like its the new social science disciplines, and the modern sense, argued that every field, latter dominating the older humanities from geology and biology to history and fields. But even within the humanities, the metaphysics, could be tied together in a classical vision steadily lost ground. The single story of “the advance from the sim- University of Chicago, where both the au- ple to the complex.”4 Classical civilization thors of this article once taught, is a good was just one stage in a larger story, Spen- example. The university is probably best cer asserted, and “had Greece and Rome known for its commitment to the social

145 (2) Spring 2016 115 What is sciences, but it has also been a staunch de- tion of Political Society (1967), read by tens Ancient fender of the classical heritage. When the of thousands of college students, Greece History? university was founded in 1892, it orga- and Rome each show up on just three of nized separate departments of Greek and the 270 pages. They fare better in David Latin, because classics was too important Christian’s hugely influential world his- a field to confine within a single unit; the tory Maps of Time (2004), each cropping Classics Building, which opened its doors up sixteen times–but that book has 642 in 1915, is still one of the finest structures pages.7 on campus. However, by the time we ar- And yet at Stanford, where both of us rived in Chicago (Morris in 1987, Scheidel now teach, nineteen of the twenty-seven

in 2000), Greek and Latin had been con- professors whose research focuses on any Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/145/2/113/1830927/daed_a_00381.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 densed into a single classics department, aspect of humanity before ad 600 work and its denizens had been penned into chiefly on Greece and Rome. Our casual one corner of the second floor. There were survey of websites suggests that Stanford rearguard actions, to be sure: In 1948, the is in no way unusual; many American uni- history department began offering a wild- versities devote twice as many faculty to ly popular course on the history of West- Greece and Rome as they do to the rest of ern civilization (which both of us once the ancient world combined. Even if the taught). This year-long sequence, running lopsided distribution of resources is, in –as student wisdom put it–from Plato large part, a matter of institutional iner- to nato, was required for all undergrad- tia, the battle over beginnings that opened uates for decades. Even in the 1980s, by in eighteenth-century Europe is clearly far which time the course was optional, most from over. students took it anyway, and some still That said, it might be time to take the camped out overnight to get into their battle in a new direction. preferred sections. In 2003, however, the university closed it down. One of the most remarkable things about In the mid-2010s, the sheer bulk of ar- the 250-year-long back and forth between chaeological evidence organized by evo- evolutionary and classical models of an- lutionary models, the elegance of evolu- cient history is how little each side has en- tionary theory, and the rhetorical power gaged with the other’s arguments. This is of narratives like Jared Diamond’s Guns, most obvious in the classical model, which Germs, and Steel (1997) or Yuval Noah Ha- willfully ignores millions of years of histo- rari’s Sapiens (2011) seem to have won over ry along with most societies that have ever educated opinion.6 Now, the origin story existed. A century ago, classical historians that seems to matter most began not in regularly claimed that Greece and Rome first-millennium-bce Greece and Rome, were the beginning of the history that mat- but with the invention of agriculture in the tered, but nowadays the very few who do Middle East more than ten thousand years so tend to be dismissed as reactionaries or ago, or the evolution in Africa of modern racists. Most classicists seem to be getting humans more than one hundred thousand on with careful research, without worry- years ago, or of the genus Homo nearly ing too much about the wider significance three million years ago. of their work, even though this seems like- Given this view of history, Greece and ly to ensure the classical model’s contin- Rome might be interesting topics, but they ued retreat. just are not very important ones. In Morton However, a similar dynamic is at play Fried’s anthropological classic The Evolu- within the evolutionary model. No one

116 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences familiar with conventional history could torians far beyond the field’s established Ian fail to be struck by the way that evolution- comfort zone. Deep knowledge of particu- Morris & Walter ary histories tend to have a lot to say about lar cultures and mastery of their languag- Scheidel the agricultural revolution and the origins es will remain important, but perhaps no of states, and about the integration of the more so than broad knowledge of world world in the early-modern period and the archaeology, quantitative methods, the so- subsequent industrial revolution, but very cial sciences, linguistics, and evolutionary little about anything that transpired in theory. Conventional boundaries between between. The geographer Alfred Crosby pre­history and ancient history, ancient and apparently speaks for many when he says, medieval history, and cultural traditions in his wonderful book Ecological Imperial- will lose much of their meaning. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/145/2/113/1830927/daed_a_00381.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 ism, that “between [2500 bce] and [the] Equally important, engaging with the time of development of the societies that evo­lutionary vision will have consequences sent Columbus and other voyagers across for how ancient historians are taught. Cur- the oceans, roughly four thousand years rently, in most institutions of higher learn- passed, during which little of importance ing, ancient history is part of a humanistic­ happened.”8 curriculum, emphasizing languages and This flyover zone, of course, includes the details of a specific literary, historical, almost all of recorded history. It saw the artistic, and philosophical tradition. Sim- world’s population increase one hundred- ply adding more requirements to graduate fold, the largest cities grow twentyfold, and programs that are already too long does not writing, markets, money, wealth, inequali- seem like a very good solution, but neither ty, empires, war, institutional capacity, and does turning training on its head, and aban- the stock of knowledge each transform the doning the knowledge of primary sources human experience. A version of history and particulars that has always been classi- with a blind spot that obscures all of these cal history’s strength in favor of the train- changes is arguably little better than a ver- ing that comparativists receive in the social sion that cannot see anything outside the sciences. history of Greece and Rome. Possibly the least poor compromise It seems to us that this peculiarity of would be to approach ancient history in a evolutionary history confronts classical manner similar to how anthropology used historians–whichever part of the world to be taught. A graduate student inter- they may work on–with both an opportu- ested in, say, how politics functioned in nity and an obligation to respond. Evolu- prestate societies was not expected to learn tionary historians often seem to imply (or, everything that could be known about ev- in Crosby’s case, state explicitly) that once ery acephalous group on earth. He or she agriculture began in the Near East after might, instead, combine a broad cross cul- 9600 bce, everything else followed auto- tural survey with immersion in one spe- matically, with cultural differences count- cific group, learning its languages, liv- ing for little. This is a huge claim to make, ing among its people, eating its food, and with enormous implications for where the catching its diseases. Insights, the anthro- world might go in the centuries to come; pologist Clifford Geertz once suggested, and no one is better placed than classical are not made by “regarding­ a remote lo- historians and archaeologists to find out cality as the world in a teacup or as the so- whether it is true. ciological equivalent of a cloud chamber,” Rising to the challenge and obligation, but by recognizing that “small facts speak however, will necessarily take classical his- to large issues . . . because they are made

145 (2) Spring 2016 117 What is to.”9 Studies of the size of ancient Greek consciousness), dao (Zhuangzi’s “way”), Ancient houses or Athenian worker’s wages or the or to kalon (Plato’s “good”) was a matter History? cost of raising foundlings as slaves in Ro- of self-fashioning, looking for the answers man Egypt do not have to speak to broad- within rather than waiting for kings or er theories of how premodern economies priests to provide them. The secret, how-­­ work–but they can be made to.10 ever, always involved compassion. Do un­ to others as you would have them do unto So far, the topic that has attracted most you, the Axial Age founders said, and you attention of this kind is probably the “Ax- will change the world. ial Age,” which lends itself to a variety of For some decades, social scientists

approaches that could potentially combine seemed to find the Axial Age more inter- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/145/2/113/1830927/daed_a_00381.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 classical and evolutionary thinking about esting than humanists did, perhaps be- ancient history. Struggling in the 1940s to cause the roughly simultaneous appear- come to terms with the moral crisis of his ance of similar intellectual systems in such own day, the German philosopher Karl Jas- distinct cultures, without much evidence pers coined the phrase to describe the mid- of diffusion, was easier to analyze in evo- dle of the first millenniumbce because, he lutionary terms than within the cul­ture- said, this had been the axis around which specific frameworks that classical histori- the world’s history had turned. From Chi- ans favored.12 There were exceptions, but na to the Mediterranean, the centuries on in the last few years classical scholars have either side of 500 bce saw an explosion of begun claiming the topic as their own.13 moral thinking, producing Confucianism Few scholars have the talents to master the and Daoism in China, Buddhism and Jain- relevant skills thoroughly enough to be- ism in India, and Greek philosophy and the come experts on the primary sources from Hebrew Bible in the Mediterranean region multiple Axial Age civilizations (the emi- and Near East. This really was the begin- nent historian of ancient science Geoffrey ning of the history that counted, Jaspers Lloyd is the obvious exception), but there asserted, because this was when “man, as are other ways to approach the problem.14 we know him today, came into being.”11 For instance, scholars might set focused Jaspers did not gloss over the deep differ- studies of the Presocratics, Upanishads, or ences between Chinese, Indian, Iranian, Mencius against the larger Axial back- Israelite, and Greek thought; after all, no ground, or, more broadly, ask why there one could possibly mistake Plato’s Apology was no Axial Age in the second millenni- for Confucius’s Analects. He observed, how­- um bce, or the New World.15 ever, that all the way from Greece to the In their teaching and research, ancient Yellow River, intellectuals began debat­ historians deal with one of the most con- ing similar questions at roughly the same sequential phases of human cultural evo- time. The new thinkers tended to be sim- lution, a time when modestly sized local ilar kinds of people, usually coming from groups of people–villages, towns, chief- the lower ranks of the elite and from doms, and the like–were increasingly ab- small, marginal states rather than from sorbed into ever-larger networks of coop- great empires. They also tended to reach eration and, more often than not, control. the conclusion that while the nature of Models of social organization differed con- goodness was indefinable, people could siderably, from small but cohesive inde- still transcend the evils of this world. At- pendent communities to large but hetero- taining ren (Confucius’s “humaneness”), geneous and highly hierarchical empires. nirvana (the Buddha’s “snuffing out” of The ancient Mediterranean produced both

118 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences of these outcomes in paradigmatic form: within a few centuries by new empires, Ian the Greek city-state culture, the largest of no comparable behemoth ever again took Morris & Walter its kind in all of history, and the Roman over all of temperate Europe. The Roman Scheidel Empire, the biggest empire ever to exist in state and the Chinese Qin and Han Dynas- that region, which, in an added twist, had ties had built huge empires that became grown out of a small city-state. more similar as they matured, and yet Eu- For several reasons, these developments rope and China embarked on very differ- are best studied from a comparative per- ent trajectories once these early super- spective. Since empires tended to appear states had failed.19 The subsequent diver- wherever ecological conditions allowed, gence between the periodic restoration the driving forces behind the rise and fall and abatement of universal empire in East Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/145/2/113/1830927/daed_a_00381.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 of any one of them cannot properly be as- Asia (and elsewhere) and enduring poly- sessed in isolation. That modern scholars centrism in Europe requires explanation, have managed to propose more than two a task only made possible by systematic hundred­ different reasons for the fall of comparison. the Roman Empire strongly suggests that Global contextualization of this kind conventional academic focus on just a forces ancient historians to reformulate single case is simply a dead end, and that their own questions: If the Roman Empire comparative analysis of a process that oc- was unique, why did it appear in the first curred so many times in history promises place? By privileging its decline and fall far more compelling results.16 over its rise, have we trained our sights on Moreover, the tension between city-state the lesser challenge? Are there specific envi- and empire as competing and complemen- ronmental obstacles to empire that the Ro- tary forms of sociopolitical organization mans somehow overcame–and how could throws light on a very big problem of his- we possibly hope to know them un­less we tory more generally: the relationship be- also look at other parts of the world? Most tween state formation and human welfare. importantly, does the lasting disappear- Our colleague Josiah Ober has powerfully ance of the Roman Empire help explain one argued that the pluralism of the Greek city- of the most momentous historical transfor- state culture delivered important benefits, mations, the Industrial Revolution, and the especially when it sustained participatory resultant “Great Divergence” between the democracy, as it did in classical Athens.17 At West and the rest of the world? The rea- the same time, one of us has found that hu- sons for this breakthrough remain contest- man social development peaked whenev- ed, with some scholars favoring relatively er some of the largest premodern empires recent or contingent factors and others ar- were at the height of their power.18 guing for the relevance of more deeply en- trenched, long-term causes.20 By foster- Understanding the costs and gains asso- ing competition and preserving alternative ciated with different forms of macrosocial pathways of development, did the absence cooperation has been a major challenge of anything like the Roman Empire in the across academic disciplines, and ancient West prepare the ground for modernity?21 history has much to contribute. After all, However one chooses to approach these the modern West grew out of a highly com-­ big questions, both the Axial Age and the petitive state system that had gradually successive political and economic diver- emerged from the wreckage of the Roman gences between Europe and the rest of the Empire. Unlike in other parts of the globe, world strike us as areas where twenty- where failed empires were often replaced first-century classical historians have im-

145 (2) Spring 2016 119 What is portant things to say about the begin- torians want to make contributions to ex- Ancient nings of the world we occupy and where it plaining beginnings, we will need to raise History? might be going next, as classical and phil- our game, master new evidence, meth- osophical historians alike tried to do in ods, and questions, and recognize that the the eighteenth century. But just as both ancient world was much bigger–and an- these groups of scholars did a quarter of cient history much longer–than our pre- a millennium ago, if today’s classical his- decessors made them seem.

endnotes Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/145/2/113/1830927/daed_a_00381.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 * Contributor Biographies: IAN MORRIS is the Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics at Stanford University and a Fellow of the Stanford Archaeology Center. He has excavated in Brit­ ain, Greece, and Italy, and published fourteen books, including Foragers, Famers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve (2015) and Why the West Rules–For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future (2010). WALTER SCHEIDEL is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics and History at Stanford University. He is also a Catherine R. Kennedy and Daniel L. Grossman Fel­ low in Human Biology. He is the author of Death on the Nile: Disease and the Demography of Roman Egypt (2001) and editor of Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States (with Andrew Monson, 2015), State Power in Ancient China and Rome (2015), and The Oxford Handbook of the State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean (with Peter Bang, 2013). 1 Confucius Analects 7.1, 12.1. 2 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, trans. Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1987), 33. 3 Wilhelm von Humboldt, “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Greek Republics” (1808), sec. 1, as cited in Humanist Without Portfolio: An Anthology of the Writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt, ed. Marianne Cowan (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963), 79. 4 Herbert Spencer, “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” Westminster Review 67 (1857): 465. 5 Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography, vol. 2 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1904), 43. 6 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997); and Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: HarperCollins, 2015). 7 Morton Fried, The Evolution of Political Society (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967); and David Chris­ tian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 8 Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, 2nd ed. (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 42. 9 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 23. 10 We have immodestly chosen examples from our own work and that of Richard Saller, our col­ league and collaborator, formerly at Chicago and currently at Stanford. See Ian Morris, “Eco­ nomic Growth in Ancient Greece,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 160 (4) (2004): 709–742; Walter Scheidel, “Real Wages in Early Economies: Evidence for Living Standards from 1800 bce to 1300 ce,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 53 (3) (2010): 425–462; and Richard Saller, “Human Capital and Economic Growth,” in The Cambridge Com- panion to the Roman Economy, ed. Walter Scheidel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 73, 85. 11 Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953), 1.

120 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 12 See Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany: State Uni­ Ian versity of New York Press, 1986); Johann P. Arnason, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, and Björn Wittrock, Morris eds., Axial Civilizations and World History (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Robert Bellah, Religion in Human & Walter Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2011); and Rob­ Scheidel ert Bellah and Hans Joas, eds., The Axial Age and its Consequences (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2012). 13 See especially Dædalus 104 (2) (Spring 1975), “Wisdom, Revelation, and Doubt: Perspectives on the First Millennium B.C.” 14 Geoffrey Lloyd, Adversaries and Authorities: Investigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese Science (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Geoffrey Lloyd, The Ambitions of Curiosity: Under- standing the World in Ancient Greece and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Geoffrey Lloyd, Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections: Philosophical Perspectives on Greek and Chinese Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/145/2/113/1830927/daed_a_00381.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Science and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin, The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002). 15 For the thoughts of one of us on the latter questions, see Ian Morris, Why the West Rules–For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 254–263; and Nicolas Baumard, Alexandre Hyafil, Ian Morris, and Pascal Boyer, “Increased Affluence Explains the Emergence of Ascetic Wisdoms and Moralizing Religions,” Current Biology 25 (1) (2015): 10–15. 16 See the 210 factors identified in Alexander Demandt, Der Fall Roms: Die Auflösung des Römischen Reiches im Urteil der Nachwelt (Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 1984), 695; and Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vols. 4–6 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939). Toynbee’s work embraced a global vision of the fall of civilizations, but we have since come a long way in terms of both methodology and factual knowledge. 17 See, most recently, Josiah Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015). 18 Morris, Why the West Rules–For Now, especially pages 281, 332, and 385 for notes on the period up to 1500 ce. 19 Walter Scheidel, ed., Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Walter Scheidel, ed., State Power in Ancient China and Rome (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 20 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Peer Vries, Escaping Poverty: The Origins of Modern Economic Growth (Vienna: Vienna University Press, 2013). Vries offers the most com­ prehensive survey of the debate. 21 One of us very much thinks so. See Walter Scheidel, Escape from Rome: The Death of an Empire and the Birth of the Modern West (forthcoming Princeton University Press).

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