Critics of modern civilization think humans have lost a Golden Age we once had in the distant past. Closer to the truth was Hobbes’s observation that life in the distant past was “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” An earlier entry in this blog shows a photo of an ancient skull-cup dug up by archeologists in England.
(p. R3) . . . while the fearsome Scythian hordes who stalked the Eurasian steppe might show you some hospitality by inviting you to dinner, Herodotus warned that you should be prepared to have your drink served to you in a human skull.
For millennia, sensational accounts like these were all that was known about these bygone backwaters of the ancient world. But according to Owen Rees, they are more a reflection of their writers’ bigoted imaginations than the truth. In “The Far Edges of the Known World,” Mr. Rees, a researcher at Birmingham Newman University and the lead editor of badancient.com, a website that fact-checks common claims about the ancient world, seeks to remedy these misapprehensions.
. . .
While Mr. Rees is keen to dispel the myths ginned up by imperial writers, he doesn’t prevaricate when the evidence shows that their fears may not have been entirely unfounded. Though he makes a heroic effort to show that the Scythians were not the one-dimensional brutes the Greeks believed them to be, he also admits that recent excavations in present-day Bilsk, Ukraine, seem to show that they really did drink from human skulls as Herodotus said.
For the full review see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date October 10, 2025, and has the title “‘The Far Edges of the Known World’ Review: Ancient Strangers.”)
The book under review is:
Rees, Owen. The Far Edges of the Known World: Life Beyond the Borders of Ancient Civilization. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2025.