A look into ancient Egypt.

Visoko, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Coordinates: 43 59 N 18 10 E
Population: 15,310 (1991 census)
There are plenty of cases where tourists have been lured to destinations to see replicas of ancient architecture, or commercial complexes masquerading as cultural monuments, but how about sites that are arguably hoaxes? Residents of Visoko, a short distance northwest […]

Dreaming of Ireland.

Bart Ehrman answers some questions about his new book.

By Brian Fagan
When I sat down to compile my latest book From Stonehenge to Samarkand, I found my greatest inspiration in the writings of a virtually forgotten English writer, Rose Macaulay. Her classic book, Pleasure of Ruins, first appeared in the 1950s and was reprinted with evocative photographs by Reny Beloff a decade later. Macaulay […]

How important was the fall of the Western Roman Empire, in terms of its consequences for the history of Europe?

WARD-PERKINS: I argue what is currently an unfashionable view (though, in my opinion, it is blindingly obvious) – that the Roman world brought remarkable levels of sophistication and comfort, and spread them widely in society (and not just to a tiny elite); and that the fall of Rome saw the dismantling of this complexity, and a return to what can reasonably be termed ‘prehistoric’ levels of material comfort. Furthermore, I believe that this change was not just at the level of pots and pans, important though these are, but also affected sophisticated skills like reading and writing. Pompeii, with its ubiquitous inscriptions, painted signs, and graffiti, was a city that revolved around writing – after the fall of the empire, the same cannot be said for any settlement in the West for many centuries to come.

I recommend caution in praising ‘Civilizations’ (whether Roman, or our own), and I do emphasize that ‘civilizations’ have their downsides. But, equally, I think the current fashion for treating all cultures as essentially the same – and all dramatic changes (like the end of the Roman world) as mere ‘transformations’ from one system, to another equally valid one – is not only wrong, but also dangerous. It evens out the dramatic ups and downs of human history, into a smooth trajectory. This risks blinding us to the fact that things have often gone terribly wrong in the past, and to the near certainty that, in time, our own ‘civilization’, and the comforts we enjoy from it, will also collapse.

HEATHER: I never know, really, how to judge good & bad in global terms when looking at any societies. I am very sure, though, that the effects of Rome’s fall were huge and felt right across the board. It’s quite common now, for instance, while describing the history of subjects as diverse as Christianity or literacy in this period, to view Rome’s fall as incidental or unimportant. In my view, that is straightforwardly wrong. Late Antique Christianity evolved a series of authority structures, both centrally and locally, which were shaped around and based upon the existence of the Roman state. When that went, these authority structures, even when they survived, changed their nature fundamentally. In shorthand, the medieval monarchical Papacy is inconceivable had powerful western Emperors survived. So too literacy. Patterns of elite literacy, for instance, were based upon the career structures generated by the Empire’s bureaucracy – lots of jobs for those knowing a particular kind of Latin well – and once that bureaucracy went, so did the jobs and the patterns of education and literacy attached to them.

Today we present a dialogue between Bryan Ward-Perkins and Peter Heather. Ward-Perkins and Heather are colleagues at Oxford University and the authors of The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization and The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, respectively. Both books were published this fall and […]

This is the last of four excerpts from The Fall of Rome by Bryan Ward-Perkins. The first excerpt, “The Disappearance of Comfort,” can be found here: LINK
The economic change that I have outlined was an extraordinary one. What we observe at the end of the Roman world is not a ‘recession’ or – […]

This is the third of four excerpts from The Fall of Rome by Bryan Ward-Perkins.
The first excerpt, “The Disappearance of Comfort,” can be found here: LINK
In the post-Roman West, almost all this material sophistication disappeared. Specialized production and all but the most local distribution became rare, unless for luxury goods; and the impressive […]

There have been some very interesting reviews of The Fall of Rome zipping about the ether lately.
Some of it spurred by our excerpt series which began HERE
From across the pond,
Alun reacts to our post…
Troels, a graduate student in the Department of Classical Archaeology at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, gives his own take on […]