Interview with Dr. Owen Rees (Book, The Far Edges of the Known World releases 9/30/25)

Tides of History

Wondery / Patrick Wyman

Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 2 October 2025

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The ancient world was a lot bigger than Greece and Rome. Dr. Owen Rees joins me to discuss his new book on this broader conception of antiquity - The Far Edges of the Known World - and we traverse the globe from Africa to Vietnam to the Black Sea, tracking the contours of a stranger, more diverse, and far more interesting world than we ever knew existed. Buy The Far Edges of the Known World here: https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324036524

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Tides of History early and ad-free right now.
0:04.6	Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:14.6	Hi, everybody, from Wondery.
0:20.3	Welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Wyman.
0:23.6	Thanks so much for joining me today. Now, the ancient world was a big place. At the beginning of the 3rd century BC, an Athenian could head down to the port and hop on boats bound north to the Black Sea, east to Rhodes or Syria, south to Egypt and west to Sicily or Campania,
0:39.9	ultimately to Carthage, Gaul, even Iberia. They would still find Greek speakers in all of those
0:45.3	places, even after traveling hundreds or even thousands of miles from home. A Roman could have made
0:50.1	a similar trip a few hundred years later without even leaving the comforting confines of the
0:54.3	Roman Empire. But the world was still much bigger than that. Beyond the boundaries of anything
1:00.7	that commonly gets lumped under the heading of the ancient world, where other communities,
1:05.5	other peoples, other ways of life. Their exclusion from our usual narratives about the ancient world is a product not of
1:12.2	their lack of importance, but the way the study of the period has evolved and the sources at our
1:16.8	disposal. Now, at last, we can reintegrate the people beyond the known into our understanding
1:22.9	of that time and place. How to do that, and what we can learn from it, is the subject of today's episode, and we could
1:29.9	not hope to have a better guest.
1:32.4	Dr. Owen Reese is the author of a new book entitled The Far Edges of the Known World,
1:36.7	Life Beyond the Borders of Ancient Civilizations, which I thoroughly enjoyed and highly
1:41.1	recommend to you all.
1:42.7	Dr. Reese is a lecturer in Applied Humanities at
1:44.9	Birmingham Newman University, the founder of the website Bad Ancient, and the author of the
1:49.3	newsletter, Our Ancient World. Owen Reese, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so
1:53.8	much for having me on. So what led you to write this book? It's a big project. It goes a lot of different times and places.
	...

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