Ancient Greece and Rome Aren’t Really All That Old
Believing they are almost the beginning of human civilization skews our understanding of history
Rome was founded in 753 BC. Greece is generally recognized to have come into being around 1600 BC when the pyramids in Egypt were already 500 years old. A unified Egypt arose around 3150 BC. To most of us, these dates seem pretty long ago, and since they are some of the oldest cultures that the average person has ever studied or learned about, the so-called “Ancient World” appears to be pretty close to the beginning of our history although this is not remotely the case.
Humans first emerged in Africa about 2 million years ago and modern Homo sapiens about 300,000 years ago. Something that took place 5k years ago is only slightly more than 1% of the time that Homo sapiens have been around. And because most people don’t know anything about the truly ancient past, they tend to assume that the dynamics of ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt must’ve always been in play.
They envision smaller, and perhaps less complex societies, but nonetheless having the same social structures as those they are most familiar with — something that is rarely the case. For the vast majority of history, humans lived in small, nomadic, leaderless foraging groups. We only start to…
