they made me in a lab & probably regret that || art @androgyne
getting rly into reading books / watching videos abt ancient civilizations, history, and empires lately. if u have any faves (China, East Asia, and Muslim histories esp as many 'world history' stuff barely touches on them) do share!
inspired by reading A People's History of Science
I really enjoyed The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan! It's not ancient and does extend fairly modern but it's not Eurocentric, which is great.
In case you haven't seen them, Bill Wurtz has "history of Japan" and "history of the entire world, I guess" which are both masterpieces in communicating narrative in history. (And separately, masterpieces in the use of jazz as incidental music)
They're necessarily pretty broad and shallow overviews given the format but they're great in surfacing things that might be worth an extra look.
And separately I find the Hundred Schools of Thought period of Chinese history fascinating. In short, the Chinese people had lived through at least 5 centuries of successful empire by this point, and yet for another 5 centuries, there technically was an emperor ruling in absentia, but he had basically no actual power except over a small area around his palace. This period is called Eastern Zhou, so named for the emperor being kicked out of his traditional western capitol to an eastern one. This led to numerous fiefdoms, nominally vassals of the emperor, but in reality were mostly fully independent states, and eventually recognized themselves as much. This cultural splintering, with a shared remembered history slowly fading into myth and legend, a shared language and writing system that were once the lifeblood of empire, as many areas alternatively prospered or decayed, and only trade serving to continue to circulate stories and philosophy across the region, led to tons and tons of philosophy!
Attempts to explain how things had gone so wrong, attempts to explain that no really, this was better than living under the emperor ever was, attempts to dictate how a great ruler in the future should avoid the mistakes of the last empire, attempts to say how the future ruler should actually return to even older traditions when the empire was more successful, monarchists and communalists and monarchic communalists and so on. Is virtue based on tradition? Compassion? A mystic Way? The letter of the law and nothing else?
And it's additionally enticing because the incoming Qin dynasty fulfilled so much of the incipient yearning for an empire, conquering the nominal emperor and all the Warring States with a flourish of propaganda, choosing a winning philosophy and burning as many texts as they could find of the others, and uh, immediately collapsing like 15 years later lmao, initiating another long period with no central government to speak of. It's such a weird little bottle of Chinese history! Bill Wurtz glosses over it in like 3 seconds, and I can't say he was wrong to! I love it so much.
