Esperaunce

History is more than just a collection of dates, books, and people. History is a conversation across centuries.

Essays on the ancient world, and a free library of twenty-seven civilisations.

Read the essaysEnter the Archives

From the essays

More essays

  • Was the Khipu Writing?

    Was the Khipu Writing?

    Spanish officials read tribute records off Inca khipu, then ordered them destroyed. On knotted cords, the definition of writing, and what was really lost.

  • Against Easy Histories

    Against Easy Histories

    The Cyrus Cylinder is not a human rights charter. On survival bias, periodisation and hindsight, the things that make history look tidy, and how…

  • Everyone Has a Flood

    Everyone Has a Flood

    Once upon a time, the gods destroyed humanity because it was simply too loud. On flood myths from Babylon to China, and why the…

All essays →

A black-figure vase painting of a charioteer driving four galloping horses.

A visual essay in eleven objects

Silently Preserved, in Objects

Helots, the enslaved, women and foreigners left almost no words of their own. What survives of them in classical Greece, traced through eleven objects.

Begin the story

Panathenaic prize amphora, British Museum. Photograph by Carole Raddato, CC BY-SA 2.0.

One question, three answers

How does a state make its will binding on people who will never meet the person issuing it?

The Archives take twenty-seven civilisations through the same eight themes. Here is a question from one of them, answered three ways.

Marble statue of Pan or a satyr, RomanAncient RomeFrom the Twelve Tables to the praetorA harsh early code learned by schoolboys, a magistrate who granted remedies, and jurists who made law a science.Read the page → Female dancer, China, Han dynastyHan ChinaWhat the strips sayTens of thousands of bamboo and wooden slips from tombs, wells and frontier posts: the paperwork the dynastic histories never mention.Read the page → Double bowl, IncaIncasThe four quartersAn empire run by moving whole peoples around, with an administration that counted everything and wrote nothing.Read the page →
See all 27 answersEnter the Archives →Who lived at the same time? →

Twenty-seven civilisations, eight themes each, and 600+ in-depth pages. Free to read.

One question, twenty-seven answers

Ten big questions, asked of every civilisation at once

How did they end? What did they believe? Who did the fighting? Each page sorts all twenty-seven civilisations into four kinds of answer, and links down to the pages that go deeper.

A roofless stone church on a grassy slope above a fjord.How civilisations endSieges, slow abandonments, collapse from within, and endings nobody can date. The vast interior of a domed building with arcaded galleries, huge round calligraphic panels on the walls and crowds of visitors below.What did they believe?Feeding the gods, religion as rule, creeds and quarrels, and conversions. Hands turning the loose pages of an old manuscript, the Arabic script dense and annotated, on a wooden table.How did they write it down?Invented, borrowed, remembered by heart, or lost and unread. A handscroll painting of warriors crowding into a burning palace courtyard, an ox carriage in the middle.Who did the fighting?Citizens, a warrior class, hired men, and wars that were never about land. A carved stone lintel of a man holding a flaming torch over a kneeling woman pulling a rope through her tongue.What could women do?Owned, signed, ruled, wrote… or seen only through other people’s records. Carved relief of Darius standing over a defeated rebel, with a line of bound captive kings before him.Who was in charge?Gods, generals, assemblies and charters… and a few with no ruler to find. A group of steep-sided sandstone pyramids on desert dunes, each with a small chapel at its foot.How did they build it?Organised labour, clever engineering, buildings with a point… and a lot of rebuilding. A medieval manuscript map showing a crowned African king seated on a throne holding a large gold nugget, with a veiled rider approaching on a camel.How did they get rich?Gold and dye, toll roads, treasuries… and rich states with no money at all. A scholar at a desk with a magnifying lamp, recording a small clay tablet beside a computer.How do we know?Their own archives, their enemies’ histories, late stories… and inventions. An inlaid panel of shell figures on a blue ground, showing a seated banquet above and people leading animals below.What did they eat?Barley rations, mare’s milk, a caliph’s cookbook… and how the food reached the table.

Who writes this

Steven is studying for an MA in Classical Studies. He is building the Archives, a comparative library of twenty-seven civilisations, from his own research.

More about Steven →

Coming next · Thursday 5 November

The Empire in Receipts

Thirty thousand clay tablets record what the Persian empire actually paid for, and the picture is nothing like the one its enemies left us.

Coming next · Thursday 12 November · A visual essay

The Empire in Receipts, in Objects

Thirty thousand clay receipts from Persepolis, and a king who wanted to be believed. Here is the empire one object at a time.

Coming next · Thursday 19 November

The Year Without Summer

In 536 the sun dimmed for a year and a half, and Italy, Syria and China all recorded it separately. How three archives agree, and where certainty stops.

Coming next · Thursday 3 December

How Knowledge Actually Travels

We call them Arabic numerals; the Arabs called them Indian. On the translation movement, the people who carried Greek learning, and what changed in transit.

Coming next · Thursday 17 December

What a Wall Is For

Hadrian’s Wall has eighty gates and a second ditch facing the Roman side. What the archaeology says it was actually for, and why walls are misread.

Coming next · Thursday 14 January

The Reason for the Plague

A Hittite king spent twenty years working out which sin caused the plague. He was closer to right than he knew. On how societies explain epidemics.

Coming next · Thursday 28 January

Ruins as Arguments

Darius carved his version of events 100m up a cliff where nobody could reach it. On monuments as arguments, and the people who decided what survived.

Coming next · Thursday 11 February

A Language We Can Read but Cannot Understand

Every Meroitic word can be pronounced; most still cannot be understood. What decipherment really requires, and why Kush’s own script went silent.

Coming next · Thursday 25 February

The Ocean That Never Closed

The Indian Ocean’s winds reverse on schedule, so its trade needed no empire to protect it. Why the network that mattered most is the one nobody narrates.

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New civilisations and essays, sent as they are written. A new essay every fortnight, and nothing else.

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