Böcker av Owen Rees

When we picture the ancient world, we tend to envision the soaring pyramids of Giza, the Coliseum conquests in Rome and the bustling agora of Athens. Indeed, the classical authors who shape our understanding of the world considered the edges of these ancient civilisations the domain of monstrous humanity. For these writers, from Ovid to Herodotus, the outer reaches of the world was where civilisation, or their conception of civilisation, ceased to exist. But at the borders of the empires we now consider the ?heart' of civilisation were thriving, vibrant cultures - just ones we might not expect.In The Far Edges of the Known World, Owen Rees brings us into the world of these ancient borderlands where the impossible became the norm, where the boundaries of ?civilised' and ?barbarian' began to run together and where normally juxtaposed cultures intermixed, showing us that the story of the ancient world isn't nearly as straightforward as we've been taught. Taking us along the sandy caravan routes of Morocco to the freezing winters of the northern Black Sea, from Co-Loa in the Red River valley of Vietnam to the southern reaches of Kenya, Rees explores the powerful empires and diverse peoples in Europe, Asia and Africa beyond the reaches of Greece and Rome. In doing so, he offers us a new, brilliantly rich lens with which to understand the ancient world.

This book examines the lasting impact of war on individuals and their communities in pre-modern Europe. Research on combat stress in the modern era regularly draws upon the past for inspiration and validation, but to date no single volume has effectively scrutinised the universal nature of combat stress and its associated modern diagnoses. Highlighting the methodological obstacles of using modern medical and psychological models to understand pre-modern experiences, this book challenges existing studies and presents innovative new directions for future research. With cutting-edge contributions from experts in history, classics and medical humanities, the collection has a broad chronological focus, covering periods from Archaic Greece (c. sixth and early fifth century BCE) to the British Civil Wars (seventeenth century CE). Topics range from the methodological, such as the dangers of retrospective diagnosis and the applicability of Moral Injury to the past, to the conventionally historical, examining how combat stress and post-traumatic stress disorder may or may not have manifested in different time periods. With chapters focusing on combatants, women, children and the collective trauma of their communities, this collection will be of great interest to those researching the history of mental health in the pre-modern period.

This volume sheds new light on the experience of ancient Greek warfare by identifying and examining three fundamental transitions undergone by the classical Athenian hoplite as a result of his military service: his departure to war, his homecoming from war having survived, and his homecoming from war having died. As a conscript, a man regularly called upon by his city-state to serve in the battle lines and perform his citizen duty, the most common military experience of the hoplite was one of transition - he was departing to or returning from war on a regular basis, especially during extended periods of conflict. Scholarship has focused primarily on the experience of the hoplite after his return, with a special emphasis on his susceptibility to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but the moments of transition themselves have yet to be explored in detail. Taking each in turn, Owen Rees examines the transitions from two sides: from within the domestic environment as a member of an oikos, and from within the military environment as a member of the army. This analysis presents a new template for each and effectively maps the experience of the hoplite as he moves between his domestic and military duties. This allows us to reconstruct the effects of war more fully and to identify moments with the potential for a traumatic impact on the individual.