To the Ends of the Earth: How Ancient Explorers, Scientists, and Traders Connected the World

A sweeping history of ancient exploration, the first full-scale account in over a century

Odysseus. Jason and the Argonauts. Heracles. Greek mythology is full of tales of heroes setting out for the unknown. Such tales reflected and instilled a sense of confidence in the Greeks as they explored the limits of their world. Their voyages of discovery (and conquest), most dramatically under Alexander the Great, are but the most famous examples of ancient exploration. These expeditions were built on earlier voyages, notably those by Bronze Age Egyptians and Mesopotamians, and led to further global travel, trade, and warfare among the Romans, Persians, Scythians, Indians, and Chinese.

To the Ends of the Earth is the first modern history of ancient exploration in over a century. Ranging from the Mediterranean Bronze Age to the third century CE, it reveals long-distance, explorative campaigning to be more than a mere ephemeral phenomenon of ancient history. Rather, exploration was, and still is, an integral and driving force of economic, political, and cultural development. Through the prisms of trade, travel, and politics, Raimund J. Schulz provides a sweeping, 1000-year history of all of Eurasia. He traces the pathways and periods of ancient discovery--from the North Atlantic to China, from the Russian steppes to the Sahara--understanding these journeys not as isolated actions, but within their political, military, economic, and cultural contexts. This book explains why adventurers, traders, colonisers, generals, and envoys set out over and over to explore new horizons, the intentions that guided them, and the long-term consequences of their discoveries. By the third century CE remote civilizations were connected as never before and the foundational dynamics of these voyages later contributed to European overseas exploration in the Early Modern Age. To the Ends of the Earth not only offers a fresh look at the ancient world, but also significantly contributes to an understanding of premodern world history by releasing Greco-Roman antiquity from its relative isolation and placing it in a global context.

Raimund J. Schulz is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bielefeld and an award-winning author.

Robert Savage is the author of Hölderlin after the Catastrophe and the translator of many books, including Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger’s Maria Theresa: The Habsburg Empress in Her Time.