A fascinating look at cities and cultures often over looked by mainstream history. However, most of the book focuses on cities and cultures on the borders of the Greco-Roman-Egyptian world like Buhen and the fortresses on Hadrian’s Wall in northern England. The furthest away from Europe this book gets is Vietnam. This should really be called the Near Edges of the Known World.

Mainly as a result of having an Asian Studies focus as an undergraduate, I didn't come into this book with a specifically Greco-Roman-centric view of the ancient world that needed to be shed. As a result, "The Far Edges of the Known World" did not end up being the eye-opening experience for me that I think was intended by the author, and I foresee many other readers having a very similar experience depending on factors like their own respective educational experiences, or even just based on where they were born and raised or where their ancestors originated from.

That being said, I do feel that this will be effective read for those who do heavily view the past as a time and place where civilization was far more Mediterranean-centric and homogeneous than it actually ever was. Also, even though I wasn’t awakened from any oversimplified historic viewpoints, I still found this to be an interesting reading experience overall. While I already come in with a decent sense of just how far more intermixed, interconnected, and diverse the past was than what is commonly thought, I never refuse any opportunity to read about any new examples of these historical realities, and thoroughly enjoyed the fresh array provided here by Rees.

Owen Rees offers readers a grand journey around the fringes of the well-known Ancient World civilizations of Egypt, Rome, and Greece, cultures who regarded most outsiders as barbarians or blockheaded troglodytes. But who were these maligned peoples living on the outskirts of empires, were they actual cannibalistic savages or the mere victims of historical discrimination?

Common sense would answer that people are people (brave of me to say, I know) no matter where they live or what culture they partake of. In *The Far Edges of the Known World*, Rees shines a light on ten such sites operating in the peripheries of "civilization", showing that there were many complex multicultural societies of which it is a crime that there is a dearth of historical scholarship. From Sub-Saharan Africa to travelling up the Nile deltas, through Israel and above the Black Sea to the nomadic peoples of Ukraine, to Pakistan, Vietnam, and Roman Britain, evidence is gathered in support of these locations being key stimulants in the spread of trade, language, and religion.

While the ideas in this book are accessible to the beginner history reader, the subject matter itself outpaces common knowledge and may prove confusing to one not well-versed in Ancient World geography and timelines. Rees often glosses over contextual remarks and he plays fast and loose with his chronology, making it often difficult to place the relevance of the data he is presenting.

For the more advanced student of history this book may prove an insightful spotlight into lesser studied societies, yet the thesis may be too simple for a non-historian to endure pages of Scythian dental records or Ethiopian religious tablets.

A history book that zooms out from the usual focus on Greeks and Romans, to look at some of the groups on the periphery of the world. What sources there are get a masterful treatment from Rees. It's well-written for anyone to be able to pick up, and it will challenge and expand your world view.