WORKING WITH EVIDENCE

Perceptions of Outsiders in the Ancient World

The peoples of ancient Eurasia did not live in splendid isolation from one another. Nor did they inhabit the kind of deeply interconnected and globalized world that the past century has created. But through war, commerce, the migration of peoples, the spread of religions, and sheer geographic proximity, some of those peoples became sharply aware of one another.

Thus the Greeks went to war with Persia, and a few of them visited or lived in Egypt. Romans derived their much-beloved pepper from India and some silk from China, while facing those they regarded as “barbarians” in the European lands to the north of their imperial boundaries. For many centuries, the Chinese too had to deal with their own “barbarians” beyond the Great Wall, even as Chinese Buddhist pilgrims sought out the sources of their faith in India. These are but a few of the cross-cultural encounters that helped to shape histories of ancient peoples.

Such encounters with strangers have long been an important motor of change in human history, as foreign ideas, diseases, goods, technologies, and military challenges required adjustment in established ways of living. Here, however, we are more interested in the perceptions or understandings of outsiders that arose from these interactions, mental images of life beyond the familiar confines of one’s own culture. How do we understand those who are “other” than ourselves? What distortions arise as we ponder those outside our circle? How can the “other” provide opportunities to question or critique one’s own society? The documents that follow provide three examples of this process from the ancient world.