The Uncertain Past
Probability in Ancient History

Showcases a powerful new approach to uncertainty in ancient history, using techniques from the social and natural sciences.

Myles Lavan (Edited by), Daniel Jew (Edited by), Bart Danon (Edited by)

9781009100656, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 1 December 2022

348 pages, 60 b/w illus. 10 maps 80 tables
25.2 x 17.6 x 2 cm, 0.73 kg

Historians constantly wrestle with uncertainty, never more so than when attempting quantification, yet the field has given little attention to the nature of uncertainty and strategies for managing it. This volume proposes a powerful new approach to uncertainty in ancient history, drawing on techniques widely used in the social and natural sciences. It shows how probability-based techniques used to manage uncertainty about the future or the present can be applied to uncertainty about the past. A substantial introduction explains the use of probability to represent uncertainty. The chapters that follow showcase how the technique can offer leverage on a wide range of problems in ancient history, from the incidence of expropriation in the Classical Greek world to the money supply of the Roman empire.

1. Probabilistic modelling in ancient history Daniel Jew and Myles Lavan
Part I. Uncertainty: 2. Assessing the scale of property confiscation in the ancient Greek world Emily Mackil
3. Senators and senatorial wealth at Pompeii: reconstructing the local wealth distribution Bart Danon
4. The Roman coinage under the Antonines revisited: an economy of silver, not gold Gilles Bransbourg
Part II. Variability and Missing Data: 5. Children and their impact on family finances in Roman Egypt Paul V. Kelly
6. The financial sustainability of grain funds: a model-based approach using Monte Carlo simulation N. Solonakis, A. Toure and M. Elhouderi
7. New approaches to the urban population and urbanization rate of the Roman Empire, AD 1 to 200 J. W. Hanson
8. Afterword Bart Danon, Daniel Jew and Myles Lavan.

Subject Areas: Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA], European history [HBJD], History: theory & methods [HBA]