What was history's biggest empire? Or the tallest building of the
ancient world? What was the average life expectancy in medieval
Byzantium? The average wage in Old Kingdom Egypt? Where did scientific
writing first emerge? What was the bloodiest ritual human sacrifice
ever?
We are used to thinking about history in terms of stories. Yet we
understand our own world through data: vast arrays of statistics that
reveal the workings of our societies. So, join the radical historians
Peter Turchin and Dan Hoyer for a dive into the numbers that reveal the
true shape of the past. Drawing on their own Seshat project, a
staggeringly ambitious attempt to log each piece of demographic and
econometric information that can be reliably estimated for every society
that has ever existed, Figuring Out The Past does more than tell the story of the past: it shows you the large-scale patterns.