> in the popular imagination, there was nothing except Greece, Rome and Egypt until this side of 1 AD.

Doesn't seem true to me; people seem aware of the Mayans and some of the stuff going on in Asia at the time (though generally not all).

In school, we (I'm in the US) spent a whole high school semester on Greece and Rome. In elementary school we had a unit on Mayans/Aztecs/the Inca, and we had a unit on ancient India, but not in high school. For some reason Chinese history was really ignored so I didn't get that until I chose to take a class in college. Since we don't have a national curriculum in the US, I'm sure it's different in different places. I think we know about the Mayans because Americans like to fly to Cancun.

This is a continuation of the 19th century American bias towards Greek classicism as the hallmark of democracy. Conflict with the Ottomans generated a lot of sympathy toward Greece and that was reflected in fads of fashion, architecture, place names, and education.

We studied all the big Eurasian civs...except for Persians. I never understood why the omission. Certainly not cause modern regime given the woke trappings adorning the rest of the curriculum.

It's an extra bummer quite simply because civilizations in the middle interact with more civilizations, and so are a great way to tie together everything else one remembers into a coherent whole.

(Umayyads conquer Sassanids and 100-200 years later have a big only-old-school-military-historicans-think-it-matters one-off battle with the Tang dynasty in like modern Tajikistan or something. What a great flashcard!)

> in the popular imagination, there was nothing except Greece, Rome and Egypt until this side of 1 AD.

Really? The Romans are known for their expansionism. Who were they conquering? Who was everybody fighting against in 300?

In the popular imagination? The Romans were conquering barbaric tribes that aren't worth talking about in detail, I think. Certainly not civilizations. The actual details of those civilizations seem to be as niche and obscure as knowledge of the Kush.

> In the popular imagination? The Romans were conquering barbaric tribes that aren't worth talking about in detail, I think.

There was plenty of interaction, but the thing about those insignificant barbaric tribes is that they aren't worth conquering either.

And there's a simple rule that's obvious even in a superficial read of de bello gallico: don't cultivate wheat and the legions won't bother you.

It's my impression the Gallic Wars were more about building Julius Caesar's personality cult than anything else. Enriching his soldiers so they'd be loyal to him and winning the respect of Roman pyblic (hence the self-aggrandizing book written in Latin, not Greek.)

Few external wars haven't been fought for internal reasons

Now it’s cultivate nukes and the legions won’t bother you.

If we're really talking about Western popular imagination, 1-4 generations ago, I have to think it was dominated by what's in the Bible.

The Persian and Macedonian empires both reconquered what had been conquered by the Assyrian empire, and likely others before.

No, the Persian empire was much, much larger than the Assyrian empire.

The Macedonian empire was technically larger, including Persia, except it was never administrated as a whole and fell into pieces just a few years after coming into existence.

Barbarians! Tribes! People in some way not civilized!

(This was, in fairness, largely how the Romans represented it to themselves, regardless of how true it was, so it's maybe not surprising.)

The Romans were well aware that Carthage, Greece, and Persia were great civilizations.