Writing World History: Which World?

Abstract

Far from being a recent world, the concept of "a [one] world" did slowly emerged in a post-prehistoric Antiquity. The actual knowledge of the world increased through millennia leaving aside large continents (Americas, part of Africa, Australia, etc. - most areas without written history), and writing history in Antiquity cannot be a synchronal presentation of the most ancient times of these areas. Through a few case studies dealing with texts, archaeology and history itself mostly in BCE times, the paper will try to perceive the slow building-up of a physical awareness and 'moral' consciousness of the known world by people of the Middle East (e.g. the Bible, Gilgamesh) and the Mediterranean (mainly Greeks).