PEOPLE believe, the author says in her introduction, that modern Western culture is based on those of Greece and Rome. Lost to Europe during the Dark Ages, they were rediscovered at the Renaissance, and have been cherished as the roots of our civilisation ever since.

Hang on a moment! While a conversation with Samuel Johnson or Edward Gibbon might well proceed on these lines, surely Europeans’ understanding of their past has always been much broader. Christianity brought an awareness of the Near and Middle East and their history. Germanic and Norse invaders added their own traditions, which helped to form European literature and, much later, theories of the origins of democracy. Archaeology has long told us of Europe’s links with beyond, and historians have been putting all these pieces together for the past two hundred years.

Professor Quinn is on stronger ground in wanting to show us that the cultures of Greece and Rome were not simply indigenous, but drew on other parts of the world, including Asia and Africa. Immigrants came in as conquerors, settlers, and slaves. Religions, alphabets, artefacts, technologies, animals, and, of course, diseases were all imported to help shape what we regard as classical civilisation. Here, her book is a welcome survey of the process, and a reminder that the ancient world was not so different from our own.

It is a study chiefly of the Mediterranean and the countries around its shores. Three-quarters is concerned with the classical world, and the last quarter with a selective study of the Middle Ages. The book ends as the Age of Discovery starts. There are 19 chapters, each beginning at a particular place, time, and happening. The typical chapter then takes us on a journey showing how the peoples of the past interacted with one another: making forays into the outside world and receiving goods and ideas from it.

The material is very varied. The chapter that begins in the Crimea, for example, stays only fleetingly in the Black Sea before taking us to Parthia, China, and the exploits of Julius Caesar against the Celts and Germans. The author’s erudition, laid out in 120 pages of endnotes, is impressive, and general readers will find a great deal here that they do not know, and new insights into the familiar.

My problem with the book is the lack of an overall design. True, this is not easy to achieve when writing cultural history. A chronological treatment is less feasible than when writing about politics, religion, or economics. Similar elements and issues in culture go on recurring, while much remains constant throughout. People’s needs and ambitions are much the same from one age to another.

But the author’s chosen structure of vignettes, beginning in particular places, but then ranging widely, give her book the character of an encyclopaedia. I became more confused by the many details than aware of a journey on which I was being taken. Even the author does not share any insights learnt from the journey when it ends, other than repeat her original aim. And, while one should never tell a writer what to put in a book, least of all when it is published, it would have been better to concentrate on the ancient world. The coverage of the Middle Ages is too fragmentary and adds nothing to the general thesis.

In the end, the book is best treated as an encyclopaedia to explore and browse in. It is an erudite and yet accessible account of many interesting things. Together, they inform us of something broader that we benefit from knowing about: the interactions of peoples, objects, and ideas in the Mediterranean world, and the way in which these formed the cultures that we think of as quintessentially Greek and Roman.

Dr Nicholas Orme is an emeritus professor of the University of Exeter. He is the author of The History of England’s Cathedrals (Books, 19 April).

How the World Made the West: A 4,000 year history
Josephine Quinn
Bloomsbury Publishing £30
(978-1-5266-0518-4)
Church Times Bookshop £27