Figuring Out The Past

The 3,495 Vital Statistics that Explain World History

By: Peter Turchin, Daniel Hoyer

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eBook | 29 October 2020

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The numbers that tell the story of humanity.

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.

About the Authors

Professor Peter Turchin is the founder of a new transdisciplinary field of Cliodynamics. He has authored seven books and has published 200 articles, including a dozen in such top journals as Nature, Science, and PNAS.

Dr Dan Hoyer works with Peter Turchin on the Deep Roots of the Modern World, part of the Seshat: Global History Databank Project.