The Invention of Yesterday

A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

By: Tamim Ansary

Narrated by: Tamim Ansary

Length: 17 hrs and 4 mins

Publisher's summary

From language to culture to cultural collision: the story of how humans invented history, from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age

Traveling across millennia, weaving the experiences and world views of cultures both extinct and extant, The Invention of Yesterday shows that the engine of history is not so much heroic (battles won), geographic (farmers thrive), or anthropogenic (humans change the planet) as it is narrative.

Many thousands of years ago, when we existed only as countless small autonomous bands of hunter-gatherers widely distributed through the wilderness, we began inventing stories - to organize for survival, to find purpose and meaning, to explain the unfathomable. Ultimately these became the basis for empires, civilizations, and cultures. And when various narratives began to collide and overlap, the encounters produced everything from confusion, chaos, and war to cultural efflorescence, religious awakenings, and intellectual breakthroughs.

Through vivid stories studded with insights, Tamim Ansary illuminates the world-historical consequences of the unique human capacity to invent and communicate abstract ideas. In doing so, he also explains our ever-more-intertwined present: the narratives now shaping us, the reasons we still battle one another, and the future we may yet create.

©2019 Tamim Ansary (P)2019 PublicAffairs

Great for fans of Dawkins or Harari

What can I say… I thoroughly enjoyed the authors overview of human history. His narration was clear and inflection was lovely.

Very well done.

This was an excellent brief overview of human history, focused on the inter-relationships between cultures, civilizations, and time.

Must read!

Is you loved sapients this is a must, the interconnection of history and geography is mind blowing

Important perspective to be aware of

The author offers a great insight inside into the history of history of architecture and human nature. It is an important perspective to be aware of and understand is it makes history and our past and culture More predictive and understood.

My favorite book of the year

I loved this book! So many awesome insights and stories, with masterful wit throughout. Great book!

Fascinating and very pithy - but not too heavy going

It’s not easy to write a world history, and make it so fact filled and compelling at the same time, and I dare say fun to read also. But the author was wildly successful in accomplishing all this, and I really enjoyed every moment of this book. I highly recommend it to anybody who is interested in history and wants learn.

Best world history I've ever read

I have read many history books. Almost always they are written from the European or American point of view, as if nothing else mattered. Rarely do they describe Native American history, or Chinese, or Muslim, or African, even though their histories are rich, eloquent, and wonderful. I learned a lot. Tamim Ansary has many insights. Most of all, this book offers us a new pair of glasses. Once you put them on, the whole world looks different.

Excellent and incredibly approachable project

I thoroughly enjoyed this and have already listened to many parts a second time. I think that if you are coming to it with a desire to understand what it means to shape a story of our history it is especially rewarding. The reading is very even and i was able to stay totally engaged without feeling like it lost intonation or became I engaging.

I heard an interview with the author that really convinced me of the importance and necessity of try to tell a story for this moment of our past that empowers us to think at the scale of the global - but with an understanding of our deep common history. I love that he did it with true grace and am very inspired.

Highly recommend for those who feel intimidated by history - I feel like this gives me a handle on so much by telling even the history I knew from a different point of view that will empower my curiosity moving forward towards so much that I both was familiar with or had never heard.

I am very grateful to the author for caring so much for our common history, and his peaceful and humanitarian desire truly touched me through this reading.

Amazing

Amazing book. Great overview of history of civilizations, with interesting concepts and facts, and story. The author is a real intellectual, not a ideologically driven academic

A New Perspective of World History

It is no secret that I love the work of Yuval Noah Harari. In this complex work, Tamim Ansary proves himself an equal. Whereas Harari’s seminal work, SAPIENS, focused on the ability of humans to utilize abstract concepts to create new communities, Ansary focuses on who these communities were (which he calls “constellations”) and the grand ideas that unified them. As such, the book starts as an anthropological work, examining human mental capacity and cultural development. But soon, it becomes a world history, but one focusing on ideas rather than events. Ansary shows how a common idea—whether that be religious, philosophical, or social—created a unified identity among certain people and led to political change. Such ideas include the deification of leaders in ancient Mesopotamia, Chinese Legalism, the rise of Christianity, the progress narrative of the enlightenment era, and Marxism. For each concept, he connects the development of the grand narrative to what he calls the “Ms”: Money, Math, Messaging, Management, and Might. These components are what sustain an empire, but cannot survive without a unifying narrative. The book ends by touching briefly on the machine age, the world wars, and post-nation state period into which we are emerging. The book is written with skill, and Ansary narrates the audiobook himself. That he sounds like my late grandfather’s lost twin is a sentimental bonus.