About Us
The internet home for armchair archaeologists.
AD/BC History is a research-driven history brand dedicated to making the ancient world accessible without compromising the scholarship behind it. We publish long-form articles backed by peer-reviewed sources, create artwork grounded in archaeological evidence, and design products for people who take the past seriously.
Every article cites its sources. And if we get something wrong, we want to know about it.
The Founder
Daniel Rankin
Classicist, archaeologist, and the person answering your emails.
Dan fell in love with the ancient world at age five when his dad sat him down in front of Age of Empires, a strategy game where you lead ancient civilisations from their first village to defining an era. The game's crumbling stone columns and bronze-armoured soldiers lit a passion in his young mind for immersion in the aesthetic of the past. It never went away.
What began with a five-year-old clicking through the Bronze Age on a family computer became a decade of formal study. Dan read Classics and Archaeology across several universities, including at the University of Melbourne in his native Australia, where he graduated with First Class Honours and was awarded the Sir Alexander Leeper Prize for the highest results in Classics and Archaeology in the state of Victoria. He was subsequently awarded a full scholarship for postgraduate research and offered a place in the DPhil programme in Classics at Magdalen College, University of Oxford.
Research
Dan's research centres on the intersection of interstate diplomacy and sacred athletic festivals in the Hellenistic period. His honours thesis examined the concept of asylia (sacred inviolability) through the corpus of inscriptions at Magnesia on the Maeander. Using archaeological and literary evidence alongside the epigraphic record, he demonstrated that the Magnesians' invitations to acknowledge the asylia of their festival of Artemis Leukophryene were not broadcast to the Greek world at large, as had been previously assumed. They were targeted: sent specifically to the city-states that had fought alongside Magnesia at the Second Battle of Thermopylae and to the Hellenistic kings. The festival's sacred status was a political instrument, not a cultural formality.
His postgraduate research expanded this thesis across the broader 3rd century BC, examining the Ptolemaia at Alexandria established by Ptolemy II and other major sacred festivals of the period. The pattern held. These games were not empty displays of civic pride and cultural prestige. They were active tools of diplomacy, alliance-building, and geopolitical positioning, and their study reshapes how we understand the political networks of the Hellenistic world.
In 2020, Dan presented at the Australasian Society for Classical Studies conference on Theocritus' Second Idyll, offering a reinterpretation of the poem's supposed "magic" through the lens of athletic culture. The inconsistencies in Simaetha's binding spell, long puzzled over by scholars, resolve when read as parody: the wayward athlete Delphis as a satire of the celebrity competitor and his wandering affections, and Simaetha's ritual as a pointed imitation of the Pythian priestess' rites at Delphi. What had been treated as a problem of textual coherence was, in fact, the joke.
He has taught ancient history and classical languages at tertiary level and spent many hours (and drunk much coffee) deciphering inscriptions on broken stone tablets.
Why AD/BC Exists
The study of the ancient world is under pressure. Universities are increasingly driven by profit rather than the pursuit of knowledge, and disciplines like ancient history and classical languages are often the first casualties. The skills required to engage meaningfully with the past, reading Latin and ancient Greek, interpreting archaeological evidence, understanding the historical context behind primary sources, are becoming harder to access and more expensive to acquire.
AD/BC was founded to push back against that trend.
The goal is to preserve and encourage the study of the human past by removing the barriers that keep people out. To democratise access to skills like reading ancient languages so that anyone with a genuine passion for history can pursue it, without needing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a degree. To protect the fragile and irreplaceable evidence for humanity's origins. And to bring people from different countries and cultures together by clearing up the misconceptions, half-truths, and oversimplifications that so often pass for history online.
Most history content on the internet falls into one of two categories: academic papers that require three espressos and a glossary, or viral posts that get the basics wrong. AD/BC occupies the space between them. We hold ourselves to the same standard of evidence as a journal article, but we write for real people. If you've ever corrected someone's pronunciation of "Thucydides" at a dinner party, you're in the right place.
Get Involved
📚 Start reading: The Library
🏺 Browse the collection: The Market
📧 Questions, corrections, or collaborations: Contact Us
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AD/BC History is proudly Australian-owned and operated by Kindle Media Pty Ltd. ABN: 50 664 285 947.
