A world building project

Ancient High Fantasy as my (sub)genre?

#EK

I was listening to some early videos by Journey In World-Building, talking about choosing a genre. Setting a genre seems like a good way to reach one's niche and be true to your own interests. This video was a timely discovery for me (and I love finding other fellow Aussies doing similar niche things!) because I've been trying to articulate what my genre is. And I must say it's been pretty difficult – Mostly because I had pretty thoughtless preconceptions of what certain labels might flag, but after some reading and a bit of thinking, I think I've settled on one for now:

Ancient High Fantasy

I don't love it, but let's dig in.

Definitions

Ancient History

I didn't know this until recently, but a quick dive lead me to realise that “Ancient History” in the UK and US academy (plus parts of Europe) is mostly synonymous with the Greco-Roman mediterranean world with possible extensions into Egypt and West Asia. It's usually narrowly implied to be from the Bronze Age through to various end points identified by various scholars (fall of imperial western Rome, ascension of Justinian in Byzantium, even to Charlemagne!). Either way, there is a deliberate focus on Western European history with possible nods to neighbouring regions. This is understandable given the history of how Europeans studied their own history.

I'm not sure that this narrow definition exists outside the academy, but Walter Scheidel opens his book[1] with a Wikipedia definition that is more inclusive in a regional sense, but narrowly described in a temporal one: “Ancient history is a time period from the beginning of writing and recorded human history through late antiquity.... Ancient history covers all continents inhabited by humans in the period 3000 BC-AD 500.”

An outside-the-academy understanding of “ancient history” is probably more vibey – pharaohs, pyramids, maybe classical Greece or Rome for those raised in the Anglosphere. For people who are interested in history, “ancient history” might conjure images associated with the emergence of the first city states in Mesopotamia/the old world, and something about writing (it did for my husband).

Are these associations a hinderance for me? Maybe, but not really. My world is more Mesopotamian than Greco-Roman, but if the “long time ago”, “not medieval” mediterranean vibe can be conjured up, I think that's fine for now.

(High) Fantasy

The website Literary Devices defines fantasy as “a genre of fiction that features fantastical elements—things that do not exist in the real world. This can include magic, mythical creatures, impossible technologies, and entirely imagined worlds.” I can accept this as a general definition, but for most modern people there is likely a trope or stereotype of what constitutes core fantasy works – Tolkien, Rowling etc. Fantasy seems to stereotypically be inspired by a mythological western European/most typically Celtic-British past. Tolkien and Rowling's works are probably largely responsible for this.

So I hesitate to apply the label “fantasy” because of this implicature, but technically... it is probably accurate for what I'm doing. There are plenty of academic pieces out there that talk about how global and broad fantasy actually is as a genre (e.g. volume edited by Gomel and Gurevitch, 2023) so maybe I needn't be too hung up about this. I have the imagined worlds, sort-of mythical creatures (but not your canonical ones), sort-of-magic (but not in the wizarding fireball sense) with a wift of historical fantasy. Maybe that's enough. The subgenre would be high fantasy mostly by process of elimination – it's not low fantasy, not dark fantasy, not historical fantasy. But also, I have a map! And include the goings on of people in high places.

So Ancient High Fantasy?

This is the label I've come up with for now, and while it's been satisfying to nut the details out it's also made me realise I don't know whether there are many works that fall into this category. A quick look online gave me some books that might fall into this category, but many suggestions seem to be historical fantasy set in Rome, Egypt, maybe Mesopotamia/Persia, smattering of Egypt. Still, I've put together little list and will start perusing through these titles to get a flavour of this genre. See if I can find worlds that are ancient-inspired, rather than historical fantasy.

References

Footnotes

[1]: I approached Scheidel's book, “What is Ancient History?” (2025), with the hope that it'd give me a definition of “ancient history” and to confirm my suspicions that it specifically meant “Greco-Roman history” pre-“fall of (Western) Rome”. It felt like a book for people who have skin in the game when it comes to the development and relevance of ancient history as an academic discipline, but I came across some interesting ideas on how a cutting-edge classics scholar views the evolution/adaptation of human society. The book that charts how the study of the ancient world has been, the consequences of that, is that human social history has undeniably been one of evolution/adaptation where we have become more concentrated into urban and centralised-stratified societies. He argues that this trend was set in motion in “the ancient” past. Given the narrow association of the world “ancient history” with Greco-Roman history in the UK-US-Eurosphere, Scheidel suggests a non-temporally bound classification of the transition from ancestral modes of human organisation to an agrarian-pastorial-urban as “foundational history”, since this is more global in scope. I found the idea compelling.