The Invention of Yesterday Audiobook By Tamim Ansary cover art

The Invention of Yesterday

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

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for $0.00
Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 3 months. Cancel anytime.

The Invention of Yesterday

By: Tamim Ansary
Narrated by: Tamim Ansary
Try for $0.00

$0.00/mo. after 3 months. Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $35.09

Buy for $35.09

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

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 Anthropology Civilization Social Sciences World Technology Thought-Provoking Imperialism Africa War World History
Comprehensive Historical Overview • Interconnected Narrative • Engaging Storytelling • Insightful Perspectives
Highly rated for:
All stars
Most relevant  
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.

Excellent and incredibly approachable project

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
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

Amazing

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
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.

Best world history I've ever read

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Brilliantly combines vast range and depth with clear expression of fundamental truths about human life. We build our worlds and traditions in language, blending, merging and evolving across the arc of history, and into the future. A brilliant read and highly recommended. (Great narration by the author brings his enjoyable writing style even more to life.)

A spectacular book on human history

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A Fascinating view of the rise and fall of human cultures and their interaction. It is helping me to look at our current situation in a different light.

Highly recommend!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
If you are looking for a book the "explains it all" I'm regards to human history and culture, this is your best bet. Taking reads and narrates with a lightness that makes allnera feel familiar and understandable.

The best "world history" book yet

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This one of the most interesting, thoughtful and important works I’ve come across in quite a very long time. Well written and read, a refreshing and relevant perspective.

Fascinating! Wow!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
this was recommended by a YouTuber (whatifalthist) and I decided to check it out.
I'm glad I did. the author did a superb job of making very complicated histories accessable to regular people. If you are a serious academic you may find the book lacking....but for someone who wants to find out if world history is really something interesting enough tostudy, this book is an excellent choice.

Very Good....

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I had a hard time getting into the book but once I did I was hooked!

Solid book

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
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.

A New Perspective of World History

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews