Ancient History and Persian

Ancient history and Persian offer a combination of disciplines with a particularly coherent intellectual logic. Ancient history focuses on the civilisations of Greece and Rome and their neighbours, including the Persian Empire, from the eighth century BCE through to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century CE. Persia was not peripheral to this story: the Persian wars shaped Greek culture and self-understanding, Persian administration influenced Hellenistic and Roman governance, and the cultural exchanges between Greek and Persian worlds produced some of antiquity's richest intellectual and artistic encounters.

Studying Persian gives you direct access to the language and literary tradition of one of the ancient world's most significant civilisations, and to modern Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, where over 100 million people speak Farsi and its related forms.

At the University of St Andrews, this four-year, full-time programme explores ancient history from the perspective of the ancient Mediterranean world in all its geographic breadth, from the Persian Gulf to the Clyde and from the Crimea to the Sahara, drawing on literary sources, inscriptions, and material culture to reconstruct political, social, and cultural life across more than a thousand years of antiquity. The Persian strand develops your linguistic competence alongside engagement with a literary and philosophical tradition of extraordinary richness, including poetry, history, and religious texts. The programme includes a year abroad that gives you the opportunity to develop your Persian in an appropriate context and to encounter the history and culture of the Persian-speaking world directly.

A typical entry tariff of 200 points reflects the selective and demanding nature of the degree.

Graduates from this combination are well placed for careers in the foreign office, diplomacy, international journalism, academic research, cultural organisations, international development, and intelligence work. The combination of deep historical knowledge and Persian language access is genuinely rare and positions graduates exceptionally well in careers concerned with the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Iranian world. Many graduates continue to doctoral research in ancient history, Iranian studies, classical studies, or related fields.