History for Worldbuilders: A Writer's Toolkit

History is one of a worldbuilder's most valuable resources. Understanding how past societies in our own world worked helps us create fictional societies in imaginary worlds that feel true to life. In this talk, we'll go through essential elements of life in early cultures, including landscape, food production, power structures, and military organization, and talk about how early historical societies such as ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, and the Persian and Roman Empires found different solutions to the same problems. Out of these examples we can draw a basic toolkit for creating imaginary worlds that have depth and plausibility.