Customer Reviews

Historical Atlas of the Ancient World

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I have started reading a lot of historical fiction and nonfiction, and have found Haywood's Altas to be very useful. It works well as an introduction, being quite readable and succinct. In addition, it is an excellent reference to use when reading nonfiction tombs that presume we all know where all the Hittites came from, or how the Illyrians migrated to Italy. Just easily finding Zhou, or Thrace on a map has been a big help for me. A good atlas, well worth the reasonably price.

This is another fine history book and atlas by Dr. Haywood, whose historical atlases are some of the best out there for readability, ease of use, and price. I have his Atlas of World History, and it's excellent as well. This one seems to be a little less technical than that one, but both are very readable and not dry like your typical historical atlas. I practically collect these things and have 7 or 8 of the major ones, and as I said, Haywood's are often the most readable and often the best value in terms of price.

Haywood has his usual nice touch with the material and he pays more attention to skillfully integrating graphics and illustrations with the text. In fact, his Atlas of World History used a team of graphics experts which worked specifically on that aspect of the book, and it shows compared to the other atlases on the market. I assume the nice layout and design on this book means the same approach was used here. The only other major historical atlas that competes with Haywood's in terms of visual design is the big Dorling-Kindersley one, which, although great, is four or five times the price of this one.

This book contains two-page spreads covering the historical periods from prehistoric times up to 500 B.C. The maps are well done and not too busy like the ones in some atlases, where they're so dense with symbols and other junk that you can hardly read the map. This book and the Atlas of World History overlap somewhat as this volume contains all of the material on the ancient world in that volume, but since it's specifically devoted to the ancient world, there is quite a bit more additional material as well. Overall, another fine history offering from Prof. Haywood.

Any of the historical atlases by John Haywood is excellent. They combine readable text with great illustrative maps. The combination makes history easier to understand and remember. This atlas covers the time of human origins to 500 BC. Those of you familiar with Haywood's Atlas of World History should note that this atlas contains all of the material as the ancient world section of that comprehensive, one-volume atlas plus about fifty percent more. The only problem is that all of Haywood's atlases seem to be out of print.

Just bought this today on a remainder rack.

I have lots of large format atlases but I must say this one is really outstanding, covering all of the ancient world to 500 BC with wonderful detailed maps and a well-constructed, functional timeline along the bottom of each page.

My biggest gripe in reading even the best history book is often a lack of functional maps. Even if you know the geography pretty well, easy-to-read large format maps are a real boom to your studies. Yet most books neglect them or entirely omit them. Cunliffe's [Europe Between the Oceans] had beautiful color maps that typically lacked many of the place names he referred to in his text. Kagan's volume one [The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War], which I'm currently reading, lacks even a single map. I mean I'm pretty familiar with the Aegean and Ionia and even Magna Graecia to some degree circa 450 BC, but there are hundreds of city states; I have a color map I downloaded off the net folded into the back of the book for reference.

I also have almost a full shelf of various kinds of atlases, including many from the "Cultural Atlas" series, but these generally get bogged down with a focus on encyclopedic information in very small print and often feature maps that contain so many details they are almost unreadable -- like some travel maps of major metro regions so criss-crossed with highways and interstates that they fail as instruments of navigation.

Haywood's [Historical Atlas of the Ancient World], on the other hand, is clear in its purpose and its presentation. I'm currently also reading [The Horse, the Wheel and Language] by Anthony about the proto-Indo-Europeans, as well as [The Ancient Near East: A History] by Hallo, and I am so impressed by the way the Heywood atlas illuminates both by actually capturing a wealth of place names referred to by modern archaeologists and historians that are often left off of other historical maps. I strongly recommend this atlas to everyone who craves maps as reference to their reading the way that I do.

A must own atlas for serious lovers of history and geography. It is out of print and it is part of the 6 volume set which all can be found in Amazon. Find all of them and buy all of them because no other set comes close to it. It is history of the world, well detailed and illustrated.

The book is a little bit hard to understand. example: the map showing Mesopatamia, Babolinia, and Persa are combined. Each one of these empires were in power at different times, and covered roughly the same land with expanson for each empire,(something I didnot know). I like the information of the food they were growing and how people imgrated and (speculating) probably used seeds as money back then.