Customer Reviews

The Penguin Atlas of Ancient History (Hist Atlas)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a very nice piece of work but not exactly an atlas of ancient history. It is a cultural geography of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. It has far fewer place names than I wanted from an atlas and much of it is pre-history beginning some 40,000 years ago.

It starts with a brisk and entertaining account of the author's methods for interpreting scanty archaeological and linguistic evidence. This is at once accessible, learned, detailed, acerbic, and engaging. There is a funny bit about how archaeologists will say "a major new civilization" when they mean "a particularly disappointing dig", or will say "earliest known" when they mean "undated", and more. There is a terrific account of what it took to re-settle humans in Europe as the last ice age retreated. The effects were strong on Northern Europe into historical times (indeed Scandinavia and some of Russia is still rising and drying out today). The author estimates the human population of all of Europe and the Middle East was only about 100,000 in 9,000 BC.

The book describes movements of peoples, languages, technologies, and writing systems. It maps out the earliest known trade relations. It includes many maps but with few place names. Rather they indicate where various ethnic groups lived and what technologies were used where. As it enters historical times the book describes the campaigns of rulers and empires. It is a beautiful piece of work and beautifully concise.

On the other hand, if you are reading Euripides and you want to know where Lemnos was, you won't find it here. You will find the most famous places: In Greece, besides
Athens and Sparta, are Mycenea, Lesbos, Argos. That is like finding Chicago and San Francisco in an atlas of the US. But you will not find general Meno's birthplace of Larissa--which you would read about in either Plato or Xenophon. It is like not finding St. Louis in a US atlas. Those places are found in the Atlas of the Greek World (Cultural Atlas of) by Peter Levi. And they are found in another book you should read anyway, namely the Landmark Thucydides. It is a terrific edition available in paperback and it shows these places in detailed maps.

I have taught History for over 15 years. In all of my years of study and teaching I have never seen a series that was so succinctly, and logically protrayed. I have been asked to help college students who were failing Western Civiliazation. I gave them this series, and none ever came back with less than a B+. I have taught teachers with multiple Masters Degrees who couldn't understand why none of their college classes ever put history in such a simple and straight forward way as this series does. This series gives you one page of narrative with a facing page displaying the information pictorially. How delightfully simple can it get. I recommend this series to any student of History, particularly to those in Biblical studies.

Having studied history, I'm still interested in lots of historical subjects. But since I'm not 'doing' history on a daily basis I find that my historical knowledge has become rusty in places. Books like the Penguin Atlas of Ancient History get it well oiled again. In was a bit dissapointed by the size of the book and the lack of colour on the maps, but when you start using the book, it turns out to be a wonderful tool. It made me dust off my old books from university again and dig into things again. Texts are realy condensed, so if you have some background information that helps. But the maps, and that's what it's all about, are great.

This book does a good job of summarizing the history of the European, North African, and Middle Eastern world and puts it into one nice package. I have read many books on Greek and Roman history, but this book gave me a good overview of what was going on in the rest of the world also. It was interesting to see the ebb and flow of peoples throughout time in the various regions. My only complaints were the bland and sometimes confusing maps: black and white line drawings with too much cross-hatching and shading to distinguish dozens of map elements at a single time.

A broad-ranging map-based narrative history written by an historian with a wonderful turn of phrase and a quirky sense of humor. The vision of stone age hunters chasing "the inglorious snail and the frankly sessile nut" has remained with me for many years.

Colin is brilliant. By that I mean someone who can make me look at material I have been reading for years in a totally new light. Every page was a delight. Again, one of my favourites.

The historical atlases by Colin McEvedy are all great. The Atlas of Ancient History is no exception.

If you are at all interested in ancient civilization, you need this book in your collection. Just flip through it and you will discover how little you know about the nations that molded European and near-eastern culture.

Stop reading! Buy this book now!

McEvedy is a useful guide into the plausibilities of pre-history, restraining himself from speculative enthusiasms, yet providing fresh and interesting views. As the minutiae of history begin to accumulate, he maps developments with the confidence that comes of encyclopedic knowledge, yet with a lofty eye to the main and important trends. History too often is taught as names and dates, without a sense of context. McEvedy's atlas series provides as good a feeling for the Human Story of the last 9,000 years as could possibly be squeezed into so few pages. People informed by this series can plunge into disjoint studies of, say, the Etruscans or the Kassites, with a good rough idea of where they fit into the great scheme of things.

A classic that looses a star only because it's dated and has been replaced by a new edition that updates some of the (embarrassing) background discussion of "races" and "sub-races". This version is in other regards superior to the new version, especially in graphical clarity, though much of the content is (presumably) also out of date, judging from the significant changes to many maps in the new version.

This book is very good. It does a wonderful, although a rather atheistic, job of detailing the middle-east and the rise of civilizations. Knowledge of Ancient China would have been a vast improvement as well as a more detailed analysis of India.