Customer Reviews

Smithsonian Timelines of the Ancient World

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

 

 

I am a student of Washington Middle School, and my teacher gave us an assignment of getting 20 trade timeline entries and 20 agricultural entries, and with this book, I got all but seven of my agriculture entries, and all my trade entries in two periods. This book may cost alot to buy, but if you go to your library and check it out, you can find out tons of stuff about the Americas, Asia, Australia, Europe, and Africa, about weapons, farming, art, etc... like I said, This book is rockin'!!

This is NOT the book to view historical time lines. The title is a total misnomer. A better title would be "Archeological Tidbits Through Time". Historical time lines are less than 5% of the book and woefully inadequate. They are a small part of the first page of each chapter. For example, the Mongols had the largest empire in history and are only noted twice in the time line. The Byzantine empire which lasted for over 1000 years is scarcely covered. There are tidbits of their archeology but inconsistent followup.

The book is organized in four columns: Food & Environment, Shelter and Architecture, Technology and Innovation, Art & Ritual. The tidbits are almost always archeological. The rows are organized by continent. Each page advances in each of these categories through time. Even the archeological information is poorly organized in that it is not consistently followed through time.

There is virtually no information on the ebb and flow empires and their effects. There is no organization by religious or national states.

The only use for the book would be for students in lower grades that have to write a one page report on one of the column categories, which is why I gave it two stars.

If you want national, religious, and complete historical time lines, I'd suggest "Timelines of World History" by John Teeple, which is vastly superior.

This is a beautiful BIG book - so much more than an illustrated history book. It is a Trip through Time.
Before starting, you are instructed how to 'travel' through the many colorful pages, researching human origins or choosing to just wander back and forth enjoying human progress around the globe. You will be acquainted at a glance with how people lived, what they ate and their cultures. Their creative art and the advance of the technology of the time.
The team of Smithsonians have put together a wonderful collection of interesting material on a number of major civilizations stimulating readers of all ages to want to search for more as our human history unfolds.

I use this reference book in the classroom to provide a global perspective for students. The book helps to show students that history and civilization are global not only continental and western.

My father recently brought me back a trilobite from Russia, which is a trilobite dalmanite which crawled along the sea bed early in the history of the earth. I remember my father reading the story about the trilobites when I was very young and when he saw the fossil in Russia, he remembered the story and brought it home for me. There is a picture on page 21.

While I don't believe in evolution (and this book begins with that theory), this book is still extremely valuable for all the information it contains and the pictures are amazing. The fact that someone had to organize all these details is mind boggling in itself.

Smithsonian Timelines of the Ancient World offers a new perspective on the past and provides a unique view of our developing world. It spans from the origins of life to the emergence of civilizations up to AD 1500. This book is richly illustrated and shows artifacts of each time period and region. Many of the artifacts come from the collections of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The photos of many items have never been published before.

This is a Millennium Classic Limited Edition Collectable. The silver cover makes this a perfect coffee table book. It is not a book you just put away and forget about, yet you will feel spoiled owning it. You can look up any region of the world at any period and discover what people ate or how they used local materials to construct shelters and temple-pyramids. The pivotal developments of technology from the fashioning of stone tools, to the introduction of navigational equipment is shown in detail.

If you want to know about the art of classical Greece, or how the Incas lived in the Andes, you can find it all in one concise collection of knowledge. There are more than 50 large-scale visual time charts, 1600 photographs and 100 specially commissioned maps.

I present to you a book produced under the expert guidance of eminent archaeologists, anthropologists, prehistorians and paleontologists from around the world. Chris Scarre, PhD, is a specialist in the prehistory of Europe and the Mediterranean. He was also the editor of Past Worlds: The Times Atlas of Archaeology (1988). An invaluable reference book that presents a spectacular tapestry of time and culture.

~The Rebecca Review

This book provides such a great visual about what was happening ALL OVER the ancient world on each page. So much easier to connect the dots through time when they are all on the same page for each era. Enjoy!

This book has a large amount of very interesting information but, oddly, gives scant treatment to major Hebrew and Christian figures of ancient times and Jewish/Christian history while significant coverage is given to the birth of Buddhism, Confucian morality, the rise of Islam, the Koran, Hinduism, ancient Egyptian religious practices and even the gods of the ancient Mesopotamians. The establishment of the great Jewish and Christian religions should have been included on par with these other religions, especially as the book is published by a major U.S. tax-supported institution, the Smithsonian, and the vast majority of the Americans who support the Smithsonian are either Jewish or Christian. The Jewish and Christian religions have had a significant impact on world history and so a book of this type is incomplete if they are not covered.