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Vanished Civilizations (Readers Digest)

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This fascinating coffee table book, is an exciting time capsule, filled with beautiful photographs, artworks and maps and is a tribute to the efforts to uncover ancient civilizations and to recreate the lives lived by the people in these fascinating societies of antiquity.

What has survived by chance through the millennia such as pottery, shards, ruined buildings, fragments of mosaic and some writing on clay tablets etc reveals something to archaeologists and historians of the day to day life of people in ancient civilizations.
This book covers 40 civilizations in Anatolia, Persia, Mesopotamia, Greece, China, India, Israel, Transjordan, Italy, Germany, Gaul, North Africa, Siberia and the Americas.
As the introduction states : "This book looks at people in their daily lives at work, eating and drinking, at prayer and at public entertainment.

Thus we can learn what homes in Catal Hoyuk, in Antatolia (modern day Turkey), looked like, in the city-state that flourished thousands of years before civilization is thought to have been born; how accounts were kept in Susa in Elam (Persia); sports and entertainment in Knossos in Crete; the life of the royal Egyptian family of Akhenaton, Nefertiti and their little princesses in Armana, Ancient Egypt and the cult of the Sun god introduced by Akhenaton; the Ishtar Gate in Babylon; the equality of women in Tarquinia, the Etruscan City-State; the Borobudur monument of faith at Java; and the early Christian community at Ani in Armenia.
A vast panorama comes alive in this book of much beauty, building and learning as well as the more turbulent events of the time.