The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome (Hardcover)

by Susan Wise Bauer (Author)
Key Phrases: first emperor, red kingdom, eight trigrams, Asia Minor, Sima Qian, Western Semitic (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Bauer (author of the four-volume The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child) guides readers on a fast-paced yet thorough tour of the ancient worlds of Sumer, Egypt, India, China, Greece, Mesopotamia and Rome. Drawing on epics, legal texts, private letters and court histories, she introduces individuals who lived through the famines, plagues, floods, wars and empire building of the ancient world: the marvelous array of characters includes Gilgamesh, Sumer's first epic hero; Yü, the founder of the Xia dynasty in China; and Tiglath-Pileser III, who restored the Assyrian empire's fortunes. Because Bauer covers so much time and territory, she focuses on the Western cultures with which she seems most comfortable; the chapters on Asia and India are the least developed. In addition, some of her assertions—for instance, that the biblical book of Joshua is the clearest guide we possess to the establishment of an Israelite kingdom in Canaan—contradict general scholarly opinion or are simply wrong. However, Bauer's elegant prose and her command of much of the material makes this a wonderful starting point for the study of the ancient world. 80 maps. (Feb.)
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From Booklist
Bauer's annals, which span the millennia between the traces of Sumer and the Roman emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity in 312 CE, are an attractive introduction to a subject vast in time and geography. She writes briskly and interpretively, and is attuned throughout to the challenge of rulers: appearing to the ruled as legitimate holders of power. This sensibility makes her narratives acutely interesting, as Bauer pierces the biases inherent in most ancient sources to discern the sincerity or the cynicism with which power seekers pursued their goals. Above, approval of the divine was invaluable; on Earth, a loyal army was indispensable. Acquiring both enabled lawgivers to make their writ stick, and Bauer's chronicles exhibit the interaction of priestly, military, and legal powers as empires and dynasties wax and wane. This endows continuity to her accounts of polities as disparate as the Harappan civilization of the Indus River or the states that emerged from misty prehistory along the Yellow and Yangtze rivers to form China. Nonacademic and sometimes colloquial in composition, Bauer's survey will spark the imagination. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 896 pages
• Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co. (March 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039305974X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393059748
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #10,387 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

64 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting and quite informative, April 24, 2007

By	Kurt A. Johnson (Marseilles, Illinois, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I am a student of Ancient Mesopotamia, so I am always checking out new book on ancient history. This fat little book is crammed full of information on the Ancient and Classical worlds. Organized in the form of discrete essays, the essays are then presented by subject - The Edge of History, Firsts, Struggle, Empires and Identity - with the essays then sorted into chronological order. Each of the essays is very interesting and quite informative, and along the way the reader is treated to a good number of pictures, timelines and maps.

Overall, I found this book to be an excellent book, giving the reader a good feel for ancient history in the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, India, and China. (The last two are often under-represented in older books.) I think very highly of this book, and recommend it to all students of history.

121 of 133 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Pretty Good, But Very Limited, History, April 17, 2007

By	Michael Gunther (Maryland, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Following up on the success of her children's homeschool history series, Susan Wise Bauer offers this large-scale (750 pages) introduction to ancient history for adults. Bauer, a "print historian" for whom the written record is paramount, tells the story of five ancient civilizations - Egypt, Mesopotamia/the Middle East, Greece/Rome, India, and China - that have left us the most extensive written records. Her narrative focuses entirely on political history: kingdoms, empires, and their rulers; this writer will have no truck with artists, poets, philosophers, architects, or mathematicians; much less with archaeology, anthropology, sociology, or any other of the numerous disciplines that have revolutionized the study of history in the last 50 years.

Rulers and Empires is her only story, but she tells it well; the book is a pleasant read, and the author deserves full credit both for the huge effort involved in producing such a volume, and for the accuracy (the undoubted product of years of sleepless nights spent digesting hundreds of primary reference works) of her narrative. I liked the book, and enjoyed reading it. But it is very limited. There is a kind of imbalance, and tunnel-vision, that becomes more apparent the more one reflects on it. This is a book that has no fewer than eight index entries on Merodach-baladan, an obscure 8th century BC king of Babylon, but not one word on Euclid, and only two sentences on the Parthenon!

To sum up, Bauer's volume, while competently written, perversely omits nearly all of the artistic and intellectual achievements of the ancient world, that alone make that world truly great and worthy of study.

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Political history of the Ancient World at its best, June 23, 2007

By	César González Rouco (Madrid, Madrid Spain) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

If political history is the narrative of political (and so often military) events and leaders, this is certainly a political history. It has got the advantage of presenting not only Mesopotamia and Egypt plus Greece and Rome, but also China and India,showing the progress of each part of the Ancient World in paralell. It is concise, interesting and highly readable.

Of course, the author's approach implies choosing a somehow narrow scope: no social or economic history is included, although some religious flavour is, for she masterly uses the myths of each civilization as clues to understand its politics. Taking that into account, I would reccomend also to read (as a complement to this book) "The History of Government. Volume I. Ancient Monarchies and Empires" by S.E. Finer, "Life after Death. A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion" by Alan F. Segal and "Gem in the Lotus.The Seeding of Indian Civilisation" by Abraham Eraly, to mention but a few.