Prehistory, First Empires, and the Ancient World

Prehistory, First Empires, and the Ancient World

Author: Markus Hattstein

Publisher: The Rosen Publishing Group

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 9781448872220

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Offers a chronicle of world events, from the first great civilizations and the religions of India, China, and Japan to the Rise of the Byzantium and China's first emperors of the Qin and Han dynasties.


Witness to History

Witness to History

Author: Various

Publisher: Rosen Young Adult

Published: 2012-07-30

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781448872268

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Readers will learn about history visually, making this volume exciting and appealing to readers of all ages. They will explore the evolution of human civilization from pre-history to the contemporary world, including the Middle Ages and early Modern Period, the Modern Era through World War II, and the mid 20th century to the present day. This educational volume covers details about these time periods that most other history books overlook. With full-color images and illustrations, readers are taken on a voyage into past worlds in a manner that heavy-textual history books cannot achieve.


Civilizations

Civilizations

Author: Jane McIntosh

Publisher:

Published: 2003-05

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9780563488897

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Civilizations takes the reader forward from the earliest days of human settlement to the civilizations of the New World overthrown by the Spanish Conquistadors.


World History

World History

Author: Philip Parker

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2017-10-03

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0744033454

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Take a trip through the defining moments of our global story and see the thinkers, leaders, ideas, and inventions that have shaped the world. Presented in a beautiful slipcase, World History is an essential guide for anyone who loves history or wants to broaden their knowledge. This accessible book covers over 350 of the world's most important turning points, from our earliest human ancestors of prehistory to political events of the modern world. Follow detailed maps showing the continuous movement of humans across the Earth, and examine fascinating paintings illustrating the events and individuals that took them there. Beautiful photography throughout the book will carry you back in time to see the people and places of the stories - along with stunning artifacts from every historical period. From magnificent buildings like the Colosseum to magnificent words like "I have a dream!", this guide brings history's most significant events to life for every reader to discover and enjoy.


The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 9000–2000 B.C.

The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 9000–2000 B.C.

Author: Hans J. Nissen

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2011-03-04

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 022618269X

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Hans J. Nissen here provides a much-needed overview of 7000 years of development in the ancient Near East from the beginning of settled life to the formation of the first regional states. His approach to the study of Mesopotamian civilization differs markedly from conventional orientations, which impose a sharp division between prehistoric and historic, literate, periods. Nissen argues that this approach is too rigid to explain the actual development of that civilization. He deemphasizes the invention of writing as a turning point, viewing it as simply one more phase in the evolution of social complexity and as the result of specific social, economic, and political factors. With a unique combination of material culture analysis written data, Nissan traces the emergence of the earliest isolated settlements, the growth of a network of towns, the emergence of city states, and finally the appearance of territorial states. From his synthesis of the prehistoric and literate periods comes a unified picture of the development of Mesopotamian economy, society, and culture. Lavishly illustrated, The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 9000-2000 B.C. is an authoritative work by one of the most insightful observers of the evolution and character of Mesopotamian civilization.


In the Land of a Thousand Gods

In the Land of a Thousand Gods

Author: Christian Marek

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-07-13

Total Pages: 820

ISBN-13: 0691233659

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A monumental history of Asia Minor from the Stone Age to the Roman Empire In this critically acclaimed book, Christian Marek masterfully provides the first comprehensive history of Asia Minor from prehistory to the Roman imperial period. Blending rich narrative with in-depth analyses, In the Land of a Thousand Gods shows Asia Minor’s shifting orientation between East and West and its role as both a melting pot of nations and a bridge for cultural transmission. Marek employs ancient sources to illuminate civic institutions, urban and rural society, agriculture, trade and money, the influential Greek writers of the Second Sophistic, the notoriously bloody exhibitions of the gladiatorial arena, and more. He draws on the latest research—in fields ranging from demography and economics to architecture and religion—to describe how Asia Minor became a center of culture and wealth in the Roman Empire. A breathtaking work of scholarship, In the Land of a Thousand Gods will become the standard reference book on the subject in English.


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

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

Author: Susan Wise Bauer

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2007-03-17

Total Pages: 897

ISBN-13: 0393070891

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A lively and engaging narrative history showing the common threads in the cultures that gave birth to our own. This is the first volume in a bold series that tells the stories of all peoples, connecting historical events from Europe to the Middle East to the far coast of China, while still giving weight to the characteristics of each country. Susan Wise Bauer provides both sweeping scope and vivid attention to the individual lives that give flesh to abstract assertions about human history. Dozens of maps provide a clear geography of great events, while timelines give the reader an ongoing sense of the passage of years and cultural interconnection. This old-fashioned narrative history employs the methods of “history from beneath”—literature, epic traditions, private letters and accounts—to connect kings and leaders with the lives of those they ruled. The result is an engrossing tapestry of human behavior from which we may draw conclusions about the direction of world events and the causes behind them.


Ancient Historiography on War and Empire

Ancient Historiography on War and Empire

Author: Timothy Howe

Publisher: Oxbow Books

Published: 2016-11-30

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1785703005

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In the ancient Greek-speaking world, writing about the past meant balancing the reporting of facts with shaping and guiding the political interests and behaviours of the present. Ancient Historiography on War and Empire shows the ways in which the literary genre of writing history developed to guide empires through their wars. Taking key events from the Achaemenid Persian, Athenian, Macedonian and Roman ‘empires’, the 17 essays collected here analyse the way events and the accounts of those events interact. Subjects include: how Greek historians assign nearly divine honours to the Persian King; the role of the tomb cult of Cyrus the Founder in historical narratives of conquest and empire from Herodotus to the Alexander historians; warfare and financial innovation in the age of Philip II and his son, Alexander the Great; the murders of Philip II, his last and seventh wife Kleopatra, and her guardian, Attalos; Alexander the Great’s combat use of eagle symbolism and divination; Plutarch’s juxtaposition of character in the Alexander-Caesar pairing as a commentary on political legitimacy and military prowess, and Roman Imperial historians using historical examples of good and bad rule to make meaningful challenges to current Roman authority. In some cases, the balance shifts more towards the ‘literary’ and in others more towards the ‘historical’, but what all of the essays have in common is both a critical attention to the genre and context of history-writing in the ancient world and its focus on war and empire.


The Dawn of Everything

The Dawn of Everything

Author: David Graeber

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2021-11-09

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0374721106

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INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. Includes Black-and-White Illustrations