PENGUIN The Historical Atlas of Ancient Civilizations

A very small book for the price paid

This comprehensive and informative work by John Haywood presents a helpful introduction to a wide variety of civilisations from all over the world. There's a preface plus an introduction entitled: 'What is Civilisation?. After that these are two pages of very helpful timelines. The rest of he work is divided into five sections followed by 'Further Reading', index and acknowledgements. The five sections are:1: The Ancient Near East. 2. The African Civilisations. 3. The First Civilisations of Africa. 4. The First European Civilisations. 5. The Ancient Americas. The information about the civilisations is accompanied by a whole host of helpful maps. and there are some very good illustrations. Besides being helpful in itself, this work forms an excellent companion and guide to further, more extensive research concerning any one of the civilisations the reader might be especially interested in. It's a valuable 'getting to know' work. 'Oh, look what those people did there so very long ago! This is wonderful! I must find out more about them.' Then the reader can search for more information on the internet and so on. We have here a valuable gate opening work, stimulating us to find out more about what built the world into what it has become. It's a gem.

Review - Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Civilizations The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Civilizations is another of the delightful series from The Penguin Group. While definitely not a definitive work on the ancient civilizations, this book is an excellent over of the ancient civilizations. This book is a joy to just leaf through casually for a taste of the ancient civilizations. Like all it’s Penguin siblings, this book is well written, well formatted, well illustrated and full of outstanding hard to find maps illustrating and expanding on the points in the essays. The essays are brief and eclectic, but informative. They point the way to more expansion of knowledge. No pretense is made of being a complete history book. I recommend these, and this one especially, to individuals with a quest for quick, overview type knowledge of ancient civilizations.

the best atlas, cheap and very knowldgeable great cards, good for family for apprentice archaelogists and savvy as well. recommended

Received this recently so am still introducing myself to it. But, as I have delved into the different sections, I have found the text full of good information and the maps clear and easy to study. I have other historical and archeological atlases and find their maps are sometimes too dense with information to be digestible. That is not a problem with this book, which takes the luxury of providing about 50 maps to cover the ancient period. The book is divided geographically to group maps relating to the Ancient Near East, Africa (more than just Egypt), Asia, Europe and the Americas. There is also a timeline that allows comparison of developments across the regions. This chart is most useful to track the different pace of development of each region. Penguin has separate historical atlases for ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt. These subjects are not covered in as much detail in this particular book although there is enough for a survey of these ancient societies. I have found this atlas to be of great benefit to my understanding of the ancient development of civilization in each region of the world.