The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome by Susan Wise Bauer Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome
Book Review: This is a good book...
Summary: 4 Stars
I think that The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome is a very well written, very informative book. My only complaint is that chapters jump around, you'll finish reading a chapter on Assyria and then the next chapter is about India. I would have preferred all the civilizations lumped into their own sections, one for Egypt, one for China, etc. And the book doesn't exactly take you to the Fall of Rome, but cuts off at Constantine making Christianity the official religion of Rome. I guess that's what the next book(The Middle Ages) is supposed to start off. The book was well worth purchasing and even includes the letter the Hyksos king Apepi I sends to the Theban king Taa II commanding him to get rid of all the hippopatami in Thebes, which was so funny I couldn't help but laugh. Aside from my criticism above I highly recommend purchasing this book, it's a great addition to any collection!
Book Review: Coherent and entertaining
Summary: 5 Stars
This really is a world history of ancient cultures--it ranges from Mesopotamia all the way east to the Chinese coast and all the way west to the British Isles. Bauer uses original sources as well as plenty of myths and legends to illuminate the bare-bones facts of history, fulfilling her promise to give us a glimpse not only of what ancient peoples did, but what they thought and feared. As an avid reader, I've read plenty of history, and I've delved deep into some areas. The wonderful quality of THIS book is that it allows me to link my knowledge of my favorite historical eras with my much sketchier and sometimes nonexistent knowledge of others. There's plenty to think about here, and plenty to disagree with--Bauer doesn't just give facts. She tells an interpretive story that centers around why and how some men--and much less frequently, women--are able to gain power over others. But agree or disagree, you'll find yourself constantly going back to her framework as you plug in other pieces of historical knowledge.
Book Review: Naming Names
Summary: 3 Stars
Many of the names and stories one comes across in literature, like Croesus, Moses, King Midas, Gilgamesh or Semiramis are barely mentioned in standard scholarly texts written by specialists, such as the "Cambridge Ancient History." That's because very little evidence exists for their existence. This doesn't worry Bauer. She names names which is useful up to a point, but she names too many names. She tries to weave together a consecutive history out of accounts of kings and battles. She fills up the gaps of missing evidence by telling stories from all sorts of sources, some of them made up thousands of years after the events she describes. People like King Minos and Abraham are treated as actual persons. The failure to distinguish legend from history is most evident in her treatment of stories from the Old Testament. She has David killing Goliath and the Hebrews fleeing from Egypt.
There may be something to be said for her method because if you stick to what can be verified from contemporary accounts and from archeological excavation it's slow going. On the other hand, if you're going to sacrifice accuracy for readability then you should have readability, and Bauer is not always readable. She can be brisk and colloquial. She often speculates in a chatty way about what was going on in the mind of a particular king three or four thousand years ago but I often found her long strings of obscure names and battles rather boring. She deliberately does not discuss history of technology or science or accounts of the lives of ordinary people. She covers India and China. The Maya don't make it.
If you want a short overview to connect the dots of your ancient historical knowledge then you might as well read something like "The Columbia History of the World" or Colin McEvedy's "Atlas of Ancient History." If you want to know what's in the Bible you've probably got one in the house somewhere. (The history is mostly in Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings and Chronicles and, if you're Catholic, Esther and Macabees).
Book Review: HISTORY OF THE ANCIENT WORLD --- S.W. Bauer
Summary: 5 Stars
In a word; FANTASTIC!! Difficult to close; a real page turner. Looking forward to her next work. Thanks Mrs. Bauer!Book Review: A Refreshing Departure from Today's Dreary Norm
Summary: 4 Stars
This book is a breath of fresh air.
All too many world historians and world history teachers today pat themselves on the back for what they see as a spiffy new anti-eurocentric all-encompassing approach to world history (and approach that is in fact not even that new). Whatever the politically correct merits of this "New World History" approach, its near exclusive emphasis on sociological and economic trends and generalizations -- trade interactions, cultural diffusions, broad cross-cultural comparisons, gender roles, labor systems, belief systems -- has rendered it horribly dull. The College Board Advanced Placement world history guidelines actually insist that teachers avoid any focus on leaders, individuals in general, warfare and political history. In doing so, they avoid the heartland of human agency in history!
These are the very things above all that have moved history and that move us in reading history. Thank goodness then for Susan Bauer's bucking of the trend here. She is relentlessly old-fashioned in offering up dramatic narrative, the stories of kings, pharaohs, warlords, prophets, poets and more. Of course she does sketch out the environmental, cultural and technological context within which individuals had to act. But Bauer understands, as all too few world history people now seem to, that what drives the rise and fall of ancient civilizations ultimately are the quirks and insights and wills of flesh and blood individuals.
She also understands how this content-rich and human story telling is what makes history comprehensible and memorable.
A nice feature of this book is its interweaving of key myths and religious texts (Gilgamesh, the Rig Veda, the Bible, Homer) into the story, and its use of these to provide insight into the facts as historians and archaeologists know them. One caveat about the book is that Bauer is not always entirely clear about which aspects of such myths she thinks can and cannot be confirmed by more solid evidence. Did the Jews wander in the wilderness for forty years? Bauer does realize it's unlikely they did, but she is not always clear where the mythological accounts must be left behind. Yet this is only occasionally confusing.
One other challenge Bauer does not always entirely meet is how to tell the entire story chronologically. She does this pretty well, but not without breaking off from one region to jump to another and back again in ways that make it a bit hard for the reader to hold things together.
But these are minor problems. This book is easily the most vivid and effective interweaving I know of, of all key strands in mankind's story in the ancient world.