Ancient History Overview
Ancient history is the study of the written past from the earliest recorded history up to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in AD 476. Many civilizations have added to our current knowledge, technology, and understanding of the world. Some provide the foundations of modern ideology. The ones covered here commenced the movement from the very agrarian society to modern culture. They are all geographically located in the Mediterranean Basin or the Middle East and include Mesopotamia (Sumer, Babylonia, and Assyria), Egypt, the Hittite Empire, Persia, Greece, and Rome.
Image: "The Walls of Babylon and the Temple of Bel (Or Babel)", by 19th-century illustrator William Simpson— influenced by early archeological investigations - from Wikimedia Commons
Gale World History in Context
Selected Books
The Cambridge Ancient History by
The present volume begins with an account of what is known about the remotest geological ages and comprises chapters on the different kinds of evidence concerning man and his physical environment up to the end of the Predynastic Period in Egypt and the parallel stages of development in Mesopotamia, Persia, Anatolia, Palestine, Cyprus, Greece and the Islands. To trace the history of these very early times it is necessary to rely chiefly on material remains, since writing had not then been invented. The text offers a setting against which the cultural progress of the historical epoch can be viewed. Archaeological investigation may be expected to bring to light more evidence to fill some of the present gaps in our knowledge, but already it is clear that the gulf between historical and prehistorical times in much of the ancient world is narrower than was once supposed.
Call Number: D57.C25 1970ISBN: 0521070511
Chronology of Ancient World, 10,000 B.C. to A.D. 799 by Call Number: D54.5.M45 1994ISBN: 013326422XFound in the reference section on the main floor
Dividing the Spoils : the war for Alexander the Great's empire by Call Number: DF235.4.W38 2011ISBN: 9780195395235
