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What was happening in China when the pyramids
were being built in Egypt? What had been achieved in the
Americas when wheeled vehicles first rolled across Sumeria?
What point of progress had been reached in Western Europe
when Knossos was supreme in Crete, or in India when the
Roman Empire was at its height?
In this book Jacquetta Hawkes sets out to
answer such questions as these, and at the same time to
fill the gaps in our overall picture of the ancient world.
It is the first book of its kind to give a comprehensive
treatment to the concurrent developments of early history
from 35,000 BC to AD 500. By means of illustrated maps showing
what happened at the same time as what, summary time charts
linking people and events across the world, a gazetteer
of archaeological sites and over 1,000 drawings and photographs
the relative progress of civilization across the globe is
lucidly presented. While particular emphasis is laid on
the simultaneous developments in art, architecture and technology,
Jacquetta Hawkes writes vividly of the social, religious
and political forces which helped to shape them.
This book should fulfil a long-felt need
both to the casual reader and to the student and specialist,
not only as an invaluable source of reference but also for
the light it casts on some of the arguments that absorb
archaeologists. Did similar technologies in different parts
of the world develop independently? Or were they the result
of a spreading influence? The clarity of Jacquetta Hawkes'
treatment enables us to draw our own conclusions to such
questions. Above all by grouping the first peoples together
in time and linking them across the world, it dispels the
clouds that have for so long blocked our view of early history.
Jacquetta Hawkes, the distinguished archaeologist,
historian and author lives with her husband J. B. Priestley
at Stratford-upon-Avon in England. She studied at Cambridge
and has travelled extensively, publishing many articles
on distant excavations. She was honoured to contribute the
first part to the UNESCO History of Mankind.
Among her best-known books are A
Land, which won the Kemsley Award
in 1951; Early Britain;
Prehistoric Britain;
Man on Earth;
Man and the Sun;
King of the Two Lands;
The World of the Past;
The Dawn of the Gods;
The First Great Civilisations;
and, most recently, Atlas of Ancient
Archaeology.
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