The History of the Ancient World, by Susan Wise Bauer

As the title suggests, this book covers the history of the ancient world from ancient Sumer to the conversion of Constantine the Great to Christianity, a span of almost four thousand years (and more, if you include prehistory). Needless to say, there’s not a lot of room to go into any great amount of detail. But Bauer covers an amazing amount of territory, and does so with clear prose and lucid explanation, and the occasional bit of acerbic commentary.

(There’s a Borg reference. I approved.)

What’s interesting is how much clearer history becomes the closer you move to the present. This isn’t the fault of the author – the bald fact is that the more written accounts you have, the clearer history becomes, and the further back you go, the fewer written accounts there are. The shadows become thicker. So we can trace every hour of the Battle of Gettysburg, maybe even every minute, but we don’t know for certain when the Pharaoh Khufu lived – or if the Pharaoh Menes even existed at all. So we are reduced to supposition, and reconstructing entire cultures and societies based upon a few pottery shards and some long-forgotten foundation stones. The ancient world will always remain dark to us, and the origins of civilization, of writing itself, shrouded in mystery – because no one wrote it down.

So it is interesting to see people become so emotionally angry over such topics as whether Moses and Abraham existed, or the Exodus actually happened, because there is literally no way to know for certain. What is left is emotion – and faith.

But this has gone rather far afield from a book review, hasn’t it? “The History of the Ancient World” is an excellent popular history of these long-dead nations and empires, and the general reader will find it quite enjoyable. And I suspect this book will find its way into a few classrooms (or it already has) as a textbook for general history courses.

-JM