2020-05-10
Lightly worn but rich scholarship highlights this reader-friendly survey of the ancient past.
We know the winners of history: the Romans, the Golden Horde, Alexander the Great. However, as Matyszak asks at the outset of this good-natured exploration of long-bygone times, “what do we know of the Bactrians, apart from their two-humped camels? Or of the Samaritans, other than that one of them was good?” That’s a pointed question, for, as he goes on to note, historians and archaeologists are recasting our understanding of early civilizations, adjusting chronologies and interpretations with each new discovery. A trustworthy general pattern emerges, however, and that is that one group conquers another group and grows in power until being conquered by a still more powerful neighbor. Sargon the Great, for instance, ruled Mesopotamian tribes and made of them “rulers of an empire that stretched from the headwaters of the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf,” an empire that would fall under the control of Amorites, people whom the Akkadians considered inferior. (We know one of them, Ammurapi, by his Akkadian name Hammurabi.) The Canaanites along the Mediterranean coast were variously Hebrews, Philistines, and Phoenicians, while the so-called lost tribes of Israel may never turn up, though Matyszak gamely ventures that, given the patterns of other historical migrations, their descendants may be scattered throughout the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. The same holds for a people known to the Egyptians as the Shekelesh, the Sicels, who moved on to southern Italy and then conquered—without much violence, it appears—the next-door island that bears their name, Sicily. Each entry for peoples ranging in time from deep prehistory to the early Middle Ages includes handsome illustrations and maps, and the author’s text is accessible, sometimes playful, and never dumbed down.
Just the thing for initiates into the early history of Eurasia and North Africa. (maps and illustrations)
