Legacy: A Search for the Origins of Civilization

by Michael Wood

Book Overview

Five thousand years ago there began the most momentous revolution in human history. Starting in Mesopotamia, city civilization emerged for the first time on earth, to be followed in Egypt, India,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0563364297
• ISBN13: 9780563364290
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: Network Books
• Length: 223 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Timeless topic

Michael Wood has put together in this small volume entitled 'Legacy: The Search for Ancient Cultures', a wonderful survey of the first civilisations to arise in human culture, and their enduring legacy for us today. It deals with cultures that arose across the globe -- so many prehistorical and ancient historical texts concentrate almost exclusively on the Fertile Crescent of five thousand years ago, to the exclusion of city cultures that arose in the Indus Valley, China, and the Americas. The first city cultures (from which our civilisation ultimately derives in large part) arose largely independently of each other, in what are present day Iraq, India, Egypt, China, and Central and South America. This book was a bit of a self-discovery trip for Wood, as he had hitherto concentrated primarily on British history (from whence I know his work), venturing only to the limits of Europe previously. Perhaps the Fertile Crescent of Iraq is highlighted both because it is the precursor of Semitic cultures (which give us Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, among many other things), but also because it was the first city culture to arise. All old cultures arose around rivers, for the sake of basic food necessity. In Iraq, there were agricultural settlements coalescing into cities as early as the seventh millennium BCE. These first settlement-builders were not Sumerian; they came later, about 4000 BCE, into an already-existing cultural structure. Who exactly the Sumerians were prior to this is still a mystery. 'Their language has no known affinities with any language, living or dead. But new discoveries concerning Elamite, the ancient language of Persia, may hold the key to Sumerian origins.' Iraqi early cultures boasted the cities of Eridu (quite possibly the first city on earth), Ur, Uruk, Lagash, Nippur, and of course, Babylon. None of these ancient cities is still inhabited, mostly having been abandoned due to changes in the course of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Sumer has been conquered and war-ravaged many times, most recently again in the 1990s. Indian history too is fascinating. The prehistory of India mostly went unknown until this century, when scholars began to take a serious look. While linguistic studies of Sanskrit have been going on for hundreds of years, it has only been in this century that the antiquity of Sanskrit and its place as a proto-language has been understood. The lost cities of the Indus show that there were people before the Aryans in the subcontinent, particularly with the discoveries of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, and settlements occupying a space the size of western Europe, with extensive trade and culture. However, there was a period of about 1000 years in which there was no real urban culture in India, with the decline of the cities. Toward 600 BCE the Ganges and Jumna civilisations grouped in kingdoms, largely Aryan, began to arise. Hinduism and Buddhism are largely products of this process. China has a long, un

Timeless topic

Michael Wood has put together in this small volume entitled 'Legacy: The Search for Ancient Cultures', a wonderful survey of the first civilisations to arise in human culture, and their enduring legacy for us today. It deals with cultures that arose across the globe -- so many prehistorical and ancient historical texts concentrate almost exclusively on the Fertile Crescent of five thousand years ago, to the exclusion of city cultures that arose in the Indus Valley, China, and the Americas. The first city cultures (from which our civilisation ultimately derives in large part) arose largely independently of each other, in what are present day Iraq, India, Egypt, China, and Central and South America. This book was a bit of a self-discovery trip for Wood, as he had hitherto concentrated primarily on British history (from whence I know his work), venturing only to the limits of Europe previously. Perhaps the Fertile Crescent of Iraq is highlighted both because it is the precursor of Semitic cultures (which give us Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, among many other things), but also because it was the first city culture to arise. All old cultures arose around rivers, for the sake of basic food necessity. In Iraq, there were agricultural settlements coalescing into cities as early as the seventh millennium BCE. These first settlement-builders were not Sumerian; they came later, about 4000 BCE, into an already-existing cultural structure. Who exactly the Sumerians were prior to this is still a mystery. 'Their language has no known affinities with any language, living or dead. But new discoveries concerning Elamite, the ancient language of Persia, may hold the key to Sumerian origins.' Iraqi early cultures boasted the cities of Eridu (quite possibly the first city on earth), Ur, Uruk, Lagash, Nippur, and of course, Babylon. None of these ancient cities is still inhabited, mostly having been abandoned due to changes in the course of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Sumer has been conquered and war-ravaged many times, most recently again in the 1990s. Indian history too is fascinating. The prehistory of India mostly went unknown until this century, when scholars began to take a serious look. While linguistic studies of Sanskrit have been going on for hundreds of years, it has only been in this century that the antiquity of Sanskrit and its place as a proto-language has been understood. The lost cities of the Indus show that there were people before the Aryans in the subcontinent, particularly with the discoveries of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, and settlements occupying a space the size of western Europe, with extensive trade and culture. However, there was a period of about 1000 years in which there was no real urban culture in India, with the decline of the cities. Toward 600 BCE the Ganges and Jumna civilisations grouped in kingdoms, largely Aryan, began to arise. Hinduism and Buddhism are largely products of this process. China has a long, unbro