World Civilizations

Centered in the Dordogne region of Southwestern France, one of Europe's most concentrated regions for Neandertal and early modern human occupations, writer Beebe Bahrami follows and participates in the work of archaeologists who are doing some of the most comprehensive and global work to date on the research, exploration, and recovery of our ancient ancestors. From this prehistoric perch, Bahrami gets to know firsthand the Neandertals and the people who love them.

The Roman Republic, and later the Roman Empire, was an unusual conqueror because it would absorb and assimilate elements of the cultures it dominated. A standing practice was to allow the defeated to continue practicing their culture and religion so long as they paid their taxes on time. Such a procedure was part of why Christianity would seep into the Roman Empire around the 1st century CE, for example. For the Etruscans, this meant they influenced aspects of Roman civilization, one of the most powerful cultures in the history of the Western world.

From the rise of Sargon of Akkad, who in the third millennium BCE ruled what is now Iraq and Syria, to the collapse of the great European empires in the twentieth century, the empire has been the dominant form of power in history. Dominic Lieven’s expansive book explores strengths and failings of the human beings who held those empires together (or let them crumble). He projects the power, terror, magnificence, and confidence of imperial monarchy, tracking what they had in common as well as what made some rise to glory and others fail spectacularly.

Virtually anyone, anywhere knows that six million Jewish human beings were killed in the Jewish Holocaust. But how many African human beings were killed in the Black Holocaust - from the start of the European slave trade (c. 1500) to the Civil War (1865)? And how many were enslaved? The Black Holocaust, a travesty that killed millions of African human beings, is the most underreported major event in world history.

Un viajero que recorriera el mundo en 1411 hubiera quedado deslumbrado por las imponentes civilizaciones orientales. La Ciudad Prohibida estaba en plena construcción en la China de los Ming; en Oriente Próximo, los otomanos acechaban Constantinopla. Por el contrario, los belicosos países de Europa occidental, Inglaterra, Escocia, Castilla, Aragón, Francia y Portugal, eran pobres y atrasados, debilitados por las epidemias, las pésimas condiciones sanitarias y las guerras incesantes.

Take an unforgettable journey into one of the most heretical, blasphemous, and controversial accounts of the Exodus in a world beyond imagination. The Exodus & Beyond picks up the mystery of the divine Twin Brothers of legend and their connection to the great Exodus out of Egypt where the first book, UNLOCKING THE DREAM VISION: The secret history of creation, left off. Within its pages, you will learn the importance of the divine Twin Brothers, along with the final secrets of the hidden history of humanity. It explores the last few lingering mysteries of the highly symbolic Dream Vision of ...

Whether you approve or disapprove, globalization is an inescapable feature of the modern world. Trade between nations and continents is now commonplace, and this exchange of goods is inevitably accompanied by the exchange of ideas and cultures. This is not, as you might expect, a new phenomenon. A series of trade routes which were first established almost 2,000 years ago provided one of the first examples of intercontinental trade.

Before Amsterdam, there was a dazzling North Sea port at the hub of the known world: the city of Antwerp. In the Age of Exploration, Antwerp was somewhere anything could happen or at least be believed. And it was a place of change. But when Antwerp rebelled with the Dutch against the Spanish and lost, all that glory was buried and its true history rewritten. In Europe's Babylon, Michael Pye sets out to rediscover the city that was lost and bring its wilder days to life using every kind of clue: novels, paintings, schoolbooks, and the archives of Venice, London, and the Medici.

There is no record of Marco Polo ever visiting the Andaman Islands, so his brief description of the islanders must have been drawn from a secondary source. They were, he wrote, “a most brutish and savage race, having heads, eyes, and teeth like those of dogs. They are very cruel, and kill and eat every foreigner whom they can lay their hands upon.”

Weisman visits an extraordinary range of the world's cultures, religions, nationalities, tribes, and political systems to learn what in their beliefs, histories, liturgies, or current circumstances might suggest that sometimes it's in their own best interest to limit their growth.

Machu Picchu is one of South America's best tourist spots, and the ruins have even been voted one of the Seven New Wonders of the World. But even though Machu Picchu is now the best known of all Incan ruins, its function in Incan civilization is still not clear. Some have speculated that it was an outpost or a frontier citadel, while others believe it to be a sanctuary or a work center for women. Still others suggest that it was a ceremonial center or perhaps even the last refuge of the Incas after the Spanish conquest.

The latest title in the series style of Artists, Writers, Philosophers, and Composers, this lavish audiobook goes under the skin of cities both ancient and modern - from Persepolis and Tikal, Paris and Vienna to Prague, Amsterdam, Tokyo, and Dubai. Which ancient civilization founded the precursor to Mexico City? Why was Venice the gateway to the East? What was the Belle Epoque? Which was the first city to build sewers? Great Cities takes you there, and tells you all this and more.

The Toltec are one of the most famous Mesoamerican groups in South America, but they are also the most controversial and mysterious. The Toltec have been identified as the group that established a strong state centered in Tula (in present-day Mexico), and the Aztec claimed the Toltec as their cultural predecessors, so much so that the word Toltec comes from the Aztec's word Tōltēcatl, translated as artisan.

Empires rose and fell along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, while a civilization as yet unsurpassed emerged. Discover myths, history and more from not only the earliest but also the greatest civilization in human history.

Over the centuries the West has become fascinated by the Vikings, one of the most mysterious and interesting European civilizations. In addition to being perceived as a remarkably unique culture among its European counterparts, what's known and not known about the Vikings' accomplishments has added an intriguing aura to the historical narrative. Were they fierce and fearsome warriors? Were they the first Europeans to visit North America?

Past and present civilizations failed and fail for many reasons, but the number-one predictor of a civilization’s survival is its sense of religion—or lack thereof. So argues David Goldman in How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying Too). The strength of a civilization’s religion affects its purpose, its fertility rate, and ultimately, its fate, says Goldman—who then argues that, contrary to popular belief, Islamic countries are in the last throes of death while Christian America is in a position to flourish.

Most of us are taught that the worst “World Wars” happened in the 20th century. World War I followed by World War 2 killed 70 million people and destroyed millions of square miles of land, property, and cities. 3 percent of the human populations died. My last book “World War Zero” described the World War before that [about 55 hundred years ago]. Worse than the more well known ones, 1/3 of the population of the entire world died and the world was sent back to a Stone Age existence, but that was not the worst World War. This book is about the World War before World War Zero. In this ...

Javier Negrete vuelve a adentrarse en la divulgación del mundo clásico para narrar, con su maestría habitual, cómo Roma pasó de ser una más entre las pequeñas ciudades de una comarca del centro de Italia a dominar todo el Mediterráneo y convertirse en un imperio cuyo recuerdo todavía sigue marcando nuestra cultura, nuestra política y nuestros ideales.

The Histories of Herodotus, completed in the second half of the fifth century BC, is generally regarded as the first work of history and the first great masterpiece of non-fiction writing. Joined here are the sheer drama of Herodotus' narrative of the Persian invasions of Greece, and the endless curiosity - turning now to cannabis, now to the Pyramids - which make his book the source of so much of our knowledge of the ancient world.

As soon as man discovered writing, he began engaging in historiography (historical writing and philosophy), but paleoanthropology only really began in the late 1800s. As archaeologists began finding bones in European caves of a human race that was very different than any race in the modern world, the study of paleoanthropology was born. The race of those early humans who were found in the European caves were later termed Neanderthals, and for quite some time, they were believed to have been the race from which many modern humans were directly descended.