The Ancient World: A Social and Cultural History

by D. Brendan Nagle and R. Brendan Nagle

Book Overview

Generally recognized as the standard text for courses in the history of the ancient world, The Ancient World: A Social and Cultural History, Sixth Edition incorporates the latest scholarship and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0205637442
• ISBN13: 9780205637447
• Release Date: March 2009
• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Length: 373 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.9" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Solid, readable book.

I'm using it as an adjunct to a classic history textbook. It provides more detail, more cultural history, more "personality" than a typical textbook. This is for AP World History course -- the book does a nice job of providing information on topics that exam cares about, such as the changing role of women. To me, the book does a nice job of walking the line between "a general history text of interest to an average (non-academic) reader" and "a book for a history course." It's fairly fun to read while remaining comprehensive and rigorous. To be honest, I doubt many will read it just for fun, but for a required text, it's engaging. As the title correctly indicates, a good amount of the book has to do with cultural elements, such as plays, philosophy and so on. Again, I enjoy this, but if you just want to know who conquered whom when, well, stick with the textbook. I also like the heavy use of primary documents in this text. Please note that the 1-star review for this book has to do with someone who takes the Bible literally.

Nagle : The Ancient World (5th edition)

If you are taking Greek and Roman history, or any ancient history class for that matter, and your syllabus requires this book,don't get the newest edition(7th at the time of this review)unless you want to pay extra dollars for very limited changes.I used the 5th edition, which cost me less than 10 dollars, compared it to a classmate who had paid over 100$ for a new edition in the school bookstore, and there were no changes that i could notice, except there were different photos, and the topics were on different pages, but the information was the same.Also i was able to obtain an A in the course.

see the dynamism of the ancient world

Nagle gives a thoughtful exposition of ancient Greece, Rome and the Near East. Unlike freshman level texts, there is not a splurging of colour illustrations and headlines. There is a fair amount of diagrams, in black and white. But the text and the ideas therein clearly dominate. We see the basic workings of Athens. The daily life and also how their government functioned. More generally, the culture of the Hellenes is described. It is from here that much of European civilisation derives. Of course, the Roman Empire is scarcely ignored. From the early Latin League to the Republic and thence the Empire. What is also pleasing about the book is how it does not portray those cultures as static. Both were dynamic creatures, evolving under many influences, including political and religious.

Excellent Introduction

Nagle provides us with an interesting and highly readable work on those "ancient" cultures from which "western" and Anglo-American civilization originated. Part One, dealing with Mesopotamia, Egypt, early Asia Minor (largely dealing with the Hittites) and the sprawling Persian Empire, sets the stage for the rise of the Greco-Roman world.Part Two deals with the early origins of the Greeks, including the Minoans and Myceneans, the conquests of Alexander and the rise of the Hellenistic period. Unfortunately, the section on classical Athens, by far the most important period in Greek history as far as it relates to the development of Western thought and philosophy is a fairly small section - although still quite enlightening and descriptive.Part Three takes us from the Etruscan period (with its important influence on Rome) through the Republican period, the Punic Wars and the fall of Carthage, the Empire, the rise of Byzantium and the "fall" of Rome.The Ancient civilizations of China, India, Kush and Axum had far less direct impact on the development of Western civilization than did Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia or Greece and Rome; therefore, they were not included in this work. Similarly, Ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations were much further back in time (3000 years passed between the time of the rise of Sumerian cities or the unification of Egypt and the reign of the first Roman Emperor while only 2000 years have pass since the reign of Augustus). Since Greece and Rome not only transferred ancient knowledge and culture but also added so much more to it, the book rightly focuses most on those two cultures. The whole is a lively and worthwhile introduction to the classical origins of modern Western culture.

A concise yet thorough history of the Ancient Mediterranean

I have used this textbook, along with the companion volume of primary source readings, in teaching a freshman level university course on the ancient world, and found both books to be excellent. _The Ancient World_ is written in a style that is accessible to college students while still preserving the complexities that by necessity characterize historical writing. In addition to covering traditional political and military history, Nagle's text includes substantive discussions of social, cultural, and intellectual history.Having read the previous reviewer's comments, I must disagree about the relative weight given to the different civilizations covered. Every textbook on the ancient world allocates more space to the Greco-Roman world than to the Ancient Near East, and for valid reasons. First, there is a far larger amount of primary source material, both literary and archaeological, on Greece and Rome, with the result very simply we know more about these cultures than about the Ancient Near East. Secondly, part of the function of an introductory history such as this is to familiarize students with the civilizations that have had an impact on our own culture, and for better or worse, more of our Western, and American, history is rooted in the Greco-Roman world than in the Near East. Including China and India in this text would make it another sort of book altogether, a *world* history rather than what it is, a history of the ancient Mediterranean world. As such, it succeeds admirably.