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Ancient World
Explore the ancient world, from the pyramids of Egypt to the oracle at Delphi, the Mauryan empire and Roman fortresses. Crammed with over 2000 facts and illustrated with detailed images and maps, this book guides you chronologically through the great civilizations.
512 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 22, 2017
Great book!!
The way with Rupert Matthew has written this book is marvelous.
Best portion of the book is that of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome.
A very knowledgeable book it is.
Total 5 stars!!!!!!!
The way with Rupert Matthew has written this book is marvelous.
Best portion of the book is that of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome.
A very knowledgeable book it is.
Total 5 stars!!!!!!!
July 28, 2025
A Christmas gift from my wonderful grandparents.
October 2, 2014
I love fact books. So naturally, when this book came along, crammed full of facts just waiting to be discovered, I couldn't help myself. Especially since I saw there was a small part on Greek mythology. (yay!) But, turns out, Ancient World goes against everything that's good about fact books.
I'm not saying it's terrible. It's just kind of 'meh'. I gave up at page 258 because it was boring me, then flicked through the rest to look at a few interesting parts (AKA, the Greek mythology parts).
Although this book was informative and easy to read, it also seemed scattered and sort of random. It should have been about something more specific - like wars in the ancient world (this wouldn't have been hard - half the book is already about warfare), or how living in the ancient world compares to the present day, or maybe solely about Ancient Rome or Ancient Egypt or whatever other civilisation rather than trying to jumble them all up into one. Doing this resulted in the book being way, way, way too long, hence the reason I gave up on it.
I did like the illustrations and pictures, but the page layout was let down by the fact that every page was just rows of facts, with the occasional 'fascinating fact' which was a useless feature seeing as the entire book is facts anyway and those were, overall, no more fascinating than the rest of them. I can't help feeling the author could have thought up a more creative way to display information than this.
The one thing non-fiction books are missing these days is the fact that they never tell you how to pronounce things. I found it annoying in this book even though it's the same story in almost all of them. I read a lot of it aloud but it's extremely frustrating to see names like triarii, aedile and Hatshepsut-Merytre and have to work out how to say them by yourself.
To all those people, like me, who thought fact books were supposed to be short and snappy, informative without droning on and good at holding your attention, read this book and you will see just how wrong we were. But, actually, on the other hand, don't waste your time reading this - I'm sure there's many better books out there on the ancient world.
I'm not saying it's terrible. It's just kind of 'meh'. I gave up at page 258 because it was boring me, then flicked through the rest to look at a few interesting parts (AKA, the Greek mythology parts).
Although this book was informative and easy to read, it also seemed scattered and sort of random. It should have been about something more specific - like wars in the ancient world (this wouldn't have been hard - half the book is already about warfare), or how living in the ancient world compares to the present day, or maybe solely about Ancient Rome or Ancient Egypt or whatever other civilisation rather than trying to jumble them all up into one. Doing this resulted in the book being way, way, way too long, hence the reason I gave up on it.
I did like the illustrations and pictures, but the page layout was let down by the fact that every page was just rows of facts, with the occasional 'fascinating fact' which was a useless feature seeing as the entire book is facts anyway and those were, overall, no more fascinating than the rest of them. I can't help feeling the author could have thought up a more creative way to display information than this.
The one thing non-fiction books are missing these days is the fact that they never tell you how to pronounce things. I found it annoying in this book even though it's the same story in almost all of them. I read a lot of it aloud but it's extremely frustrating to see names like triarii, aedile and Hatshepsut-Merytre and have to work out how to say them by yourself.
To all those people, like me, who thought fact books were supposed to be short and snappy, informative without droning on and good at holding your attention, read this book and you will see just how wrong we were. But, actually, on the other hand, don't waste your time reading this - I'm sure there's many better books out there on the ancient world.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews