Wonders of the Ancient World: Antiquity's Greatest Feats of Deign and Engineering

by Justin Pollard

Wonders of the Ancient World describes the most extraordinary feats of human engineering and design from across the globe, created between the dawn of human civilization and the onset of the Dark Ages. Author Justin Pollard looks at the problems that the ancients solved to build each wonder and introduces us to the travellers, both ancient and modern, who saw and rediscovered each site.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Reference, Historical, World History

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Justin Pollard was born in Hertfordshire and educated at St. Albans School and Downing College, Cambridge where he was president of the Poohsticks Society.

Since then he has written nine books, a few articles for magazines like History Today, BBC History Magazine and the Idler and he is currently one of the writers of the BBC panel show QI.

He is one of the founders of Unbound - http://www.unbound.co.uk - a new crowd-funding site putting authors directly in touch with their readers.

He also runs a company called Visual Artefact which provides scripting and historical advice for feature films. His credits include Shekhar Kapur’s ‘Elizabeth’, Joe Wright’s ‘Atonement’, Tim Burton’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and Pirates of the Caribbean 4.

In television drama he is the historical consultant for the BBC TV/Showtime series ‘The Tudors’ - which gets him into a lot of trouble with other historians.

He is also the co-founder of crowd-funding book website www.unbound.co.uk.

He lives in Dorset where he grows vegetables and wonders where all the sheep have gone.

Reviews

[Mahmoud Aghiorly]

الكتاب مميز جدا في طريقة عرض المعلومات و السرد التاريخي ، كاتب قصص هذه العجائب هو كاتب محترف يستطيع تلخيص قرون من الاحداث بفقرات صغيرة محبوكة .
استمتعت جدا في قراءة هذا الكتاب

[La PSN]

I love this book, I find myself liking to fall asleep with books like this. I pick and choose when I relax at night what wonder to fall asleep too. It's not a book you read straight from front to back, but rather more looking at the contents and seeing what peaks your interest at the moment. I bought mine a while ago at Barnes & Nobles and I have several books just like this. I love learning about historical landmarks, monuments and history in general. It has fascinating wonders from literally all over the world and place like the Philipines that you wound never thing would have such fascinating facts. Everything is usually about the Roman Empire and the Greeks, but this book is an around the world in a book.

[Greg Schloesser]

An interesting, concise description and history of dozens of wonders from the ancient world. Nice photos, graphics, facts and stories. A very nice coffee table / reference tome.

[Beth]

A great resource for an overview of some of the ancient wonders of the world, with a few pages dedicated to each, encapsulating the historical highlights, allure, fate, and remains of each wonder. Heavy emphasis on ancient Western and Near/Middle East wonders, with some effort to include a few in the East and the New World. Some obvious oversights, though--especially in East and Southeast Asia. How is Angkor Wat not on this list, or Bagan in Burma, or various sites in Kyoto and Nara, Japan? Still, a fascinating read.

[James]

A quick read with a lot of pictures, pretty much what the titles says. It gives a brief review of the locations, a bit of history, and some nice photography. It's pretty much a Cliff Notes version though, it doesn't really go into detail or depth of the locations or structures. But for a quick read with a few pictures it's pretty good.

[Elentarri]

A medium sized coffee table type book that covers several wonders of the ancient world in 4-6 pages of text and colour photographs/illustrations each. The text provides a brief description and history of each wonder. This book is quite nice and also includes ancient wonders I haven't come across before.

[Marissa]

A great nonfiction book that tells the stories of some of the oldest and greatest architecture of the world. It uses detailed photographs and information to help the reader gain a better understanding of some of the least well known, but no less amazing, landmarks in all of history.

[Rey Cogswell]

Overall was a very good book giving description of the sites and their history. Only problem i had with was there were no plans of the building which really would have been nice to include. Has over 40 sites dating from 3000 BCE to some in 1000 CE.

[Sophie]

A quite interesting book, illustrated with beautiful pictures.

[Fernando]

Excelent and insightfull book into the enginnering marvels of antiquity, only thing i would have add would be more diagrams or schematics of said marvels.