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TimeFrame #5
Empires Ascendant, 400 BC-AD 200
Examines the different cultures that were emerging between 400 BC and AD 200
175 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1987
55 people want to read
About the author
Stephen G. Hyslop
35 books4 followersStephen G. Hyslop worked for many years as a writer and editor at Time-Life Books, where he contributed to a series of books on American Indians.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 8, 2021
I just love statements such as ‘Rome’s neighbors were the Parthians, a war like people’, or ‘the Parthians were curiously inward looking and relatively uninterested in cultures other than their own’. Seriously! Romans weren’t a war like people and perhaps one can say the editors of this book were also curiously uninterested in other cultures when it did not fit their ethnocentric Western worldview.
The editors would only tell the non-Western history as a reflection of how they perceived the world through their narrow non-reflective un-self-aware beyond themselves focal points and would use just as un-reflective sources in support of their own biases as for when they said ‘According to Justin, the Parthian male was arrogant, treacherous and violent, a rather silent sort, quicker to act than to converse. He enjoyed drink, particularly palm wine, but he was said to eat sparingly: meat from the hunt, some fish, and a few vegetables and grains’. To me, such a statement says more about the ethnocentrism of Justin than it does about the Parthians and similarly it shows the myopic vision of the editors especially since they meant the statement un-ironically.
It amazes me that we survived the 1980s since books like this one were how we understood our past. The editors take Masada and its suicide brigade as gospel truth and The Gospels themselves as historical fact, and the certainty that God came down to earth in the guise of a man in order to offer Himself up as a vicarious sacrifice for all of humanity for the sin of eating from a tree of knowledge. Perhaps that is all true, but it’s not history as I understand history.
I’m going to say one or two nice things about this book. I liked the pictures, I liked the maps and I would suggest one should read this book before they read Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, because the editors place Plutarch in context and will make reading Plutarch all the more pleasant and there is a whole lot of overlap between Plutarch and this book. The other nice thing I can say about this book is that it really shows how ethnocentric and non-reflective a history book written at a ninth grade level can be and how one can appreciate that the certainties they had in the 1980s are not how today we think about the past. BTW, this book is available at any half way decent used book store or easily getable from archive.com and I think it’s an excellent example of the 1980s simplistic worldview and that makes this book a worthwhile read for today’s reader.
The editors would only tell the non-Western history as a reflection of how they perceived the world through their narrow non-reflective un-self-aware beyond themselves focal points and would use just as un-reflective sources in support of their own biases as for when they said ‘According to Justin, the Parthian male was arrogant, treacherous and violent, a rather silent sort, quicker to act than to converse. He enjoyed drink, particularly palm wine, but he was said to eat sparingly: meat from the hunt, some fish, and a few vegetables and grains’. To me, such a statement says more about the ethnocentrism of Justin than it does about the Parthians and similarly it shows the myopic vision of the editors especially since they meant the statement un-ironically.
It amazes me that we survived the 1980s since books like this one were how we understood our past. The editors take Masada and its suicide brigade as gospel truth and The Gospels themselves as historical fact, and the certainty that God came down to earth in the guise of a man in order to offer Himself up as a vicarious sacrifice for all of humanity for the sin of eating from a tree of knowledge. Perhaps that is all true, but it’s not history as I understand history.
I’m going to say one or two nice things about this book. I liked the pictures, I liked the maps and I would suggest one should read this book before they read Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, because the editors place Plutarch in context and will make reading Plutarch all the more pleasant and there is a whole lot of overlap between Plutarch and this book. The other nice thing I can say about this book is that it really shows how ethnocentric and non-reflective a history book written at a ninth grade level can be and how one can appreciate that the certainties they had in the 1980s are not how today we think about the past. BTW, this book is available at any half way decent used book store or easily getable from archive.com and I think it’s an excellent example of the 1980s simplistic worldview and that makes this book a worthwhile read for today’s reader.
February 21, 2020
A highly enjoyable history book, focusing on the empires of antiquity - the empire of Alexander the Great, the Roman Republic and Empire, the sub-continent of India and the struggles of Charaguptya Maurya, and the various dynasties that came after Qin Shi Huangdi in China.
August 30, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews