Ancient History

The tale of ancient history has been edited many times. History of the more recent kind is founded on a wealth of documentation which, to be sure, leads to arguments and revision as well. But ancient history has seen whole nations and peoples resurrected and added to the beginning of the story.

Once upon a time, Egypt was considered the most ancient of all civilizations, prefaced and surrounded by utter savagery. Then, in the 19^th century, men discovered the ruins of cities in Mesopotamia somewhat older than the oldest urban settlements in Egypt. Since then, evidence of organized and civilized men has been uncovered in a number of places around the world. Catal Huyuk in Anatolia is one example of such a place. Explorers recently discovered the ruins of towns beneath the waters of the Black Sea, leading to speculation about just how many ancient societies may have been inundated in floods caused by the receding glaciers after the end of the last Ice Age circa 11,000 B.C.

This blog will focus primarily on the line of increasing sophistication which appears to begin in the Mesopotamian realms of Sumeria during the fourth millennia before Christ and ends, or perhaps unravels, in our own time. The reason for this bias is simply that we lack records, or access to records, regarding any of these other peoples and places from our ancient history which may also have seen the urban lifestyle and organized behavior which we associate with civilization.

The First Men
Fire
Animal Domestication
Your Ancestors Were Killers
Ice Age
Agriculture
The Chalcolithic
The Indo-Europeans
Sumer
Egypt: The Old Kingdom 
The Bronze Age
Babylon 
Egypt: The Middle Kingdom 
From Barter and Trade to Silver and Gold 
Phoenicia and the Mediterranean Marketplace 
Crete and the Minoan Civilization 
Mycenae and Greek Origins