Antiquities

Reviews

Cats arrived on time for a birthday gift. They are exactly what I expected. BK

i love this product, i'm going to buy another one just because it's so beautiful. it's not cheap looking.

Reviews

This book was used as the text for a course I have taken on the Aegean Bronze Age by Professor Shelmerdine herself. This time period is absolutely fascinating for those interested, and this book will enhance the understanding of any who choose to study the Bronze Age. It is well organized, and there are no overly esoteric concepts, though some prior knowledge is assumed. You might also have to look up a word or two, but the point is to learn something new, right? I highly recommend this text for anyone interested in the Bronze Age or early antiquity. And if you can manage to get a class with Professor Shelmerdine, so much the better!

Reviews

Having an intrest in the remote past this book goes into great detail and anaylizes various theories and ther merrit to events that took place long ago. I was suprised how little we actually know and how much is theory and speculation. I like the different methods from lingustic to surviving texts to archology to tell the most acurate story and also present some the debates in the comunity on the range of topics.

This book covers everything that you need to introduce yourself to the end of the Bronze Age. It introduces you to countries and characters who you would never hear of otherwise. Apart from the Mycenaeans made famous by Homer, and the Egyptians who have earned their own fame through their brilliant structures, there are also the Hittites and their perpetual enemies the Assyrians. This book can show you worlds which few people know existed.

Buyers of this book should beware that it is self-published, and needs editing. Aside from the spelling errors ("court marshal" for "court martial") and meandering prose style, some of the arguments seem weak. For example, we're told that the number of villages in Greece declined after the fall of Mycenae, and that the population of Europe declined after the Black Death of the Middle Ages; therefore, the fall of Mycenae might have been accompanied by the plague. The author doesn't say whether this is a widely held opinion, or merely his own speculation; and without any biographical information about the author, it's hard to know what's reliable in the book, and what's not.

This book is only tangentially concerned with the Near East Bronze Age as it waxed and waned in the Fertile Crescent (Iraq, Jordan, Israel, and Egypt) as well as its cultural extensions into the Anatolian highlands and the Aegean Region (including Greece). And it is not focused on the "Collapse of the Bronze Age." As Robbins makes clear the Bronze Age of the Near East transitioned into the Iron Age imperceptibly and, to the people involved seamlessly. Rather the book has a number of interesting stories that are tied together only by location (the Eastern Mediterranean), time period (the transition from the Bronze to Iron Age), and the mysterious phenomenon of the Peoples of the Sea movement. Robbins focuses particular attention to the dissolution or collapse of the proto-Greek Mycenaean Society and the Anatolian based Hittite Society. He uses both events to illustrate that the transition of the Bronze Age into the Iron Age was accompanied by a good deal of social disorder, movements of peoples, and collapse of empires. While archaeologists and historians are in general agreement that the ending of the Near Eastern Bronze Age was a time of social and political upheaval, they disagree about why this was so. In this book, Robbins comes down on the side of migration-invasion and disruptions by the so-called Peoples of the Sea. He does also note however that natural disasters clearly could have had a role as well, particularly in Greece. He also discusses the destruction of the seldom mentioned advanced civilization of Cyprus which occurred during this same period. And, in a rather long aside, he also discusses the origins of the Jews and the occupation of Canaan by the tribes of Israel. Presumably because this also occurred around the end of the Bronze Age and the Israelites also had to cope with the Peoples of the Sea. This book has some good tales to tell, but appears to lack focus. It is filled with digressions and expositions on matters not directly related to the social collapses of the late Bronze Age. On the other hand Robbins brushes over relevant information such as the Island of Crete where the Bronze Age began for the Aegean region and whose civilization defused to mainland Mycenae. And Cretan society also was disrupted at the end of the Bronze Age. Yet his only concern with Crete has to do with origins of the Peoples of the Sea. He also ignores the Mycenaean Linear A and B scripts which tell a good deal about these proto-Greeks and their way of life. In short this is an interesting book that could have been much better.

This could have been written better. Too much redundancy to make for an enjoyable read and it draws conclusions rather weakly. Its section on Israel relies far too much on biblical historic inaccuracies to prove some points - very biased, even although he lists more modern archaeological writings in the bibliography. This book is probably not worth the price which is a shame, as such a broad review would have had value.

Reviews

Finding sources on pre-Islamic Arabia is incredibly difficult, and finding sources in English is doubly so. This is an excellent overview of the subject, well written and well organized. The author gives the broader picture, tying the various peoples of Arabia in to the larger world in each time period, showing ties of diplomacy, war and trade, as well as focusing on what the different groups were doing individually and among themselves. The book is organized in a very standard and useful fashion, giving chapters on each region (internally organized by time period) before moving on to topic-focused chapters. This is a book which rewards a cover-to-cover reading, and is understandable to a novice on the subject; now that I've been through it once, I'll probably read it again at least once in its entirety, as well as using it as a look-up reference for individual bits of information. The notes are interesting and worth reading, without this being a case of all the good stuff being in the footnotes. The only complaint I have is that I'd have liked for each place mentioned more than in passing in the text to have been marked somewhere on one of the maps. More maps and some more detail would have been nice. This isn't an insurmountable problem, however, for anyone who has a good historical atlas, or access to the internet. For someone who's writing a journal article or a dissertation, this is probably too elementary a source. For a person with some historical background who's familiar with the ancient world in general, but lacking foundation knowledge of ancient Arabia, this is an excellent first source and provides many jumping-off points for further research. This is a keeper for me, and I'm sure it'll get a lot of use.

I am an amatuer archeologist, constantly on the lookout for practical, well researched books on the history of the Arabian Penninsula. What is difficult for any writer on Ancient Arabia, is the fact that there are very few texts available on this subject. However, the writer has delved into the society, mores, trade, cultural traditions, and other components of this unique land. All in all, I vote five stars for the effort and interesting writing style.

I keep looking for books about the history of Arabs giving a pure academic point of view, unfortunately without success. This book certainely doesnot go deep intothe history of Arabia, nor of the origins of its people or the origins of people who migrated out of Arabia. It is a big dissapointment.

Why the author does not speak about the emperor Elagabal and his black stone ?