Early Civilization Books - Page 5

When Time Began: Book V of the Earth Chronicles (The Earth Chronicles)

Zecharia Sitchin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

LOVE IT 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Besides loving the contents, of this book. I have decided to purchase the complete chronicle series.

The book came to my surprise brand New! Thank You Amazon!

Editorial Review:

They came to Earth thousands of years ago to usher in mankind's first New Age of scientific growth and spiritual enlightenment. Under the guidance of these ancient visitors from the heavens, human civilisation flourished - as revolutionary advances in art, science and thought swept through the inhabited world. And they left behind magnificent monuments -- baffling monoliths and awesome, towering structures that stand to this day as testaments to their greatness.

In this extraordinarily documented, meticulously researched work, Zecharia Sitchin draws remarkable correlations between the events that shape our civilisation in millennia past - pinpointing with astonishing accuracy the tumultuous beginning of time as we know it . . . and revealing to us the indisputable signature of extraterrestrial god indelibly written in stone.

Critical Path

R. Buckminster Fuller

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Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

R. Buckminster Fuller is regarded as one of the most important figures of the 20th century, renowned for his achievements as an inventor, designer, architect, philosopher, mathematician, and dogged individualist. Perhaps best remembered for the Geodesic Dome and the term "Spaceship Earth," his work and his writings have had a profound impact on modern life and thought.

Critical Path is Fuller's master work--the summing up of a lifetime's thought and concern--as urgent and relevant as it was upon its first publication in 1981. Critical Path details how humanity found itself in its current situation—at the limits of the planet's natural resources and facing political, economic, environmental, and ethical crises.

The crowning achievement of an extraordinary career, Critical Path offers the reader the excitement of understanding the essential dilemmas of our time and how responsible citizens can rise to meet this ultimate challenge to our future.

In Search of Ancient Ireland: The Origins of the Irish from Neolithic Times to the Coming of the English

Carmel McCaffrey

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 31 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Excellent overview of Irish prehistory and ancient and medieval history 5 out of 5 stars.
11 of 11 people found this review helpful.

_In Search of Ancient Ireland_ by Carmel McCaffrey and Leo Eaton is a well-written and thorough tour of Irish history from Neolithic times following the last Ice Age up into the 12th century.

Chapter one looked at the first Irish people. The chapter began with the authors touring the Irish countryside examining eskers, long gravel ridges left behind by retreating glaciers, features that once served as elevated roads relatively free of vegetation, useful to Ireland's first arrivals. Although there is debate over whether a land-bridge still existed at the time between Britain and Ireland, the first people to settle Ireland arrived in small family groups around 9000 BC, having left southwest Scotland for northeast Ireland. The authors discussed Mount Sandel, a Mesolithic site dating to around 7000 BC. Notable finds from the camp include fulacht fiadh (also known from the Bronze Age), essentially mounds of fire-heated stones that were used to boil water for cooking. More dramatic though are the 1500 megalithic structures from Neolithic Ireland built largely between 4000-2000 BC, structures that are evidence of large communities with considerable organization. The authors discussed dolmans, court tombs, and wedge tombs.

Chapter two reviewed Bronze Age Ireland, which began around 2400 BC. The authors examined a Bronze Age mine, the famous stone circles of the era (hundreds of all sizes were constructed between the end of the Neolithic and the start of the Iron Age around 500 BC), the importance of cattle (as one expert said, "raising cattle is the key to understanding Ireland...everything is about cattle"), the traumatic climatic events that took place between 1159-1141 BC that led to the development of Ireland's first warrior aristocracy and hill forts, and crannogs (artificial lake islands, usually with no more than two huts).

Chapter three examined who the Celts were and what it means to be "Celtic," reviewing the history of the term (which is of very recent origins), how there is no evidence of any large-scale Celtic invasion from Europe (though Celtic culture and language did indeed arrive), and how Celtic should be seen as a cultural and linguistic term, not an ethnic one. A very interesting section examined in detail _An Tain Bo Cualigne_ (frequently just called _The Tain_ or translated as _The Cattle Raid of Cooley_, the greatest Irish story and oldest epic written in a vernacular European language).

The fourth chapter looked at religion and laws. Topics included the druids, various Irish festivals (Samain was a great feast that marked the end of the year and the start of the new one on November 1st, a festival that eventually transformed into Halloween), the Brehon Laws (administered by judges known as brehons, a vital part of Irish life though not written down until seventh and eighth centuries), the significant role of fili or poets, and women's rights in Ireland (much better under Brehon Laws).

Chapter five was devoted to fifth century St. Patrick, detailing his life (interestingly, he was not the first missionary to Ireland nor was he in fact Irish) and how the cult of St. Patrick developed (largely for the political expediency of various Irish leaders).

The sixth chapter looked at the rise of Christianity, how was it spread from the top down in Ireland, how missionaries had to adapt an essentially urban religion to a land without cities, its largely nonviolent acceptance, how some Celtic gods morphed into saints (St. Brigid might have either have been a real person or the goddess Brigid). A major figure is St Enda, the man most responsible for introducing monasticism to Ireland.

Chapter seven examined in detail the Irish monasteries, which were surprisingly worldly (Irish monks frequently married and were not poor) and scholarly (they preserved much Classical literature). While some monasteries basically became cities with many lay persons living and working there, others were founded in very remote places, notably desolate off-shore islands and even Iceland (appalled at the lack of Irish martyrs, the Irish church said that White Martyrdom could be achieved by leaving Ireland and founding monasteries in desolate places). Also examined are early conflicts between the Irish and Roman churches, Brendan the Navigator, and the perigrini (large numbers of Irish pilgrims in Europe from the sixth century on).

Chapter eight looked at the growing role of monasteries in the flowering of Irish arts and crafts (examples include the _Book of Kells_ and the ninth century High Crosses, sometimes called Celtic crosses, freestanding, up to 20 feet in height stone crosses with the distinctive ringed cross head and elaborate and apparently painted carvings upon them) and also the Irish political situation; the hundreds of petty kings (many were called taoiseach or chieftains), Irish succession laws (not always the eldest son, but rather decided upon by a dail or discussion group), and the wars between the monastic city-states.

Chapter nine looked at the first Viking raids in the late 8th century and the establishment of Viking fortified camps called longphorts, many of which later became Irish cities (the most important would be Dublin, which comes from Dubh Linn, or Black Pool, a natural harbor favored by the Vikings).

Chapter ten examined the history of the Vikings in Ireland, how "Vikings were as likely to use Irish allies in their own wars as the Irish were to have Viking allies," and how Viking towns became real engines of economic growth (and also by the way Christianized; later myths would portray all Vikings as pagan).

Chapter eleven chronicled the life and times of tenth century Brian Boru, "Emperor of the Irish," the only Irish high-king to have any real power.

The final chapter looked at the conflict between Tara, long the seat of traditional Irish power and prestige, and Dublin, growing in wealth and power, the lasting Viking legacy in Ireland (they introduced coins, even the stirrup and spur), the massive reforms imposed on the Irish church by Rome in the twelfth century, and Dermot MacMurrough, the deposed Irish king who was partly responsible for the Norman English invasion.

Editorial Review:

The history, archaeology, and legends of ancient Ireland from 9000 B.C., when nomadic hunter-gatherers appeared in Ireland at the end of the last Ice Age, to 1167 A.D., when a Norman invasion brought the country under control of the English crown for the first time. The book also looks at contemporary Ireland's connection with the country's past. Companion to the PBS documentary series. Well-written...integrates the talents of distinguished anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians....Contains new and fascinating material challenging many myths. --Lawrence J. McCaffrey, Loyola University of Chicago

Underworld : The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

Graham Hancock

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 39 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Underworld 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

As Far as I know no one else has informed us about all of these underwater places where people, at one time, lived. As always Handcock makes you think.

Drivel 1 out of 5 stars.
0 of 35 people found this review helpful.

These books are nonsense. Any books whose titles include any of the words 'mysterious', 'secrets', 'Templar', 'alien', 'code', 'supernatural', 'mythic', 'cosmic', are just giving away the fact that they are unscientific rubbish. They are based on wishes and dreams, but we should all know that children wish, adults decide.

Long but very important book 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I believe this is a far more important book than most people realize. While the author suffers from a lack of editing and brevity, he more than makes up for it in his subject selection and hands-on detective work. I read the entire book and it was a detailed, highly convincing argument that mankind has done a really slipshod job of investigating our history in terms of looking at the oceans of the world.

I thought the photographs in the book were fantastic and my only complaint is that there weren't more of them! Especially interesting were the underwater photos of Yonaguni which I find almost impossible to believe could be natural phenomena. I wish Mr. Hancock had also put together a DVD release of this material as I think that the actual pictures tell a story that the written word itself can hardly match. The author does actually mention the difficulty of underwater photography in the various locations he travels and this is part of the importance of the book; that is, that we need advances in our ability to image places we are investigating in order to tell the story to the public and thereby capture both imagination and funding in order to continue exploring the hidden history of mankind.

Those who gave this book bad reviews are ignoring the fact that, to my knowledge, modern history has absolutely no explanation at all for formations like Yonaguni, if it is indeed man-made. The author's book is, as far as I can tell, one of the only attempts to provide any kind of real explanation for this. Yonaguni is an anomaly whose only other explanation (that it is a natural formation) is almost impossible to believe.

With some additional editing, etc., in a second edition, this book could easily rate five stars. And the subject matter is important enough that it needs to.

The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality

Cheikh Anta Diop

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 97 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Don't hate us because we're Beautiful! 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 14 people found this review helpful.

Without a doubt the most critical and honest review of who the ancient Kemetians(Egyptians)were; Black Africans. This book should be on the shelf in every African-American home, as well as those in the Diaspora. It is the final stage in understanding who were are as a people. As the great Mr. Diop says:

"The oneness of KMT(Egypt)and black culture could not be stated more clearly. Because of this essential identity of genius, culture, and race, today all Negroes can legitimately trace their culture to ancient KMT(Egypt)and build a modern culture on that foundation. By this dynamic contact, the Negro will be convinced that these temples, these forests of columns, these pyramids, these colossi, these bas-reliefs, mathematics, medicine, and all the science, are indeed the work of his ancestors and that he has the right and a duty to claim this heritage."

Diop is no idiot proclaiming this fact just because it sounds good, every arguement that he makes is based upon meticulous research & FACTUAL evidence. Is it any wonder that Dr. John Henry Clarke, the scholar, fought for almost ten years to get his books published in the United States?

The recent King Tut exhibit that was on tour in the United States was a propoganda tour with it's fake euro-arab depiction of King Tut; The blacks that protested it got absolutely NO media coverage. Anyone with just a cursory knowledge of ancient Egypt knows King Tut could never have looked like that, his grandmother was a pure African Woman, Queen Tiye. (look it up and see for yourself)

Zawi Hawass is an idiot who was trained here in the U.S., in its overwhelmingly racist field of egyptology; run by people who find it hard to believe that this was an African civilization, even though the greeks and other ancients admit this fact wholeheartedly themselves in their writings.

It is even more sick that some would like to think that aliens from outer space built the pyramids... It is laughable that an Arab is the curator and spokesman for egypt antiquity when Arabs didn't invade & settle into the Holy land until around 640 AD.

The fact is that Egypt is and was founded by Black Africans and no amount of propoganda can hide this; at least to those of us who know the truth.

Editorial Review:

Now in its 30th printing, this classic presents historical, archaeological, and anthropological evidence to support the theory that ancient Egypt was a black civilization.

The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square

Ned Sublette

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

New Orleans is the most elusive of American cities. The product of the centuries-long struggle among three mighty empires--France, Spain, and England--and among their respective American colonies and enslaved African peoples, it has always seemed like a foreign port to most Americans, baffled as they are by its complex cultural inheritance.

            The World That Made New Orleans offers a new perspective on this insufficiently understood city by telling the remarkable story of New Orleans’s first century--a tale of imperial war, religious conflict, the search for treasure, the spread of slavery, the Cuban connection, the cruel aristocracy of sugar, and the very different revolutions that created the United States and Haiti. It demonstrates that New Orleans already had its own distinct personality at the time of Louisiana’s statehood in 1812. By then, important roots of American music were firmly planted in its urban swamp--especially in the dances at Congo Square, where enslaved Africans and African Americans appeared en masse on Sundays to, as an 1819 visitor to the city put it, “rock the city.” 

This book is a logical continuation of Ned Sublette’s previous volume, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, which was highly praised for its synthesis of musical, cultural, and political history. Just as that book has become a standard resource on Cuba, so too will The World That Made New Orleans long remain essential for understanding the beautiful and tragic story of this most American of cities.

The Lessons of History

Will Durant, Ariel Durant

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Total reviews: 34 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this illuminating and thoughtful book, Will and Ariel Durant have succeeded in distilling for the reader the accumulated store of knowledge and experience from their four decades of work on the ten monumental volumes of The Story of Civilization. The result is a survey of human history, full of dazzling insights into the nature of human experience, the evolution of civilization, the culture of man. With the completion of their life's work they look back and ask what history has to say about the nature, the conduct and the prospects of man, seeking in the great lives, the great ideas, the great events of the past for the meaning of man's long journey through war, conquest and creation -- and for the great themes that can help us to understand our own era.

To the Durants, history is "not merely a warning reminder of man's follies and crimes, but also an encouraging remembrance of generative souls...a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers, and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing...."

Designed to accompany the ten-volume set of The Story of Civilization, The Lessons of History is, in its own right, a profound and original work of history and philosophy.

cosmic code: Book VI of the Earth Chronicles (The Earth Chronicles)

Zecharia Sitchin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Misunderstandings and baseless assertions Ahoy! 1 out of 5 stars.
15 of 47 people found this review helpful.

For all those praising the academic/scholastic merit of this work, yours must have a detailed references section that the one I picked up seems to lack. I would give him a D- and a "See Me!" had this had shown up on my desk. Someone should point out to him that evolution has no direction, as if we were destined to get to this point and are no longer evolving. Be careful of the plethora of misunderstandings and baseless assertions that can destroy a person's capacity to think about humans at all scientifically, historically, or otherwise. If you're incredulous of my own assertions, please research anything in Sitchin's works. You will have done more research than he likely did, and could even cite it. Don't take one sourceless book's word for it! You'll find planet X (Tiamat?) prophesies, space stations made of rocks, and millions of years of evolution very slightly co-opted by extra-terrestrials less believable than you once did. There are, after all, enough actual mysteries in the world. We don't need another convoluted theory that creates far more problems than it solves. It's no fluke that these books have made no waves in challenging any anthropological or historical constructions of earlier periods of humanity, areas of knowledge that are constantly modified by actual scholarship. It's also no fluke that these books are marginally profitable, and they keep being released, expanding upon the baseless foundation with even more baseless structure rather than defending the indefensible first works. As far as I'm concerned, if he's one of the few who can decipher those texts, he's abusing his position for financial gain, and could easily be ousted in the genre by a legitimate scholar.

Editorial Review:

Many thousands of years ago, a group of extraterrestrials from another planet guided the evolution of life on Earth—determining the existence and nature of humankind as we know it today. How did the master builders from the stars construct the miracle called man? Is the DNA that is at the core of all life in the universe a "cosmic code" that links Earth to heaven and man to God?

In this sixth volume of The Earth Chronicles, Zecharia Sitchin unveils writings from the past to decipher prophesies, and reveals how the DNA-matched Hebrew alphabet and the numerical values of its letters serve as a code that bares the secrets of mortal man’s fate and mankind’s celestial destiny.

The Story of Mankind

Hendrik van Loon

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

It was intended for children, and of course much of the science is hopelessly out of date, but this ambitious, even audacious attempt to offer an overview of the entirety of human history remains a breathtaking work today. A 1921 bestseller, The Story of Mankind won the first Newbery Medal in 1922, and it is no wonder: the book-which begins with the origin of life itself on our planet and the arrival of the earliest protohumans on the scene and ends with "The Last Fifty Years, Including Several Explanations and an Apology"-is abundant with an offbeat charm and packed with the author's own beautiful illustrations and maps that are alive with a fresh, delectable humor. As a document of early modern science writing, it is invaluable. As a delightfully entertaining read, it is not to be missed. Dutch-American author and educator HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON (1882-1944) sold more than six million books during his lifetime, including The Story of the Bible (1923), Tolerance (1925), and America (1927).

Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure

Daniel Quinn

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 144 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Perspective on 'takers' concept 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Mr. Quinn has, as have most Jeremiahs in earlier societies, engendered quite a lot of animosity for his calling out of our American (nee western) society as a 'taker society'. Here in Beyond Civilization Quinn puts his proverbial 'money' where his former books' mouths were and outlines what the hell we can do about the state of things we 'takers' have brought about. A good read, but not for those who are lazily comfortable living in 21st century America.

Editorial Review:

In Beyond Civilization, Daniel Quinn thinks the unthinkable. We all know there's no one right way to build a bicycle, no one right way to design an automobile, no one right way to make a pair of shoes, but we're convinced that there must be only one right way to live -- and the one we have is it, no matter what.

Beyond Civilization makes practical sense of the vision of Daniel Quinn's best-selling novel Ishmael. Examining ancient civilizations such as the Maya and the Olmec, as well as modern-day microcosms of alternative living like circus societies, Quinn guides us on a quest for a new model for society, one that is forward-thinking and encourages diversity instead of suppressing it. Beyond Civilization is not about a "New World Order" but a "New Personal World Order" that would allow people to assert control over their own destiny and grant them the freedom to create their own way of life right now -- not in some distant utopian future.