“Peoples and Places of the Past: The National Geographic Illustrated Cultural Atlas of the Ancient World”, by The National Geographic Society

 

424 pages, The National Geographic Society, ISBN-13: 978-0870444623

My Dad got Peoples and Places of the Past: The National Geographic Illustrated Cultural Atlas of the Ancient World from somewhere when I was a kid and I liked it so much that, when I moved out of my parent’s house, I took it with me. Without asking. “Stole”, if you want to get all legal about it. And am I ever glad that I did. As a kid, I would take this book and just open it to a random page and marvel at what I was looking at. Being new to history as I was, I was astounded that the world didn’t begin the day I way born; indeed, seeing as how human history stretched back far longer than I could have imagined, some nights I just became numb with how ancient we were and wonder what happened to all of those vanished civilizations and how one could spend their life studying one or the other and still only scratch the surface of what they were seeking.

And now that I am seeing this book once again with adult eyes, I have to say that, while the nostalgia factor is strong, the book itself is rather weak, overall. This comes as no surprise as, with the number of oversized books like this one that are conglomerations of pictures and facts and charts and so on, they all tend to be just introductory works meant as broad overviews of their topics that are designed to whet the appetite of the prospective scholar. So in that regard, it is a brilliant success for, while not going in-depth into any one culture, it at least gives one general sense of the same. Mission accomplished, for while I’m still rather ignorant of many of the peoples who inhabit this work, this book was one of many that opened my eyes to the past and compelled me to banish my ignorance and learn more – something I am still doing today.