Early Antiquity e-bog

The internationally renowned Assyriologist and linguist I.M. Diakonoff has gathered the work of Soviet historians inthis survey of the earliest history of the ancient Near East,Central Asia, India, and China. Diakonoff and hiscolleagues, nearly all working within the general Marxisthistoriographic tradition, offer a comprehensive, accessiblesynthesis of historical knowledge from the beginnings ofagriculture through the advent of the Iron Age and the Greekcolonization in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea areas.Besides discussing features of Soviet historicalscholarship of the ancient world, the essays treat thehistory of early Mesopotamia and the course of PharaonicEgyptian civilization and developments in ancient India andChina from the Bronze Age into the first millennium B.C.Additional chapters are concerned with the early history ofSyria, Phoenicia, and Palestine, the Hittite civilization,the Creto-Mycenaean world, Homeric Greece, and the Phoenicianand Greek colonization.This volume offers a unified perspective on earlyantiquity, focusing on the economic and social relations ofproduction. Of immense value to specialists, the book willalso appeal to general readers.I. M. Diakonoff is a senior research scholar of ancienthistory at the Institute of Oriental Studies, LeningradAcademy of Sciences. Philip L. Kohl is professor ofanthropology at Wellesley College.