2014 read #59: The History of the Ancient World by Susan Wise Bauer.

The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome by Susan Wise Bauer
782 pages
Published 2007
Read from June 1 to June 28
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

A year ago I read the sequel to this book, The History of the Medieval World, and even though it was the usually tedious sort of "kings and wars" history that eschews analysis of social trends and the experiences of anyone who lacks "Emperor" before their name, I found myself impressed by the breadth of Bauer's coverage. A kings and wars history, yes, but one that dug its way into Korea and medieval Japan and other cultural areas usually ignored by such histories. This was enough to get me to shell out some $30 for my own copy of this volume, and imagine having the whole three-volume set ready to hand in my future library.

I've only now gotten around to reading this installment. (My reading pace has slowed considerably from last year, and 800-page history tomes don't ease their way into my rotation quite like they did.) While I'm not entirely discouraged from (eventually) reading The History of the Renaissance World, this book was a let-down. Sniffing about the lack of known personalities in social history and archaeology, Bauer insists upon kings and wars almost to the exclusion of all else; the charming or bloodthirsty or charmingly bloodthirsty anecdotes sprinkled through the later volume are thin on the ground here, while the first half or so of Ancient World relies to a disconcerting degree on legends and holy texts, often stripped down to their barest outline but otherwise presented with little correction.

Worst of all, thanks to Bauer's disdain for mere archaeology, the fascinating scope of her World is restricted to the usual suspects: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, a tiny bit of India, a lot of Greece, and a whole lot of Rome, following the long-outmoded "ladder" of civilizations (with modern Western Europe, as a general rule, found on top). Once the Punic Wars begin, Bauer seems to shrug off the existence of any part of the world outside Rome and China: addressing Pontius or Parthia or India only in reference to movements from those two centers, skipping centuries of amply documented history in Egypt and Greece, presumably because they'd passed on the torch and weren't so relevant to the glorious path of progress. It's an ethnocentric approach at odds with the title and with the subsequent volume.

The only help for it, though, would be to add something like another 700 pages and producing a separate volume in the series, A History of the Classical World or some such. Presumably an editor or publisher (or a fit of pragmatism) nixed that possibility. What we're left with in that absence, though, is a tremendous amount of material sped through with little to hold one's interest, undeserving of the title of a "world" history.