When I was at High School I started to read about History. I had studied it at school before but I had never read a book of that subject by myself. So I decided to read a history encyclopedia. Volume 1, then volume 2, and so on. I think it didn't work very well. It is true that it was interesting but I do not remember many things about those readings.
However, when I was at university, studying an engineering, I found a book that changed my point of view. It was a book about the history of archaeology and, as you can read in Wikipedia, Gods, Graves and Scholars covers Greek, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, as well as Mexican, Central American, and South American archaeology. Since then, the origin of our european civilitation, around all those ancient middle east empires, became my favourite period to read about.
It was there where agriculture, livestock and writing started and spread all over the world. And different empires from there dominated his world until a collapse around 1200 BC.
A new study has found that a three hundred years drought could have caused the fall.
A climate change. Another one.
Books I would like to recommend:
- Guns, Germs and Steel. Jared Diamond.
- Collapse: How Societies choose to fail or succed. Jared Diamond
- Gods, Graves and Scholars. C.W. Ceram
- The secret of Hittites. C.W. Ceram
- The Egyptian. Mika Waltari.
