Early Antiquity
I. M. Diakonoff, Alexander Kirjanov
University of Chicago Press
The internationally renowned Assyriologist and linguist I. <br>M. Diakonoff has gathered the work of Soviet historians in <br>this survey of the earliest history of the ancient Near East, <br>Central Asia, India, and China. Diakonoff and his <br>colleagues, nearly all working within the general Marxist <br>historiographic tradition, offer a comprehensive, accessible <br>synthesis of historical knowledge from the beginnings of <br>agriculture through the advent of the Iron Age and the Greek <br>colonization in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea areas. <br><br>Besides discussing features of Soviet historical <br>scholarship of the ancient world, the essays treat the <br>history of early Mesopotamia and the course of Pharaonic <br>Egyptian civilization and developments in ancient India and <br>China from the Bronze Age into the first millennium B.C. <br>Additional chapters are concerned with the early history of <br>Syria, Phoenicia, and Palestine, the Hittite civilization, <br>the Creto-Mycenaean world, Homeric Greece, and the Phoenician <br>and Greek colonization. <br><br>This volume offers a unified perspective on early <br>antiquity, focusing on the economic and social relations of <br>production. Of immense value to specialists, the book will <br>also appeal to general readers. <br><br>I. M. Diakonoff is a senior research scholar of ancient <br>history at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Leningrad <br>Academy of Sciences. Philip L. Kohl is professor of <br>anthropology at Wellesley College.<br><br>