Early Antiquity

The internationally renowned Assyriologist and linguist I.

M. Diakonoff has gathered the work of Soviet historians in

this survey of the earliest history of the ancient Near East,

Central Asia, India, and China. Diakonoff and his

colleagues, nearly all working within the general Marxist

historiographic tradition, offer a comprehensive, accessible

synthesis of historical knowledge from the beginnings of

agriculture through the advent of the Iron Age and the Greek

colonization in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea areas.

Besides discussing features of Soviet historical

scholarship of the ancient world, the essays treat the

history of early Mesopotamia and the course of Pharaonic

Egyptian civilization and developments in ancient India and

China from the Bronze Age into the first millennium B.C.

Additional chapters are concerned with the early history of

Syria, Phoenicia, and Palestine, the Hittite civilization,

the Creto-Mycenaean world, Homeric Greece, and the Phoenician

and Greek colonization.

This volume offers a unified perspective on early

antiquity, focusing on the economic and social relations of

production. Of immense value to specialists, the book will

also appeal to general readers.

I. M. Diakonoff is a senior research scholar of ancient

history at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Leningrad

Academy of Sciences. Philip L. Kohl is professor of

anthropology at Wellesley College.