I've owned this book for over a year now and still find it indispensable (I have highlighted and written in it to such an extent that I am probably the only person who can actually read my copy). Its span seems ridiculous for one book, even though it is pretty long (about 650 pages, plus an excellent 27 page time line), but it gives one a great understanding of the Mediterranean World's evolution, starting not only from Archaic Greece, the unification of Egypt and its First Dynasties, but from the earliest settlements, the earliest urban settlements, and earliest cities in the Ancient Near East, which of course set many precedents (if not THE precedent) for those civilizations after which the book is named. In fact, the initial chapter is an excellent, thorough -- yet still very nuanced and fascinating to read -- overview of the first cities and cultures that sprang up in that region, from the cities of Sumer and Uruk, to the Akkadians (and Sargon the Great, generally accepted as history's first emperor), the early Israelites, the Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, and all the way to the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

Conservative/orthodox views are presented alongside liberal views, and "revisionist" theories are -- refreshingly -- given equal credence as well. Many currently accepted consensuses about the Ancient World held by Classicists, Anthropologists, and Historians have traveled from (often laughable...) beginnings, and many of those evolutions are presented here in a way almost as interesting as the way in which the Roman Civil Wars are portrayed. If intrigued by a certain topic or period, the reader is constantly referred to the names of scholars and authors, both well-known and obscure, whose works they may also find interesting. While this is hardly revolutionary, it is VERY prevalent throughout this work. Hardly any alternative argument or contrary opinion pertaining to events is included without the person from which it originated.

If there is one strong point of this book that stands above the others, it is how accessible it is, while also being such a treasure of information. The sheer volume each chapter manages to say about its subject(s) without becoming a bland and simple chronology is simply amazing. One striking example of this accessibility is the treatment of the period that begins with the rise of Macedonia under Philip II, and ends after the conquests and death of Alexander. Despite the fact that this crucial topic in ancient history (which many have easily stretched out into often redundant works of several hundred pages) is mainly covered inside of 33 pages, it is one of the most informative and most evocatively written studies of the subject I have ever come across, and gives one plenty of insight into this moment in history. After reading it (and I had very little knowledge about Alexander's life at the time I bought this book, I'm ashamed to say), I felt as though I read a 300+ page piece: it is that concise and well written.

Do not be misled by the title and expect a strict format that dedicates one section to Egypt, one to Greece, and to for Rome. Though there are such sections, they are merely guidelines, and bits and pieces of each consistently creep into the others. The histories of all three (plus that of the Ancient Near East) are not presented as having occurred inside of a vacuum (as they too often are), but instead, as having developed alongside and with each other and other neighboring civilizations of the profoundly fluid Ancient Mediterranean World (perhaps the most concise chapter on anything that I have ever read is this book's short chapter on two of those lesser known, lesser appreciated cultures of the period, the Celts and Parthians, and what they contributed and took from surrounding cultures). There are wonderful profiles of the iconic figures from every conceivable aspect of the Ancient World: from the various schools of philosophy in Greece, the greatest minds of each, and their notable ideas; the great military leaders like Ramses II, Caesar, Pompey, Hannibal, Epaminondas, Pyrrhus, Philip, and Alexander; the most influential poets and playwrights, from Homer and Hesiod, Aeschylus and Aristophanes, to Catullus, Horace, and Virgil; the first men who seemed to have viewed history as a science, Herodotus, Thucydides, and much later, Polybius, who did explicitly think of both historiography, and what we might call political science, as sciences; and the political genius behind such larger than life figures as Cyrus the Great, Pericles, Cleisthenes, Cicero, Augustus, and Vespasian.

While the book typically does not delve into great detail when discussing important battles (e.g. how many troops on which side, nature of the terrain, strategies employed by the winners and losers, etc.), it seems insignificant given the attention and analytical thought given elsewhere (besides, one can often find great descriptions of famous battles on Wikipedia, in addition to just about every other history book).

In little over 600 pages, this book illustrates both Western and Near Eastern Civilization, from about 5000 BCE, the initial evolution of the settlement to the city state, the rise and fall of great empires long thought to be invincible, the dominance and demise of the Roman Republic, the dominance and demise of the Western Roman Empire, and the rise of Christianity and monotheism. This nearly perfect history begins its end with one of history's great turning points: the seventh-century war between the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius and the Sassanid Persian Shah Khusro II (and by proxy, the dominant monotheistic religions: the Orthodox Christianity of Constantinople and Zoroastrianism of Ctesiphon), in which Heraclius, against all odds, managed to save the Byzantine Empire, defeat the Sassanids, and retake critical territory in the Near East (most importantly Jerusalem, along with Christendom's most venerated relic, the True Cross, which he brought back to Constantinople after a triumph through the Holy City's streets).

As centuries of war between the Mediterranean's two superpowers finally seemed to be over, the Muslim armies of Arabia came, driven by their own monotheistic faith, and united by intense religious fervor. Soon Palestine and Syria were lost (this time, forever), and the Sassanid Empire fell after being soundly defeated by the Muslim forces; soon Alexandria too fell, followed by all other Roman/Byzantine lands in North Africa.

However, the book does not end on this note in order to provide a catastrophic ending to what we consider the picturesque, classic, ancient world. Instead, these events and their aftermath are used to reinforce and continue its main theme: the ever-fluid nature of the Ancient Mediterranean World. Greek culture proved to be profoundly important to the early Muslim armies and empires, the leaders of which -- especially early on -- depended on their new Greek neighbors to aid them in administering their new cities. Likewise, because non-Orthodox Christians in these cities faced persecution under Byzantine rule, in many cases they and the Jewish populations (who, obviously, also faced persecution) welcomed their new rulers; many cities, including Jerusalem, had willfully, even gladly, accepted Muslim rule without resistance (many Christians are said to have actually fought with the Muslim armies against the Byzantines). The Arab rulers, whose people had always been on the outskirts of the Ancient Mediterranean World, were now fully engaged, and -- like so many other empires and civilizations who took from and contributed to that very world -- within a century had done away with much of their old ways, particularly the Bedouin tradition of oral transmission and memorization, which grew from the necessities and limitations of desert life, and embraced the options and ideas which other cultures presented to them. There was an explosion of literacy among the previously-illiterate Arabs, and by the ninth-century, many sophisticated Greek works of medicine, philosophy, and mathematics, which had long been neglected by an increasingly scripture-centric Byzantine culture, were translated into Arabic, and thus spurred a renaissance among Muslim scholars. Soon, the Muslim world was the center of the sciences, where the ideas of Classical Greece thrived, and where the ideas of the great minds of antiquity were debated, built upon, and above all, revived in a manner "that was not possible in the Christian world." (p.648) Indeed, it is commonly accepted among historians that had the Muslim armies never conquered those Byzantine lands, many works of the ancient Greek philosophers and scientists, of which we are today so familiar, would likely not have survived.

This book gets my highest possible recommendation, simply for being a work of comparative history at its finest. Throw in the fantastic and informative maps (32 in all), beautiful plates (80 in all), its consistently nuanced tone, and a study of power politics in the ancient world that would make Polybius proud, and it becomes a must buy for anyone merely slightly interested in history. And again, this is a book which just about anybody can pick up and enjoy. The casual reader will take away from it not only a great amount of knowledge regarding the beginnings of each "civilization" of the ancient Mediterranean, but also new perspective into how much each owes -- to this day -- to each other.

I've owned this book for over a year now and still find it indispensable (I have highlighted and written in it to such an extent that I am probably the only person who can actually read my copy). Its span seems ridiculous for one book, even though it is pretty long (about 650 pages, plus an excellent 27 page time line), but it gives one a great understanding of the Mediterranean World's evolution, starting not only from Archaic Greece, the unification of Egypt and its First Dynasties, but from the earliest settlements, the earliest urban settlements, and earliest cities in the Ancient Near East, which of course set many precedents (if not THE precedent) for those civilizations after which the book is named. In fact, the initial chapter is an excellent, thorough -- yet still very nuanced and fascinating to read -- overview of the first cities and cultures that sprang up in that region, from the cities of Sumer and Uruk, to the Akkadians (and Sargon the Great, generally accepted as history's first emperor), the early Israelites, the Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, and all the way to the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

Conservative/orthodox views are presented alongside liberal views, and "revisionist" theories are -- refreshingly -- given equal credence as well. Many currently accepted consensuses about the Ancient World held by Classicists, Anthropologists, and Historians have traveled from (often laughable...) beginnings, and many of those evolutions are presented here in a way almost as interesting as the way in which the Roman Civil Wars are portrayed. If intrigued by a certain topic or period, the reader is constantly referred to the names of scholars and authors, both well-known and obscure, whose works they may also find interesting. While this is hardly revolutionary, it is VERY prevalent throughout this work. Hardly any alternative argument or contrary opinion pertaining to events is included without the person from which it originated.

If there is one strong point of this book that stands above the others, it is how accessible it is, while also being such a treasure of information. The sheer volume each chapter manages to say about its subject(s) without becoming a bland and simple chronology is simply amazing. One striking example of this accessibility is the treatment of the period that begins with the rise of Macedonia under Philip II, and ends after the conquests and death of Alexander. Despite the fact that this crucial topic in ancient history (which many have easily stretched out into often redundant works of several hundred pages) is mainly covered inside of 33 pages, it is one of the most informative and most evocatively written studies of the subject I have ever come across, and gives one plenty of insight into this moment in history. After reading it (and I had very little knowledge about Alexander's life at the time I bought this book, I'm ashamed to say), I felt as though I read a 300+ page piece: it is that concise and well written.

Do not be misled by the title and expect a strict format that dedicates one section to Egypt, one to Greece, and to for Rome. Though there are such sections, they are merely guidelines, and bits and pieces of each consistently creep into the others. The histories of all three (plus that of the Ancient Near East) are not presented as having occurred inside of a vacuum (as they too often are), but instead, as having developed alongside and with each other and other neighboring civilizations of the profoundly fluid Ancient Mediterranean World (perhaps the most concise chapter on anything that I have ever read is this book's short chapter on two of those lesser known, lesser appreciated cultures of the period, the Celts and Parthians, and what they contributed and took from surrounding cultures). There are wonderful profiles of the iconic figures from every conceivable aspect of the Ancient World: from the various schools of philosophy in Greece, the greatest minds of each, and their notable ideas; the great military leaders like Ramses II, Caesar, Pompey, Hannibal, Epaminondas, Pyrrhus, Philip, and Alexander; the most influential poets and playwrights, from Homer and Hesiod, Aeschylus and Aristophanes, to Catullus, Horace, and Virgil; the first men who seemed to have viewed history as a science, Herodotus, Thucydides, and much later, Polybius, who did explicitly think of both historiography, and what we might call political science, as sciences; and the political genius behind such larger than life figures as Cyrus the Great, Pericles, Cleisthenes, Cicero, Augustus, and Vespasian.

While the book typically does not delve into great detail when discussing important battles (e.g. how many troops on which side, nature of the terrain, strategies employed by the winners and losers, etc.), it seems insignificant given the attention and analytical thought given elsewhere (besides, one can often find great descriptions of famous battles on Wikipedia, in addition to just about every other history book).

In little over 600 pages, this book illustrates both Western and Near Eastern Civilization, from about 5000 BCE, the initial evolution of the settlement to the city state, the rise and fall of great empires long thought to be invincible, the dominance and demise of the Roman Republic, the dominance and demise of the Western Roman Empire, and the rise of Christianity and monotheism. This nearly perfect history begins its end with one of history's great turning points: the seventh-century war between the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius and the Sassanid Persian Shah Khusro II (and by proxy, the dominant monotheistic religions: the Orthodox Christianity of Constantinople and Zoroastrianism of Ctesiphon), in which Heraclius, against all odds, managed to save the Byzantine Empire, defeat the Sassanids, and retake critical territory in the Near East (most importantly Jerusalem, along with Christendom's most venerated relic, the True Cross, which he brought back to Constantinople after a triumph through the Holy City's streets).

As centuries of war between the Mediterranean's two superpowers finally seemed to be over, the Muslim armies of Arabia came, driven by their own monotheistic faith, and united by intense religious fervor. Soon Palestine and Syria were lost (this time, forever), and the Sassanid Empire fell after being soundly defeated by the Muslim forces; soon Alexandria too fell, followed by all other Roman/Byzantine lands in North Africa.

However, the book does not end on this note in order to provide a catastrophic ending to what we consider the picturesque, classic, ancient world. Instead, these events and their aftermath are used to reinforce and continue its main theme: the ever-fluid nature of the Ancient Mediterranean World. Greek culture proved to be profoundly important to the early Muslim armies and empires, the leaders of which -- especially early on -- depended on their new Greek neighbors to aid them in administering their new cities. Likewise, because non-Orthodox Christians in these cities faced persecution under Byzantine rule, in many cases they and the Jewish populations (who, obviously, also faced persecution) welcomed their new rulers; many cities, including Jerusalem, had willfully, even gladly, accepted Muslim rule without resistance (many Christians are said to have actually fought with the Muslim armies against the Byzantines). The Arab rulers, whose people had always been on the outskirts of the Ancient Mediterranean World, were now fully engaged, and -- like so many other empires and civilizations who took from and contributed to that very world -- within a century had done away with much of their old ways, particularly the Bedouin tradition of oral transmission and memorization, which grew from the necessities and limitations of desert life, and embraced the options and ideas which other cultures presented to them. There was an explosion of literacy among the previously-illiterate Arabs, and by the ninth-century, many sophisticated Greek works of medicine, philosophy, and mathematics, which had long been neglected by an increasingly scripture-centric Byzantine culture, were translated into Arabic, and thus spurred a renaissance among Muslim scholars. Soon, the Muslim world was the center of the sciences, where the ideas of Classical Greece thrived, and where the ideas of the great minds of antiquity were debated, built upon, and above all, revived in a manner "that was not possible in the Christian world." (p.648) Indeed, it is commonly accepted among historians that had the Muslim armies never conquered those Byzantine lands, many works of the ancient Greek philosophers and scientists, of which we are today so familiar, would likely not have survived.

This book gets my highest possible recommendation, simply for being a work of comparative history at its finest. Throw in the fantastic and informative maps (32 in all), beautiful plates (80 in all), its consistently nuanced tone, and a study of power politics in the ancient world that would make Polybius proud, and it becomes a must buy for anyone merely slightly interested in history. And again, this is a book which just about anybody can pick up and enjoy. The casual reader will take away from it not only a great amount of knowledge regarding the beginnings of each "civilization" of the ancient Mediterranean, but also new perspective into how much each owes -- to this day -- to each other.

This is a great intro book on ancient civilizations around the mediterranean. While the subtitle is Egypt, Greece & Rome, the author goes into other, older and more distant cultures as well. The chapters are short and leisurely - you get a good feel for each section without being buried in details.

This book was one of the required texts for a course I took on ancient history. Egypt, Greece and Rome was the perfect text, because the book reads as a narrative; nothing in Charles Freeman's book is boring or dry. It covers Mesopotamia from 5000 BC up through the emergence of the Byzantine Empire in the fifth century AD. This book is the key to understanding ancient history, and I highly reccomend it.

Plus, there are a number of black and white and full-color plates, plus some in-text drawings and maps.

This book was one of the required texts for a course I took on ancient history. Egypt, Greece and Rome was the perfect text, because the book reads as a narrative; nothing in Charles Freeman's book is boring or dry. It covers Mesopotamia from 5000 BC up through the emergence of the Byzantine Empire in the fifth century AD. This book is the key to understanding ancient history, and I highly reccomend it.

Plus, there are a number of black and white and full-color plates, plus some in-text drawings and maps.

Charles Freeman's work, Egypt, Greece and Rome, is a long and ambitious work, intended as an undergraduate introductory text as well as a text for the layman. Works of this size and scope (over 600 pages of text and illustrations covering the Egyptian, Sumerian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman civilizations as well as some others) tend to leave the reader breathless as they jump from one important topic and time period to another. This is not the case with Freeman's work. He wisely juxtaposes the overviews of civilizations with interludes that highlight a small part of the civilization in greater detail.

For example, between Chapter 14 ("Religion in the Greek World") and Chapter 15 ("Athens: Democracy and Empire") is an interlude titled "The Classical Age in Art." This short section discusses the golden age of art in ancient Greece, and brings us to the modern age briefly as the art historian Johann Winckelmann is discussed in relation to his views on the age. ("Winckelmann claimed that the `sublimity' of Classical art was the result of the atmosphere of liberty and exuberance which followed the Persian Wars" 244.)

The text is very accessible, and has a generous bibliography at the end of each chapter in case one wants more. Recommended highly as an introduction to the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean.

I liked the idea of a book that includes the three great Mediterranean civilizations. The book is not too detailed and serves well as a survey, especially for novices to the subject. The book could have had a little better editing for things such as punctuation (many commas were missing where they could have made reading more easier) and better use of the words "which" and "that."

This book covers Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome in three multi-chapter sections and covers the Ancient Near East, the Hellenistic world after Alexander, and Europian "barbarians" in single chapters. The main topics--Egypt, Greece, and Rome--are, I think, treated quite separately, so there is no great advantage besides convenience to grouping them in one book.

I believe that the Ancient Near East--particularly the Persians and Jews--should have been a primary focus, and probably Egypt should not have. The Persian Wars and the rise of Christianity had huge impacts on Rome and Greece, and much of Greek culture was derived from Eastern culture. Ancient Eqypt was a unique and remarkable civilization but it was relatively isolated, and certainly it is possible to understand Greece and Rome without understanding Egypt.

The basic flaw of this book is that the chapters aren't tied together and that it has no overarching vision. For example, a theme like the similarities between the Eastern, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman religions because of assimilation would have been very interesting and enlightening I think, but there is little of it.

The writing is a bit prosaic, though in general this book is written well. You can learn a lot from this book, but it is difficult to remember it all since it is too much a compendium of facts and too little a coherent story.

This is a great book to get an integrated view of the ancient world. I looked at many different books before reading this one, having previously devoured a number of more specialized books about the ancient world over the years, but wanting something more in the way of an overall perspective and context. This book is great for that.

I was mainly interested in the sections covering pre-Classical Period Greece, from 1500 down to the Golden Age (about 500 BC), but the other areas of coverage are superb also. Freeman also has an especially nice touch and fluency with the Greek history, and I wasn't surprised to find a separate book on Greek history by him next to this one on the bookshelf. There were also several gaps in my historical knowledge that this book plugged. For example, his section on the Etruscans, which I only had very fragmentary and superficial knowledge of, was also excellent.

The book benefits from much recent scholarship, and the author points out in the introduction that one of the main differences between a modern book on ancient history and older ones is the degree to which ancient civilizations like Greece can be placed much more securely in the context of their times, showing them not as isolated cultural entities, but as arising from the interplay of much more cosmopolitan influences as they interacted with, and were influenced by, their contacts, peaceable or otherwise, with neighboring or competing cultures. This is another one of the great scholarly strengths of the book.

I also found the author's deft touch and writing style a big plus, and although by necessity this is not a short book, it rarely got tedious or boring. That is notable by itself in a work of this size and nature. Overall, it counts as the best overall book on the history of the ancient world, and one of the most consistently interesting history books, I've ever read.

If you are constantly confused by this period of history, this is the book for you. It puts into context, the whole shape of the era. It makes you realise that someone like Cleopatra is closer to our time than the beginnings of Egyptian history. I have read the whole book through and it is a superb narrative. This is no mean feat, for if you where to write a history of the United States from Columbus to the present, it would be close to a third of the time that he covers. You can start to see the relationship between the writers of the period and the politicians. You can begin to way each period is interlocked with the next. But more than that, you can look up any period and be given a succint description to help you through.

My only regret was that this book was not published years earlier. I cannot recommend a book more highly.