Will Durant (1885-1981) was one of the most prolific writers after the death of Edward Gibbon. He and his wife wrote the magnum opus "The Story of Civilization" in 11 volumes, published from 1935 to 1975. Its a mammoth work and requires a lot of time and patience to read it. 11 volumes have more than 7000 pages in total and every page is worth at least couple of minutes.
Volume 1 (Our Oriental Heritage) starts with the evolution of home-sapiens, early culture, tools, customs and religions. After toiling and vegetating for thousands of years humans built their first civilizations in the fertile valleys of Euphrates-Tigris, Nile, Indus, Yangtze, Yellow river more than 5000 years ago. The Pyramids are as old as the seals of Mohenjadaro, and the epic of Gilgamesh is older than any other known epic. Ikhnaton (aka Amenhotep IV) of Egypt was the first King to start a monotheistic revolution, about 50 years before Moses and about 1800 years before Prophet. The Sumerians were perhaps the first people to invent the script (Hieroglyphs) to write or express human thoughts and sounds. Almost all other scripts had evolved from this script one way or the other. Our own Devanagari script has evolved from Cuneiform script of the Babylon via Brahmi script of Mauryan times. Undeciphered Indus script is the important link missing in the chain of the evolution of script and language. It is widely believed across the spectrum that Indus script was contemporary script of Sumerian script and both these scripts influenced each other through trade contacts.
Volume 1 talks in insignificant details about the history of Sumerians, Elamites, Assyrians, Egyptians, Hittites, Mittannis, Babylonians, Jews, Medes, Achamenids, Indians, Chinese and Japanese and ignores completely the story of Korea, south east Asia, central Asia etc. This book should be read with an open mind and patience, since this was written in 1935 so bit outdates and the chronology used in this book should not be taken as gospel (eg. according to this book Hammurabi lived in 21st century BC but widely accepted date today of his reign is 17th/18th century BC).
Highly recommended (9/10)
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