Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #205469 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-21
• Binding: Hardcover
• 624 pages

Sunday Telegraph
'Ostler is particularly good...this richly various book offers new insights and information for almost everyone interested in the past'

New Statesman
'ambitious and well-researched'

The Observer
'learned and entertaining...remarkably comprehensive as well as thought-provoking'

Customer Reviews

dreadful paper
I don't want to comment on the books contents, mereley the paper it is printed on. My copy, Harper Collins hard back 2005 edition published at £30. Printed on the cheapest paper they could find, after a couple of years looks like it has been dipped in tea. I have 60 year old books which look newer. Shame one them, they have no pride in what they produce.

Wonderful Book
Ok, i bought this at the British Museum so i was expecting heavyweight but its actually REALLY readable- TIP if you get to a paragraph with letters with funny squiggles or lines (apparently its how youre supposed to pronounce it a different way but theres little in the way of glossary to help) just ignore it and skip to the next paragraph- YOU DONT MISS ANYTHING!
Otherwise a REALLY good read, Ive been so caught up in Archaeology/Genetics ive never considered looking at history from a linguistic point of view - Its fascinating, and this is detailed without being too wordy ..Best read ive had in months

A fascinating study
This book seeks to examine the history of the world through the spread of languages and the empires that built those languages. Usually these subjects have been completely seperate. There has always been the history of empires such as Rome or the early Arabian empire of Islam. There has also been linguistical studies of language, such as Languadoc or Mandarin Chinese. Obviously the two are intertwined but no one has ever attempted a complete synthesis of the two.

This book fills this void and in doing so sheds light on why some languages suceed and other fail, why some die out(Coptic, Aramaic and Greek in the East) and others are brilliantly successful and rarely pushed back(Arabic and English). It also does a great deal of comparison, examining Coptic/Egyptian and Chinese as 'triumphs of fertility' and how each coped with foreign invasions differently.

The maps are brilliant and shed light on long forgotten histories such as Christianity in Iraq and Iran.

There is a wonderful chapter on Sanskrit and its development in India and its spread and subsequent decline in South and Southeast Asia. There are chapters on the well known histories of Greek and Latin and lesser known examinations of the role of Greek in Asia. The chapter on Celtic(Run) is fascinating.

The last third of the book examines languages borne by the sea, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and English.

One of the most readable and original books of the year.

Seth J. Frantzman