The Seventy Wonders of the Ancient World: The Great Monuments and How They Were Built Hardcover – October 17, 1999

Love it!

Wonderfull book

Interesting book with beautiful pictures of places and things we will probably never get to see.

This book is a real grabber. Hard to put down if one has any kind of interest in many of man's most noteworthy creations of the distant and relatively near past.The summaries of each "wonder" are very informative considering how concise they are. The descriptions do not delve deep enough to satisfy someone well versed in these structures or the civilizations which built them, however for the casual reader, those whose avocation is ancient history and those looking for an introduction, this book is a great way to do a little time travel in your mind. This makes a great gift for young or old alike with any kind of interest in ancient civilizations.The writing, crisp and easy to follow, is suitable for children from about the 4th grade and above. Nevertheless, adults will enjoy these clear, sometimes eye-opening accounts as well. The writing works on several levels so adults should enjoy it as much as older children.The photographs are clear and well-reproduced with easy-to- understand diagrams, drawings and reproductions clarifying points of that which no longer stands (e.g. outlines of city walls, Babylon's Ishtar Gate, Sennacharib's Palace). Top quality paper is pleasing to the touch.As for the wonders covered, they span thousands of years from the 5th millenium b.c. to 16th Century Aztecs. The bulk of the marvels detailed are from ancient times, but not all. Egyptian wonders are well-represented (e.g. Abu Simbel, pyramids at Giza, Sphinx, Ramses Colussus, Alexandria's Pharos) but the full scope is quite wide. In addition to the tradional Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, coverage includes references to Babylon, Turkey, Greece, Rome, Persia, Western Europe monoliths, Great Wall Of China, Ethiopia's Aksum, Angkor Wat and Peru's Nazca Lines.This is quite a collection which helps to bring the past alive. Terrific price, too. ...

This is such a good book to have around. A casual reader (e.g., one who enjoys lots of pictures a la the National Geographic) upon seeing this one will literally not be able to put it down, and in at most a couple of hours will have plowed through the entire book. While the author's choices were of course arbitrary, and may have been dependent on the places he was allowed to go, many of these are little known and the thumbnail histories of each are worthwhile.

This book in detail explains how ancient wonders were built. It also has educated illustrations of the monument in study. I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in ancient civilizations.

One would think it would be hard to write a boring book about the greatest examples of architecture in the ancient (actually up to about 1500 AD) world, but this book comes close. You have to be a real archi-geek to get into the construction details enough to read every page of this book, though admittedly portions are interesting. I must confess a partiality to reading about the ones I'm familiar with: the Parthenon, the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Nazca Lines, and so on. The book is successfully multicultural, providing apparently worthy examples from around the world, including American Indian burial sites, Asian Indian temples, and several examples from South America, Africa, and the Far East. Still, it seems as if it could have been done better, with more diagrams and photos (all of which are quite good) and less in the way of text. A pet peeve of mine was the "fact file" on each one, which provided capsule facts and figures on each structure but in a totally inconsistent way from each monument to the next, so that there was no way of comparing the size or magnificence of any two constructions. It would also have been nice to provide comparisons to modern monuments: how big was the Colossus of Rhodes compared with the Statue of Liberty, for example?I think this one is mostly for those who are really into the topic, though it's worth skimming for the pictures and diagrams.

Fascinating collection of historical wonders!

Just got this book because I am interested in the subject.Before I bought I compared it online with Justin Pollard's "Wonders of the Ancient World".What this book had over the Pollard book was that it contained 70 wonders instead of the 40 in Pollard.It spreads those 70 over about 280 pages and Pollard has 40 spread over 190.What Pollard had over this book by Chris Scarre is that it had many more good reviews on Goodreads, and it is much more recent.Also you could see inside the Pollard book and the pictures were very good. However it was harder to obtain secondhand.What disappointed me greatly about Seventy Wonders are the pictures. Fully half of them are in black and white!This gives the book and outdated feel as this is not a subject that does well with black and white pictures. It looks grainy and lacks vibrancy.Each wonder gets about two or 3 pages and sometimes the main photograph accompanying it is black and white.Otherwise the text is fine and I did appreciate the few artists impression for the seven wonders of the world.But there are far too many black and white pictures here for this to satisfy what I was looking for, and compared to the Pollard ( which I have just purchased) it pales in this area. I have marked it down two stars because of this. It is an expansive book, but because of the inadequate pictures I found myself looking them up online anyway. In conclusion, while it is not without value, I at least should have gone for the Pollard book instead.

Good product and happy with purchase

Excellent

thank you