Here you will find suggested reading that covers the broad scope of Ancient history. This will be continued to be updated but please do not hesitate to ask for guidance or particular areas that interest you that you cannot find here. Any book marked with an * means we have a copy available to loan.
Ancient history is vast and it would difficult to incorporate every single area within this list. Here are a few areas that have not been included that we can provide recommendations for:
Ancient Mesopotamia: Sumerians, Assyrians, Hittites, Ancient Persia, Parthians, Sassanian Persia.
Ancient Greece: Bronze Age Greece, Classical Athens, Sparta, Alexander the Great
Mediterranean peoples: Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Celts, further Roman history
*Beard, Mary (2016). SPQR. Croydon: CPI Group. - Beard's huge overview of all of Roman history is a great starting point for anyone interested in Roman history
Beaulieu, Paul-Alain (2018). A History of Babylon 2200 BC- 75 AD. London: Wiley-Blackwell. - This is the best and most recent history of Babylonia. Beaulieu effortlessly brings together a wide variety of textual sources to reconstruct the history of Babylon, and the text is enriched with maps, illustrations, and king lists.
Cartledge, Paul. (2009). Ancient Greece: A History in Eleven Cities. - Designed for a non-expert audience, but again by a top expert, this book uses a series of microhistories to tell a story of Greece's history from the Dark Age to the Byzantine Empire.
*Holland, Tom (2013). Rubicon The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic. St Ives: Abacus - Holland focuses on the last few decades of the Roman Republic and how it transformed into a empire ruled by one emperor. Here you will read the real stories of many famous Romans you would have heard of from Julius Caesar to Cicero.
Lewis, Bernard (2011). The Middle East: 2000 years of History from Rise of Christianity to the present. London: Phoenix - In this immensely readable and wide-ranging book, Bernard Lewis charts the successive transformations of the Middle East.
*Loverance, Rowena (2004). Byzantium. London: British Museum Press. - Byzantium, the Roman empire in the eastern Mediterranean, dominated the political and religious face of Europe for over a thousand years. In this introduction, Rowena Loverance traces the history of the empire from the founding of its capital Constantinople in A.D. 330, to its capture by the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
Osborne, Robin. (2014). Greek History: The Basics. Abingdon on Thames: Routledge. - A very short, compressed primer on Greek history from the Dark Age up to the Roman conquest, written by one of the top experts.
*Wilkinson, Toby (2013) The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt. London: Bloomsbury - This is a story studded with extraordinary achievements and historic moments, from the building of the pyramids, the glory of Tutankhamun's burial chamber to Cleopatra's fatal entanglement with Rome.