Past Recaptured

By Peter Staler

THE ATLAS OF EARLY MAN

by JACQUETTA HAWK-L-S

255 pages. Illustrated. St. Martin's Press. $15.

Four thousand years ago, give or take an epoch, the Egyptians were busy constructing pyramids. What were the Chinese doing at the same time? Or the Greeks? What was transpiring in India? In the Americas?

Historians have enough trouble with these questions. Laymen are usually bewildered by synoptic accounts of dynasties and empires. For both professionals and the purely curious, Archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes (The World of the Past} now provides a brilliant series of answers-- a chart of all the ancients whose past is our prologue. Along the way, she illuminates a great many contemporary geopolitical attitudes.

Hawkes' genius lies in organization. She divides the period between 35000 B.C. and A.D. 500 into eight time steps. Each is examined on a global basis and shows in well-chosen words, maps and pictures what was going on throughout the world in such critical areas as art, architecture and technology.

The period from 3000 B.C. to 2000 B.C., for example, shows the Egyptians to be eons ahead of their contemporaries. The Chinese of the period dwelt in houses of mud and thatch, contem porary Britons and Scandinavians lived like troglodytes in barrows, inhabitants of the Americas made do with skin tents, flimsy huts and caves. Technologically, the cultures of the Mediterranean and Middle East were even more advanced. Mesopotamians and the people of the Indus Valley could cast metals to make tools and ornaments--and keep written records. Small wonder that even centuries later, the peoples of the Middle East looked askance at the West. While their culture was flowering, Europe and the Americas were still in the Stone Age.

Peter Staler

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