In this book a time machine transports young readers back more than 5000 years using pictorial maps and lifelike reconstructions to show what life was actually like in ancient times and to highlight the achievements of the great civilizations that have influenced and shaped our modern world.

On museum visits, we pass by beautiful, well-preserved vases from ancient Greece—but how often do we understand what the images on them depict? In Image and Myth, Luca Giuliani tells the stories behind the pictures, exploring how artists of antiquity had to determine which motifs or historical and mythic events to use to tell an underlying story while also keeping in mind the tastes and expectations of paying clients. Covering the range of Greek style and its growth between the early Archaic and Hellenistic periods, Giuliani describes the intellectual, social, and artistic contexts in which the images were created. He reveals that developments in Greek vase painting were driven as much by the times as they were by tradition—the better-known the story, the less leeway the artists had in interpreting it. As literary culture transformed from an oral tradition, in which stories were always in flux, to the stability of written texts, the images produced by artists eventually became nothing more than illustrations of canonical works. At once a work of cultural and art history, Image and Myth builds a new way of understanding the visual culture of ancient Greece.

THE KINGFISHER ATLAS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD features 17 beautiful, hand-illustrated maps and packed with fascinating information to feed children's interest in the ancient world. Clear, accessible text introduces the civilisation and its history before going on to describe interesting details about that culture's people and the objects and buildings they have left behind. Full-colour photographs add to each spread's appeal. In addition to the main spreads, a small number of feature spreads throughout the book focus more closely on a well-known civilisation, allowing readers to build on their interest and find out more about ever-popular topics such as the ancient Egyptians and imperial Rome.

How did the earth look in prehistoric times? Scientists and artists collaborated during the half-century prior to the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species to produce the first images of dinosaurs and the world they inhabited. Their interpretations, informed by recent fossil discoveries, were the first efforts to represent the prehistoric world based on sources other than the Bible. Martin J. S. Rudwick presents more than a hundred rare illustrations from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to explore the implications of reconstructing a past no one has ever seen.