The World's Great Civilisations: Life Books

The Rise and Fall of Nations, from the Ancients to Today. This is the pictorial history of the rise (and fall) of great nations, from the ancients to today. But this is not just Rome and the Incas and British imperialism - though it certainly includes them - but lesser known civilizations that are often relegated to a footnote, or forgotten altogether. The ancient Anasazi Indians of the American Southwest apparently enjoyed an agrarian lifestyle that, after they mysteriously disappeared, would not be realized again on the American continent for many generations. The natives of Easter Island sealed their own doom with a kind of communal hysteria that remains unclear. Several cultures put their mark on England's Stonehenge, and peeling the layers of that story is like parsing the experience of a very old tree, ring by ring. The ages of empire are recounted: Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, Russia, Great Britain. Take a journey, photographically and archeologically, through Troy and the Mediterranean islands of Gnossos and Santorini (possible site of Atlantis); climb to Machu Piccu, and trek to Australia to revisit the island continent when it belonged to its Aborigines. Obviously, many of the great civilizations belong to history,  and there are no pictures of Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan or Napoleon beyond the painted ones. But there are many photographs of the civilizations they built and ruled, many of which were made for LIFE magazine. Illustrated.