The great panorama of this first volume of A History of the World reaches from the Old Stone Age to Late Antiquity—a grandiose representation of 2.7 million years of humanity’s cultural history and it’s major historical events stretching from the beginnings of human existence and the world of the hunter-gatherers through the arrival of agriculture, the flourishing of early advanced civilizations to the epoch of the Greco-Roman world and the end of the Gupta Period in India as well as to the fall of the Sui Dynasty in China and the advent of Islam. This volume about distant times and the ancient civilizations of humankind provides the key to understanding even younger epochs that were sustained by cultures that had already perished long before writing was invented. The masterful description of these early civilizations illuminates the darkness of early history before the written word just as much as it sheds light to the cultural richness of the ancient Orient, Egypt, and Classical antiquity, revealing also the wealth of the Indian and East Asian world. All the contributions have been generously enhanced with maps, plans, illustrations, and time lines.