This was originally written in 1962, and is therefore is a little dated. Sprague de Camp has written a book all about the different civilisations and the technologies that that invented or acquired from other neighbouring civilisations.

The book is split into sections on each of the civilisations, so from Egypt to middle ages Europe. The technologies covered are boat building, wind and water power, construction, printing and warfare. Some of it is fascinating, but other parts of it are the authors opinion. He spent far too long on the historical context, necessary to a certain extent, but more could have been written on the innovations. ( )

I've always been curious about engineers of the ancient world. Being familiar with Roman numerals at the basic level -- I can read them a bit -- I've always wondered what Roman arithmetic actually looked like when it was put to work to construct a building or a bridge or something substantial. They had no algebra, for example, because they had no Arabic numerals, So what did some poor slob do when he was ordered to design and construct a project such as the coliseum? How many tons of parchment did his calculations require? How many gallons of ink? How many writing instruments did he have to buy?

Nobody ever told me any of those things. I'm not sure that anyone alive today has any knowledge of such details. Great authors such as L. Sprague de Camp seem careful never to mention the subject and neither (to my knowledge) do any other writers who get their bread writing books about the ancient world.

Mr. de Camp was a wonderful writer. I first read him as a child of 8, when my mother handed me her paperback edition of "The Bronze God of Rhodes". That book remains one of the two or three very best novels I've ever read. It is fiction, I know, but anybody who wants to know a bit of what happened in the Mediterranean world a year or two or three after the death of Alexander the Great should read Mr. de Camp's "Bronze God of Rhodes".

About Alexander himself, I recommend Mary Renault's treatment of Alexander and his empire. "Funeral Games," the last novel in Renault's "Alexander" cycle, left this little boy sitting on the sofa in Ma's living room crying tears as big as horse turds and unable to stand. NO OTHER AUTHOR has ever done anything remotely like that to me. Renault's "Alexander" cycle is three medium sized novels. When you've got hold of those three books, you should read "Funeral Games" last -- and make sure you're sitting on a nice, comfortable sofa with a large box of facial tissue ready to hand.

What I remain sorry about is that no author has yet explained for me how to build palaces and aqueducts and dams and bridges and colossal statues and such using Roman numerals. So my verdict on "The Ancient Engineers" is that it's a wonderful history that I enjoyed immensely, but it is sadly incomplete.

Solomon Sed ( )

5609. The Ancient Engineers, by L. Sprague De Camp (read 21 Jan 2019) This book was first published in 1963 and hence its bibliography includes nothing after that date. It undertakes to tell of the work of engineers and like-minded folk from the earliest times up to the time of Leonardo da Vinci, whom the author calls not the first of modern engineers but the last of ancient engineers. The book covers a lot of territory and in the early part I found it very dull and uninteresting, but as his account delved into more recent times it better held my interest. The author is an agnostic and loses no chance to snipe at the Catholic Church, which, admittedly at times did not show itself a friend of new things, as Pope St. John Paul II illustrated in his saying the Church was wrong to dis Galileo. The book, being a 1963 book, does not get into the amazing things which have happened in technology since then, the most amazing to me being the computer and how it has revolutionized transmittal of information and brought such great things as LibraryThing to us. Some one more technologically aware than am I would no doubt appreciate this book more than I did. ( )

Stylistically rather dated, and no doubt some of the content is now superceded by more recent discoveries (originally written in 1960), but still an entertaining and informative read. Basically, the book is history in terms of technological discovery; and suggests reasons why some civilisations/cultures do not seem to progress. It covers various Old World civilisations - Egypt, Mesopotamia, Classical Greece, Hellenistic Greece, Early Rome, Imperial Rome, The Orient and finally Europe. The Americas are only mentioned in passing; this may be to do with the original publication date.

There were things mentioned I didn't know, and others mentioned that surprised me given the date and the fact that de Camp was not an archaeologist (the evolution of stirrups in relation to steppes nomads, specifically the Sarmatians - at the time the book was written, I was under the impression that the archaeology was Russian and largely inaccessible to the West). It does provide background to his historical novels.

If you're looking for in-depth coverage of ancient and medieval civilisations and their technological development, this is not that. On the other hand, if you're looking for something which can expand on GURPs Low Tech, and is a readable one-volume discussion on various technological developments and can serve as a stepping-stone for more in-depth reading, then despite the datedness of the coverage it's a worthy addition to the gamers' reference shelf. It's a pity de Camp never wrote an updated version prior to his death, and perhaps added in The Americas and Polynesia (the latter would have been interesting in the case of shipbuilding and navigation).

A necessary Corrective for those who think that our ancestors were not very bright. This is the first book that reset my mind to truly understand that technology has been accumulating for the last 5000 years, and we are the beneficiaries. The prose is clear and very accessible for those of us not engineering-minded. ( )