Two thousand years ago, artworks of astonishing variety were being created in far-flung regions of the world. This volume presents more than 150 works of art from western Europe, the Mediterranean, the Near East, India, China, Southeast Asia, and the Americas, and highlights the similarities that existed between the widely separated parts of the world in which they originated. Historical summaries accompanied by maps briefly describe the nature of each culture and the flow of power and peoples during the period centering around the Year One. An introductory essay offers both an overview and an account of the startling degree to which the ancient world was an interconnected one, crisscrossed by intrepid traders and adventurers who journeyed both east and west to bring back coveted goods and tantalizing scraps of information about exotic lands. The works of art included here are almost all in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the book's authors are members of the Museum's curatorial staff representing seven different departments. -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.