It's easy (for me, at least) to forget that Ancient Egypt was not the only powerhouse in the mideast, and of the rich and busy trade between nations in the region (and beyond). Not to mention the rise and fall of nations, including the Minoans, Chaldeans and Persians, and the endless wars.
This comprehensive overview is eminently readable, with illuminating photographic examplars of the cultures discussed. This has gone onto my "need to own" list. ( )

Just finished reading [From Egypt to Babylon: The International Age 1550-500BC] by Paul Collins.

This is a gorgeous book with beautiful color plates and wonderful maps that actually refer to the place names discussed in the narrative! (You wouldn’t think you would need to celebrate this, but I have read so many books recently where it appeared the map was inserted by someone who had never read the book, that I have come to be grateful for a real map.)

This book is a survey of war and trade relationships between the major and minor powers of the Near East for a millennium and underscores the “web of interconnectedness” (to borrow a favorite phrase of Brian Fagan) that governed the world these nations inhabited through several significant eras. The author wants to point the modern reader who lives in an age of globalization to another time long, long ago where nations interacted similarly, and he succeeds quite well. For the players in this narrative, the ancient Near East (with the adjacent Mediterranean as a whole gradually growing in importance) was their “globe.”

Because it is a survey, many points are touched upon referencing various leaders, cultures and nations that beg for greater elucidation, so if you are completely unfamiliar with these countries and this period this will be a challenging book to work through. But if you know something about Egypt, Assyria, the Hittite Empire, the Babylonians, etc. you can gain a great deal from the narrative even if you find yourself making notes to get further information from other sources. I knew very little about the Hurrian, Syrian-based Mittani, for example -- the fourth greatest power in the region as the book opens -- but I did not find myself too handicapped because of my familiarity with the other powers and the context of war and trade in the period.

What I especially like about Collins is the way he takes us through the devastating collapse (Hittites, Mycenaean’s) or concomitant decline (Egypt) of many nations with the end of the Bronze Age, without losing sight of the continuation of civilization elsewhere in the region as new forces combine to fill power vacuums left by those who fell. Trade – and naturally war – continues.

It is the brutal unending wars that I found most depressing, both because the unremitting conflicts took such a human toll and because we can’t help but be reminded that the often pointless and immature waves of slaughter that dominated the more than a thousand years of human history in this survey are little different from the often pointless and immature waves of slaughter that have characterized the last one hundred years (or one thousand years) of our own times. ( )