Large format book with many fascinating but sometimes oddly selected illustrations. For example, some very nice period illustrations of Brahe's and Copernicus's theories of planetary motion are adjacent to discussions of the speculations of various ancient Greeks. Presumably there are no period illustrations of the ideas of those Greeks. Many portraits are Nuremberg Chronicle woodcuts. There are also reconstructions, taken from various sources and based on ancient descriptions. Probably the most fascinating of all is the illustration of an escapement for an enormous Chinese water clock driven by human energy. That is beautiful and fascinating.

Throughout the book there are reconstructions, usually occupying a whole page, of some ancient technology that has been described but is now lost. One is a toy Greek temple, where lighting a fire on the altar causes the temple doors to swing ajar. Another is a Chinese earthquake direction detecting device (called a seismograph by the author, analogizing a bit too much there). Another is a monumental clepsydra in the Temple of the Winds in Athens. Occupying both pages is a Roman water driven mill, for grinding grain. And another is a reconstruction of the ziggurat of Ur-Nammu. These are all credited to "John Smith"; artist or publisher, I can not say.

The text is in two columns and well-written. The book was published in the 1970s and the author clearly believed that Columbus was unusual in believing the earth was round. This is now commonly understood to be false. Most navigators of Columbus's time believed that the earth was round, but there was a lot of disagreement on its size, with some adhering to an estimate around that of Eratosthenes's and others, including Columbus, giving more credence to Ptolemy's smaller and far less correct estimate. ( )