BOOKISHGAL

Another Book Without ISBN. And this, along with many of Leonard Cottrell’s similar books, is at the core of my non-ISBN treasure chest.

My aunt gave me Wonders of Antiquity many years ago, since she knew I had a love of ancient history, similar to hers. A former correspondent for the BBC, Cottrell was a great popularizer of history and archaeology, publishing myriad books on those subjects. (Just check out the list at his Wikipedia entry!)

This particular volume was originally published in 1959, and my edition is from 1964. The “Wonders” of the title refer first of all to the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, but as well as devoting a chapter to each of those, Cottrell expands the list to include places like the Dome of the Rock, the Valley of the Kings, and the Oracle at Delphi.

All of which, of course, are heavenly ambrosia to me.

Still, I’d had these books from my aunt for several years before I finally got down to reading them. But through the 1990s, I had a cat who needed walking on a leash (and frequently off; she never ran away), sometimes for a couple of hours a day, almost every day for nine years. And while she pursued her leisurely explorations of our neighbourhood or, on hot days, sat under a bush for two hours, I needed something to occupy me as I strolled or sat nearby.

So I got a lot of reading done in the 1990s, thanks to my cat. And I absolutely devoured books like Wonders of Antiquity. I learned so much about the ancient sites and archaeology in general! It was all for the lay-person, of course, since I wasn’t a professional, but that’s who these books were written for. I learned names like Flinders Petrie, Austin Henry Layard, Henry Rawlinson, and Arthur Evans. I read about how the ancient city of Nineveh was rediscovered, how the Rosetta Stone was translated, how the ruins at Knossos were excavated, what the hieroglyphs said on the walls of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings.

Even though those walks with my cat took up a lot of my time, whenever I was in the midst of one of these popular archaeology books, I almost regretted it when she decided she was done and it was time to go inside. And even today, almost a decade since our last walks together, I can still watch a historical documentary and find myself thinking things like, “Oh, there’s the Behistun Monument. That’s where Rawlinson had to get up that huge cliff to copy it.”

I guess you could say that I owe much of my current archaeological knowledge and interest to both my aunt and my cat. And to books like Leonard Cottrell’s Wonders of Antiquity, another of my treasures without an ISBN.

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