Gods, Graves & Scholars: The Story of Archaeology

Description

Since the original German edition of this book was published in 1949, it has been translated into twenty-six languages and read by millions of people, even though I have never permitted a reprint edition to be issued. While Gods, Graves, and Scholars was originally written for the widest general reading public, its strict adherence to scientific standards has led long since to its being made required reading for some college courses. University and college libraries often stock as many as ten copies or more in order to be able to satisfy the demand for the book, which my publisher and a number of critics have called a classic. In the meantime, archæology has marched on. New discoveries have been made, new interpretations advanced, and above all, remarkable new techniques for archæological researches developed. To cover these new developments, I have revised the original edition and concluded the book with a summary of the important new findings and methods. The extensive additions to the original American text have been translated from the German by Sophie Wilkins, to whom I particularly wish to express my appreciation also for her painstaking work in comparing texts and making necessary rearrangements in the revised edition. Gods, Graves and Scholars was followed by The Secret of the Hittites: The Discovery of an Ancient Empire (1956), The March of Archæology (1958), a pictorial history of archæology, and Hands on the Past (1966), a documentation. Together these four volumes, with their combined total of nearly a thousand bibliographical items and picture sources, constitute the most comprehensive history of archæology ever published for the general reader, containing numerous facts and stories long forgotten even by the specialists, as well as the latest developments and scientific thought in the field. C.W.C. July 1967