#000469
Wonders of the Past, vol. 1 (2-volume set)
J. A. Hammerton
The first of two hefty volumes in one of the great interwar picture-encyclopedias of antiquity, subtitled "a world-wide survey of the marvellous works of man in ancient times." Edited by the Scottish journalist Sir John Alexander Hammerton, it gathers essays by leading archaeologists and Egyptologists and pairs them with more than a thousand photographs, maps, and color plates. Volume one sweeps from Egypt and Mesopotamia through the classical Mediterranean, treating pyramids, temples, and buried cities as marvels to be admired as much as studied. Issued in Britain by The Amalgamated Press in the 1920s and reprinted for years afterward, it belongs to a moment when photogravure could finally put the ruins of Karnak or Pompeii on a middle-class parlor table. It reads today as both reference and period artifact.
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The editor
Sir John Alexander Hammerton (1871–1949) was among the most industrious editors Britain ever produced—Arnold Bennett reportedly called him the most successful creator of continuously published works of his day. From the offices of Amalgamated Press he masterminded a shelf of part-issued illustrated encyclopedias (Wonders of the Past, Countries of the World, Peoples of All Nations) and the multi-volume histories of both world wars, selling to a mass readership hungry for authoritative, richly pictured knowledge.
The book
First appearing as a fortnightly part-work in the early 1920s and then bound into two volumes, Wonders of the Past enlists genuine specialists to narrate the ancient world monument by monument. Its real engine, though, is the photography: full-page plates and photogravures that made distant ruins vivid at a time when few readers would ever travel to see them.
How it has aged
The scholarship is a century old and shows it—some datings and attributions have since been revised, and the framing carries the confident imperial tone of 1920s Britain. But as a survey of what educated readers then knew and admired, and as a still-handsome object, it holds up remarkably well.
For more context
Pair it with a modern single-volume archaeology reference to see how interpretations have shifted, and note that later American reprints circulated under the same title.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- J. A. Hammerton
- Publisher
- The Amalgamated Press
- Place of publication
- London
- Year
- 1923
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Colorado