"In this introduction to the ancient world, three leading French historians explore the emergence of rationality and writing: how it developed and how it is remarkably similar to our own tradition. We learn that the supposed twin pillars of Western civilization, Greece and the Bible, were hardly freestanding: they elaborated logical and religious structures that had developed much earlier in Mesopotamia. At the same time Ancestor of the West reminds us that these cultures were precursors of our own precisely because they possessed an intelligence that we still recognize. The ancients, even in their earliest writings, thought like us."--BOOK JACKET.