100 books like Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings

I appreciate that this may be quite random but I had to read it to obtain multiple references as the wider plot grew into that of the Gabriel Sect – when the original killer develops a ‘fan club’.

I am now an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church – but I am not Christian. I believe in both freedom of and freedom from religion.

I certainly do not set out to offend anyone and welcome all faiths and alternate beliefs, but this I would say. If the Holy Bible were to be published today, given the huge doses of incest, sodomy, and extreme violence it contains, it would be considered - unsuitable for children.

I wanted to understand how specific biblical and ancient texts could be exploited by cults, I naturally chose the worst. I appreciate that this is counteracted by equal doses of kindness and goodness within the… show more.

Christopher Dunn's research is impressive, as he shares over 30 years of study and nine trips to Egypt in Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt.

He explains the unique marks left by skilled craftsmen that today, with modern technology, we would have great difficulty reproducing. Dunn writes about the precision found in the monuments of Egypt. He uses digital photography and computer-aided design software to give the reader an appreciation for the ancient Egyptians' remarkable achievements.

He includes over 280 photographs of Egyptian monuments to support his theories, and his examination of the underground tunnels of the Serapeum is worth the price of the book alone. His explanation of the precision engineering achieved by our ancient ancestors leads the reader to question long-held beliefs about ancient people. 

Flinders Petrie was the first, and remains, the greatest of all those who have studied Giza. Over many years he physically measured and surveyed the entire Giza site. It is those mathematical results that prove the complex was put there as a message for generations to come, rather than the more favoured ideas of burial complexes for obscure kings. He identifies tiny details, that I too identified on a visit to the Cairo museum, that just could not be done. The necessary lasers suitable are only just being developed over 100 years later.

Corless spent his life trawling through old magazines and scientific journals and recording articles about ancient artefacts that baffled the author at the time. He makes no comment on the articles, some of which reveal amazing discoveries. For example, the one about an iron cup that was found in a coal mine in Oklahoma. The coal had formed around it some 300m years ago and yet there it was—man-made but by whom. He outlines many other baffling discoveries as described in articles going back to the 19th century.

I love the main character, the strongest woman in literature, who, in late Paleolithic times, literally invents the modern world. She is strong but thinks herself weak. She is beautiful but thinks herself ugly. She circumvents and overcomes every instance of adversity thrown her way. I want to be her, and the book permits me to wear her shoes.

I have been highly influenced by Jean Auel’s storytelling, especially the graphic scenes of Ayla’s loss of innocence, growth into sexuality, and descriptions of lust, love, and completion.

This book is not erotica, yet the love scenes are the best I’ve ever read and are a roadmap to create tension and heat in my writing. With her influence, my audience laughs, cries, and cheers their way through my books.

This was one of those books that as I got past the halfway point I became sad as I realised I was heading towards the ending.

Set in prehistory, this book follows a young apprentice shaman making his way in a small hunter-gatherer band. I've never read a book that does such a good job of helping me live in my mind outside of our modern civilsation and with something approaching the view of the rest of the living world that our ancestors may have had.

The new science of DNA reveals a lot about how we think about identity.

Humans are a migratory species and our stories are complicated. Ancient DNA don't always match people's stories about their ancestors. Rather than being in a place for thousands of years, sometimes we replaced those who were there before or only the males of the group.

Sometimes we completely replaced the group that was there before but the original group's culture persisted or even replaced the invading culture. The book complicates our understanding of indigeneity and belonging.

In The Inheritors, William Golding brings to life a creature from the distant past: Lok, a hairy, barely verbal hominid whose small band is the last of their kind. New words and thoughts confuse him, flashes of logic slip out of his grasp, and he discovers the existence of mysterious Others; invaders with the formidable technology of bow and arrow. But The Inheritors is much more than an exciting adventure. The story stays with me because Lok is a mirror of us—of the human urge to try, to fail, to push on despite the odds. We have no idea what the next thousand years will hold. Neither did Lok. But just like him, we can’t help moving forward.

I like to think of Patrick Kirch as “Mr. Pacific Archaeology”—no one has written more, or more winningly, about Polynesian prehistory—and On the Road of the Winds is his introduction to the field. First published in 2002 and reissued in an updated edition in 2017, this elegant, eminently readable survey not only covers the history of archaeology in Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia but explains how the archaeological findings of the past half-century relate to discoveries in biology, linguistics, cultural anthropology, botany, and countless other fields.

I was trained in literary criticism and spent years reading the “Classics,” considered the greatest books of all time, so the fact that Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear, first published in 1980, to derisive and condescending reception is my absolute favorite read comes as a surprise, even to myself.

I’ve been so enthralled with this story of a little girl named Ayla who’s found and raised by Neanderthals following the massive earthquake that destroys the Cro-Magnon tribe into which she was born—that I’ve read Clan, along with its five sequels three times, all the way through. It’s probably not a coincidence that Ayla, who’s exiled from her adoptive tribe and finds ingenious ways to survive on her own—reminds me of Karana from Island of the Blue Dolphins.

I love the way Auel’s saga imagines our anthropological origins in scrupulously researched detail and dramatically displays the… show more.