That made me think of the first book I came across on history, and it was H.G.Wells - Outline of History, the linear walking through history laid out chapter by chapter. How much of that book could be discredited today? But all knowledge is built upon previous writing and thought, so we are always in some way fumbling towards a truth....
"Wells was uncertain whether to place "the beginnings of settled communities living in towns" in Mesopotamia or Egypt. He was equally unsure whether to consider the development of civilisation something that arose from "the widely diffused Heliolithic Neolithic culture" or something that arose separately. But between the nomadic cultures that originated in the Neolithic Age and the settled civilisations to the south, he discerned that "for many thousands of years there has been an almost rhythmic recurrence of conquest of the civilizations by the nomads."
According to Wells, this dialectical antagonism reflected not only a struggle for power and resources, but a conflict of values. "Civilization, as this outline has shown, arose as a community of obedience, and was essentially a community of obedience. But . . . [t]here was a continual influx of masterful will from the forests, parklands, and steppes. The human spirit had at last rebelled altogether against the blind obedience of the common life; it was seeking . . . to achieve a new and better sort of civilization that should also be a community of will." Wells regarded the democratic movements of modernity as an aspect of this movement."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outline_of_History
My two 'old' books are Glyn Daniels - The Megalithic Builders of Europe and Grahame Clark - Prehistoric England, and I still love Stuart's Piggotts - The Druids. Flawed or not, initial excitement as history unfolds is something to be treasured ;)
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