Civilizations takes the reader forward from the earliest days of human settlement to the civilizations of the New World overthrown by the Spanish Conquistadors. After a brief look at humanity's development as nomadic hunters and gatherers, the story begins with the crucial step taken around 10,000 years ago when some communities began cultivating plants. The settled villages of these early farmers were the forerunners of the complex cities and highly sophisticated cultures that were later to flourish in the emergent civilizations across the world. Following a basically chronological path, the book focuses on the world's key civilizations in each time period, beginning with the primary civilizations in Mesopotamia, India, Egypt and China, illuminating Greece, Rome and their contemporaries and culminating in the states of America, but not neglecting other, less familiar, civilizations.