Gombrich's Little History Of The World Chapter 1 Analysis

Historiographical Critique of Gombrich’s Little History of the World’s Chapter 3
Written in 1935 in Vienna, Austria by Ernst Gombrich, A Little History of the World, remains a great history book that chronicles the story of human development from the caveman inventions to the post-World War 1 world. At first, the book was written and published in German but was later translated into English. In a total of forty chapters, the author describes the underlying principles and beliefs of the major world religions, as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. In the logically related chapters, Ernst Gombrich incorporates these religious ideas into the book’s narrative presentation of historical events and people (Redford, 2014). Even though the book mainly targets young readers, it deeply focuses, in great detail, the sweep of human experience across the centuries, the depth of its frailty, and the extent of human achievement. While writing the book, Ernst chose his themes basing on
According to Ernst Gombrich, ancient Egyptians were immensely proud of their writings. In the chapter, the author brings to awareness how difficult it was for anyone to learn these hieroglyphs. Gombrich equates the difficulty experienced in learning these hieroglyphs to the complexity of constructing a picture puzzle. Based on the ancient Egyptians’ use of these hieroglyphs to represents certain gods and events in their society, Gombrich suggests that this provided the basis for modern day Christians’ practice of drawing a cross on a name to symbolize the death of a person. Christians still hold onto this belief and practice even to the modern day. In the modern day, deciphering the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs would not be possible without significant efforts exhibited by historical scholars. People in the present day world are able to read almost everything that was written by the ancient