How long does it take to read War Before Civilization?
Lawrence H. Keeley
War Before Civilization by Lawrence H. Keeley takes about 4 hours 45 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 45 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1996. 259 pages, about 71,225 words.
10 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 7 hours 55 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 45 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 58 minutes |
The page count is the median across 4 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The myth of the peace-loving "noble savage" is persistent and pernicious. Indeed, for the last fifty years, most popular and scholarly works have agreed that prehistoric warfare was rare, harmless, unimportant, and, like smallpox, a disease of civilized societies alone. Prehistoric warfare, according to this view, was little more than a ritualized game, where casualties were limited and the effects of aggression relatively mild. Lawrence Keeley's groundbreaking War Before Civilization offers a devastating rebuttal to such comfortable myths and debunks the notion that warfare was introduced to primitive societies through contact with civilization (an idea he denounces as "the pacification of the past"). Building on much fascinating archeological and historical research and offering an astute comparison of warfare in civilized and prehistoric societies, from modern European nations to the Plains Indians of North America, War Before Civilization convincingly demonstrates that prehistoric warfare was in fact more deadly, more frequent, and more ruthless than modern war. To support this point, Keeley provides a wide-ranging look at warfare and brutality in the prehistoric world.
Subjects: Fortification, Prehistoric, Prehistoric Fortification, Prehistoric Weapons, Prehistorico Warfare, Warfare, Prehistorico, Weapons, Prehistoric
