E. H. Gombrich Books

When I introduce the Stone Age, I begin not with tools or caves, but with imagination. Picture our distant ancestors, living amid wild animals and dense forests, possessing only their hands, their wits, and an indomitable desire to survive. They chipped flints to make tools, tamed fire to keep away ...

From A Little History of the World

From scattered tribes arose the first organized societies. I take my readers to Mesopotamia — the land between the rivers, where farming took root and cities began to grow. For the first time, people built temples, counted harvests, and devised a means to record their transactions: writing. It was a...

From A Little History of the World

When I contemplate the first images ever made by human hands—the horses galloping across the walls of Lascaux or the bison shaped in relief from clay—I sense the birth of a peculiar kind of magic. These early artists were not decorating their dwellings for pleasure. Their work was a means of graspin...

From The Story of Art

Egypt teaches us a different lesson: here, art became the servant of eternity. The civilization of the Nile was obsessed with permanence, with ensuring that human existence might defy decay. Tomb paintings, statues of pharaohs, monumental temples—all were created within a rigid system of forms desig...

From The Story of Art