One of our sons called one night. He had been reading a book about knights to his son. Our son wanted to know the name of another book about knights that we had read to him when he was a boy. Duh! How were we supposed to remember one specific book from years and years ago? We kicked around several books on King Arthur and his knights but that wasn't it. We three agreed to think about it and call back if and when we came up with it - but not at four o'clock in the morning! That is the usual time for obscure items to pop into our heads.

I spent some time the next day looking up "knights" and ran across plenty of stuff I never knew before even at my advanced age. That is how this all got started. I wrote our son a long letter about every knight I found. He called again one night and said he remembered it was "Ivanhoe". I had not found Ivanhoe.

One of the things that always happens when I am looking up something, even in the dictionary, before I find what I am looking for I am distracted by something else. My research into "knights" took me off in a number of different directions to look up further. One thing led to another and here it is. This chronicle was actually written backwards in many respects.

More often than not, history takes one country or culture and traces it chronologically. This I have done but I have also tried to weave into these rich tapestries the interactions with other countries or events taking place at the same time period in different parts of the world. History is never linear and isolated from influences outside the borders of a particular group of people.

I make no claims to being a scholar, philosopher, historian, or scientist! My talent lies in an ability to eventually find what I am looking for despite the tangents I take off on in Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, books and tomes written by people who have spent their entire lives in dedicated research. Often my initial search came up with something I thought could not be right. I checked it out in several other sources and sure enough, confirmed that what I had always assumed was true was in fact a misconception. How about that!

So much of what we perceive, think and react to in our daily lives is almost a knee-jerk response. Why? We seldom give a second thought, unaware that those perceptions, thoughts and reactions are often rooted in customs, beliefs and traditions that go back to time immemorial. Their origins are embedded in physiology, religion and, of course politics. Some of them are sound and valid in today's world. Others are just plain silly. Those without sense or reason deserve re-examination and probably need to be discarded from our thinking.

In regard to medical, scientific and statistical data, we hear and see reports thrown about everyday in reference to tidbits from those fields. But do we really know what is meant? Back to the books to find out. It occurred to me that perhaps the general public would benefit from a little deeper explanation of terms and an overview without going into exhaustive technical detail. You are going to find out exactly what DNA is all about the next time you hear about it from crime scenes on TV.

It has been my experience in reading whenever a new name or place comes up in the text, I can't always remember specifically what it was about the next time reference is made to it. I spend time flipping pages back to find the initial passage. In my research and writing I had a terrible time with Persian and Russian names! I have put them in bold face to make it easier for the reader to find the next time that name or place is brought up. You can just scroll back up and there it is in bold face. Also the first time a name, place or term appears in bold face, that is a tip off that those are of some importance and will turn up again.

I learned copious amounts of information I never knew. I hope the reader does too and has his or her curiosity piqued enough to learn more than my brief account here has to offer. There is abundant material available! I have chosen not to write a separate treatise on Greece, Christianity and Judaism for this reason: The body of research material available is so extensive that it would be a daunting undertaking. I get tired just thinking about what a job that would be! And China? Recorded history of its sovereigns begins at least the twenty-eighth through twenty-second centuries BC!

My intent is not to do the reader's thinking for him/her, but to entice the expansion of thought into more extensive exploration.

I cannot resist including my unabashed editorial comments. Other writers do it all the time, whether consciously or unconsciously. I claim that privilege too!

Finally, there are times to be serious and also times to lighten up. When my funny bone is tickled, my natural reflex is to giggle.