Ancient Rome traces the history of the Roman Empire from the earliest archeological remains in Italy to the Merovingian line of Frankish kings in the ninth century who claimed to replace the Western Roman Empire with a Christian version. The book consists of 41 chapters and the epilogue, which adds a cursory treatment of the Byzantine Empire until the fall of Constantinople to Ottoman Turks in 1453. This is a quote from a comparative civilizations review by by Adán Stevens-Díaz