A gripping story of losses and rediscoveries; power plays and heroic journeys; innovations, imitations, and appropriations. Why care about the past? What good are the arts? At every stage, humanity has sought to understand and transmit to future generations not just the “know-how” of life, but the “know-why”—the meaning and purpose of our existence, as expressed in art, religion, and philosophy. Crucially, societies have always been most successful in both know-how and know-why by adopting and remixing the insights of the past and of other cultures. In this expansive one-volume tour of world culture through the ages, Martin Puchner argues that the arts and humanities are (and have been) essential to the transmission of knowledge that drives and undergirds the efforts of human civilization. With magnificent global range and narrative flair, Puchner focuses on a series of dramatic turning points to highlight cultural achievements from Nefertiti’s lost city to the plays of Wole Soyinka; from the theaters of ancient Greece to Chinese travel journals to Arab and Aztec libraries; from an Indian statuette found at Pompeii to a time capsule left behind on the Moon.His book astonishes, informs and delights at every turn.