Ancient Society is the representative work of the American ethnologist and anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, originally published in 1877; its full title may be rendered as Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization. Morgan conducted long-term intensive study of the social institutions of the Iroquois Indians and extensively gathered historical materials on ancient peoples such as the Greeks, Romans, and Aztecs, on which basis he attempted to sketch an overall picture of human society's evolution from lower to higher stages. The book is divided into four parts. Part One takes inventions and discoveries as its thread, discussing several stages of human cultural development and using the arts of subsistence as the measure of progress; Part Two discusses the development of the idea of government, proceeding from social organization based on kinship to the Iroquois gens, phratry, tribe, and confederacy, then extending to the Greek and Roman gentile systems and the establishment of political society, showing how the gentile system moved toward the state; Part Three traces the development of the idea of the family, proposing successive family forms—consanguine, punaluan, syndyasmian and patriarchal, and monogamian—and inferring early forms of marriage and family from systems of kinship terminology; Part Four discusses the development of the idea of property, using three laws of inheritance as examples to analyze the evolution of property from common to private ownership and the process by which the gentile system disintegrated and classes and the state arose. The Commercial Press translation, by Yang Dongchun, Ma Yong, and Ma Ju, was made from a relatively complete original, restores the citations of Greek and Roman classical works in the notes, and arranges chapters according to the original format; it is the most widely circulated version in the Chinese-speaking world. The book profoundly influenced the historical theories of Marx and Engels; Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State took it as an important basis. Today it is both a classic in the history of anthropology and an important text for understanding nineteenth-century social evolutionism.
这是理解“人类从何而来、氏族与家庭如何演变为国家”时绕不开的一本书。摩尔根并非在书斋里凭空推演：他在易洛魁人中间生活多年，被部落接纳为成员，书中的氏族、胞族、联盟材料正来自这些实地经验，这让19世纪的进化论叙述有了少见的实证底色。 商务印书馆这个译本的价值在于“全”。旧译本所据底本删除过古典著作引文，章节分目也是后加的，读起来常有文不对题之感；杨东莼、马雍、马巨的译本则恢复了注释引文、调整了体例，读者能真正看到摩尔根如何用希腊、罗马的史料搭建论证。对研究者而言，译名对照表与详尽的注释同样是可用的工具。 当然，书中的单线进化框架、分期标准乃至部分民族志材料，后世已有大量修正与批评。但这恰恰是它的另一重意义：只有读懂摩尔根，才能明白20世纪人类学为何要反叛他。作为“汉译世界学术名著丛书”中的经典，它值得以“读一本书、看一个学科起点”的心态来读。
The Commercial Press is a publisher known for classic works and academic publishing, with titles spanning Eastern philosophy, foreign literature, world history, social culture, and applied psychology. Its list includes classical commentaries such as Zhu Xi's Collected Commentaries on the Analects and Wang Bi's Commentary on the Zhouyi, as well as modern annotated translations like Zhuangzi with Modern Notes and Translation. In foreign literature it offers War and Peace and Crime and Punishment, while in world history it carries Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Applied psychology is represented by Irvin D. Yalom's Existential Psychotherapy, and ethical texts include a Greek-Chinese-English edition of the Nicomachean Ethics. Its authors and translators include Zhu Xi, Wang Bi, Yalom, Braudel, and translators such as Huang Zheng, Zhang Yiling, Shen Dongyu, and Tang Jialong, balancing the editing of original texts with academic translation.
