Notes on Ancient Social History contains five reading notes written by Marx in the period of 1879- 1882.

Since the mid-1970s, Marx has strengthened his research on the pre-capitalist social form and made a lot of reading notes. These five notes are one of them.

According to Marxist theory, the social form of ancient nationalities was determined by two spontaneous social relations, namely kinship and ownership of the means of production commune.

Until the establishment of capitalist society, these two kinds of social relations or their variants existed in all societies, especially in slow-developing societies, and left traces in all aspects of social life to varying degrees.

The basic theme of the five notes in this book is the historical investigation of these ancient social relations.

Marx's timid extraction and treatment of various works he read, especially many of his notes and comments, not only shows how he tried to open up new research fields in his later years, but also reflects the new development of his theory.

This book and Karl Marx's Historical Notes are important historical works of Marx in his later years, but unlike Historical Notes, Historical Notes is a typical historical work, which describes the historical development of ancient Europe with time as the carrier.

Notes on Ancient Social History covers a vast area of Asia, Africa and Latin America except Europe. The content includes philosophy, political economy, history, politics, ethnology, religion, morality and other disciplines; Culturally dabbled in eastern and western cultures, prehistoric cultures and historical cultures; Methodologically, it pays attention to empirical research and emphasizes the overall application of analysis, synthesis, comparison and speculation.

Belonging to the category of social history, it also has a strong color of cultural anthropology and ethnology, so Notes on Ancient Social History is also called Notes on Anthropology or Notes on Ethnology.

At the same time, it is also an extremely important work to study Marx's theory of oriental society and generalized political economy.

Later, Engels according to the "road" in the note? Constant? Morgan wrote Engels' classic book "The Origin of Family, Private Ownership and State" in the book "Summary of Ancient Society".