Atlantis and the Game of Time - K M Alford

Their goal is a single culture, a single history, threatening to obliterate all others, with peace forged only through oppression. From the dingy annals of human prehistory, a new culture emerges. Like the Atlantians, they too can travel through time, but these are no passive, desk-soft anthropologists, and they will not be satisfied with coexistence. They desire to absorb, to assimilate, and will crush any civilisation that stands against them.... The Atlantians know the price of complicity is too high; they will not risk the annihilation of human advancement, culture, art, and freedom. Instead, they send their overworked operative, Professor Lokyne, and a select group of book-loving, academic activists to face this new enemy. Atlantis's only hope is that they can employ their research and cultural integration skills to study their new enemy, find a weakness, and then strike from within. Only then can they hope to bring down this parasitic new civilisation and return the flow of time to its normal course. In this fast-paced, exquisitely detailed adventure, we follow the trepidatious group as it struggles across time and culture from ancient Egypt and Babylon, to China and beyond. Alford expertly explores equality and the injustice inherent when one culture seeks to extinguish another.