Showing titles in Ancient

On 8 June AD218, a fourteen-year-old Syrian boy, egged on by his grandmother, led an army to battle in a Roman civil war. Against all expectations, he was victorious. Varius Avitus Bassianus, known to the modern world as Heliogabalus, was proclaimed emperor. The next four years were to be the strangest in the history of the empire. Heliogabalus humiliated the prestigious Senators and threw extravagant dinner parties for lower-class friends. He ousted Jupiter from his summit among the gods and replaced him with Elagabal.

'A groundbreaking reclamation of the forgotten women who slay dragons. A must-read for dragon fans.' Professor Daniel Ogden A seminal chronicle of the hidden history and mythology of female dragon slayers from ancient world expert and author of Goddess with a Thousand Faces Jasmine Elmer. The...

What is our species' greatest invention? Medicine, computers, space travel? Not even close. The innovation that underlies each of our past achievements and those we still aspire to is language. Language is the ultimate invention of Homo sapiens - one that has allowed us to change the physical and social world around us in every conceivable way, and an invention that has fundamentally changed us, as well.

For centuries, the story of Adam and Eve has resonated richly through the corridors of art, literature, and theology. But for most moderns, taking it at face value is incongruous. Author John Walton explores the ancient Near Eastern context of Genesis 2-3, creating space for a faithful reading of Scripture along with full engagement with science for a new way forward in the human origins debate.

A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF 2025, as chosen by Martin Wolf 'Economica is an epic story . . . an important retelling of global economic history that puts women at the centre . . . Bateman is a great storyteller . . . a rare, long-term perspective on gender equality' - Financial Times 'This...

"NOW THERE ARE FIELDS WHERE TROY ONCE STOOD" —OVID During the great migrations of the second millennium BC, peoples from Western Europe-known as Achaeans or Sea Peoples-arrived in the Mediterranean region, either to settle there peacefully or to plunder and raze the land. They brought about...

Despite the turmoil of Arab nationalism and fundamentalism, Middle Eastern wars, and oil crises, the history of the Arab world has been little known and poorly understood in the West. One reason may be that, for more than half a century, there has been no up-to-date single volume work that chronicles the story of Arab civilization - until now.

In just over a hundred years - from the death of Muhammad in 632 to the beginning of the Abbasid Caliphate in 750 - the followers of the Prophet swept across the whole of the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain. Their armies threatened states as far flung as the Franks in Western Europe and the Tang Empire in China. The conquered territory was larger than the Roman Empire at its greatest expansion, and it was claimed for the Arabs in roughly half the time.

Philosophy for busy people. Listen to this succinct account of the philosophy of Plato in just one hour. Plato is still seen by many as the greatest of all philosophers, inspiring many of the finest thinkers through the ages. Indeed, many see all later philosophy as nothing but attempts to...

The tragic story of ancient Greece's last democratic leader and his doomed fight to save Athens from Macedonian domination In the spring of 340 BCE, news arrived that Philip of Macedon had seized a town in central Greece, a base from which he could march on Athens. In the fierce debates about...

How did a remote desert people change the course of world history? In the seventh century AD, the Eastern Roman Empire collapsed—defeated by the rising power of Arabia. How did this happen? And why then? In this gripping new history, Nick Holmes offers a fresh view of the end of the Ancient...

The Four Heavens brings to life the cultural and visual splendor of the ancient Maya, drawing on the oldest indigenous texts of the Americas and the latest archaeological discoveries to present an entirely new history of this spectacular civilization. Renowned historian and archaeologist David Stuart, who has made groundbreaking contributions to the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphics, shows how there was no single rise and fall of the Maya but a series of births and collapses over a breathtaking span of nearly three millennia.

Beginning with the life of Jesus, Robert Louis Wilken narrates the dramatic spread and development of Christianity over the first thousand years of its history. Moving through the formation of early institutions, practices, and beliefs to the transformations of the Roman world after the conversion of Constantine, he sheds new light on the subsequent stories of Christianity in the Latin West, the Byzantine and Slavic East, the Middle East, and Central Asia. 

When the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 368 AD, he changed the course of European history in ways that continue to have repercussions to the present day. Adopting those aspects of the religion that suited his purposes, he turned Rome on a course from the relatively open, tolerant, and pluralistic civilization of the Hellenistic world, towards a culture that was based on the rule of fixed authority, whether that of the Bible, or the writings of Ptolemy in astronomy and of Galen and Hippocrates in medicine. 

The Destruction of Black Civilization took Chancellor Williams sixteen years of research and field study to compile. The book, which was to serve as a reinterpretation of the history of the African race, was intended to be "a general rebellion against the subtle message from even the most...

Explore the dramatic interaction between Judaism, Christianity, and paganism in Rome from the 1st to the 6th centuries. Why did pagan Rome clash with the early Christians? What was it like to be a Jew or a Christian under Roman law? And how did Christianity ultimately achieve dominance in the Roman Empire?Over the course or 24 lectures, Professor Harl enables you to grasp the full historical sweep of this critically important era and its key figures.

In this series of lectures, professor Eric H. Cline delves into the history of ancient Greece, frequently considered to be the founding nation of democracy in Western civilization. Ancient Greece lives on in modern culture, evidenced by an ever-present fascination with the tales of Homer, Greek drama, and the stories associated with Greek mythology. In the rise of Sparta and Athens, people today find a wealth of material for understanding not only ancient Greece, but the modern world.

Jim Clary presents a compelling and riveting digest of beliefs, customs, and mystery in Superstitions of the Sea. Clary focuses on the vast array of strange, mythical, and often comical beliefs of mariners from ancient times to the present. Collecting the various topics for years, Clary found that maritime superstition was weaved throughout every fabric of his study. The folklore was so interesting that it often lured him far away from his subject search and held him spellbound for hours at a time.

Towards the middle of the third century BC, the Hellenistic kingdoms were near their peak. In terms of population, economy, and military power, each was vastly superior to Rome, not to mention in fields such as medicine, architecture, science, philosophy, and literature. But over the next two and a half centuries, Rome would eventually conquer these kingdoms while adopting so much of Hellenistic culture that the resultant hybrid is known as "Graeco-Roman." In Greece Against Rome, Philip Matyszak relates this epic tale from the Hellenistic perspective.

How did human societies scale up from small, tight-knit groups of hunter-gatherers to the large, anonymous, cooperative societies of today - even though anonymity is the enemy of cooperation? How did organized religions with "Big Gods" - the great monotheistic and polytheistic faiths - spread to colonize most minds in the world? In Big Gods, Ara Norenzayan makes the surprising and provocative argument that these fundamental puzzles about the origins of civilization are one and the same, and answer each other.