Ancient history Books

First published in 2006. This delightful book written in 1892 by a founder of the National Trust is regarded as a classic of high Victorian travel writing. After three journeys to the East, Rawnsley decided that existing guide-books were not sufficiently...

The discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb in 1922 aroused unprecedented excitement in the field of Egyptology. In the tomb of a "colourless youth, who reigned for a few years only" were found unmatched riches, the study of which has led to numerous insights...

The Roman World 44 BC - AD 180 deals with the transformation of the Mediterranean regions, northern Europe and the Near East by the military autocrats who ruled Rome during this period. The book traces the impact of imperial politics on life in the city...

Mariam F. Ayad explores how five women were elevated to a position of supreme religious authority. Drawing on a variety of textual, iconographic, and archaeological evidence, and containing fifty-one black and white and colour illustrations, the...

In this fully revised and updated edition of Roman Pompeii, Dr. Laurence looks at the latest archaeological and literary evidence relating to the city of Pompeii from the viewpoint of architect, geographer and social scientist.Enhancing our general...

Do the Romans have anything to teach us about the way that they saw the world, and the way they ran their empire? How did they deal with questions of frontiers and migration, so often in the news today?This collection of ten important essays by C. R...

Curchin explores how, why and to what extent the peoples of Central Spain were integrated into the Roman Empire during the period from the second century BC to the second century AD.He approaches the question from a variety of angles, including the...

This collection of papers combines important archaeological and textual evidence to examine diverse aspects of religion and society in Roman Palestine.A range of international experts provide an unprecedented look at issues of acculturation, assimilation...

An examination of the cult of Mary in the cultural and religious life of Constantinople in late antiquity in the context of the religious culture of the Mediterranean world and the imperial Christianity of the Roman Empire.

The economies of classical and Mediterranean antiquity are currently a battleground. Some scholars see them as lively and progressive, even proto-capitalist: others see them as static, embedded in social action and status relationships.Focusing on the...

John the Baptist as a Rewritten Figure in Luke-Acts compares the Gospel of Luke's account of John's ministry with those of Matthew, Mark, and John to make the case for the hypertextual relationship between the synoptic gospels.The book is divided into...

This volume offers 18 new studies reflecting the latest scholarship on Latin verse, explored both in its original context and in subsequent contexts as it has been translated and re-imagined. All chapters reflect the wide research interests of Professor...

This book is an exploration of the ideals and values of the ascetic and monastic life, as expressed through clothes. Clothes are often seen as an extension of us as humans, a determinant of who we are and how we experience and interact...

With a novel approach to Aristotle's zoology, this study looks at animals as creatures of nature (physis) and reveals a scientific discourse that, in response to his predecessors, exiles logos as reason and pursues the logos intrinsic to animals' bodies,...

A central figure in both classical and ancient near Eastern fields, Trevor Bryce presents the first publication to focus on Troy's neighbours and contemporaries as much as Troy itself. With the help of maps, charts and photographs, he unearths the...

Apocalyptic Bodies presents a cultural, critical reading of apocalyptic texts and images, using a variety of critical perspectives, including body criticism, ideological criticism and horror and fantasy theories.

This volume explores the fascinating phenomenon of noble death through pagan, Jewish and Christian sources. The cross-cultural approach of this study make it valuable for students and scholars.

First published by CUP in 1989, The Medieval Greek Romance provides basic information for the non-specialist about Greek fiction during the period 1071-1453, as well as proposing new solutions to problems that have vexed previous generations of scholars...

Judaism in the New Testament explains how the writings of the early church emerged from communities which defined themselves in Judaic terms even as they professed faith in Christ. These two extremely distinguished scholars introduce readers to the...

In the period of Roman domination there were communities of Jews, some still in Palestine, some dispersed in and around the Roman Empire; they had to face at first the world-wide power of the pagan Romans and later on the emergence of Christianity as an...

In this work, the first biography of Ptolemy in any language, Professor Ellis charts Ptolemy's extraordinary achievements in and beyond Egypt.

From the middle of the eighth century to the tenth century, almost all non-literary and non-historical secular Greek books, including such diverse topics as astrology, alchemy, physics, botany and medicine, that were not available throughout the eastern...

This volume provides modern, uncensored translations of Aristophanes' Acharnians, Knights, and Wasps. These plays, originally a series, are the world's earliest political satires, and are made available here for the first time in one volume, augmented by...

This is the first volume to attempt a comprehensive overview of the evolution of the 'Arian' churches in the Roman world of Late Antiquity and their political importance in the late Roman kingdoms of the 5th-6th centuries, ruled by barbarian warrior...

The Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy: Perspectives Across the Humanities is an interdisciplinary study of the abiding quarrel to which poet-philosopher Plato referred centuries ago in the Republic. The book presents eight chapters by four humanities...

Since the nineteenth-century rediscovery of the Gilgamesh epic, we have known that the Bible imports narratives from outside of Israelite culture, refiguring them for its own audience. Only more recently, however, has come the realization that Greek...

This book explores the complex relationship between production, trade, and connectivity in pre-Roman Italy, confronting established ideas about the connections between people, objects, and ideas, and highlighting how social change and community formation...

This volume centers on dreams in Greek medicine from the fifth-century B.C.E. Hippocratic Regimen down to the modern era. Medicine is here defined in a wider sense than just formal medical praxis, and includes non-formal medical healing methods such as...

The study of Syria as a Roman province has been neglected by comparison with equivalent geographical regions such as Italy, Egypt, Greece and even Gaul. It was, however, one of the economic powerhouses of the empire from its annexation until after the...

Richard Hingley here asks the questions: What is Romanization? Was Rome the first global culture?Romanization has been represented as a simple progression from barbarism to civilization. Roman forms in architecture, coinage, language and literature came...

This fresh and engaging book looks at each of the Roman emperors from Julius Caesar in 44BC to Romulus Augustulus in AD 476, illuminating not only the manner of their deaths but what their final days tell us about their lives. We also hear how the most...

This landmark book shows how much Victorian and Edwardian Roman archaeologists were influenced by their own experience of empire in their interpretation of archaeological evidence. This distortion of the facts became accepted truth and its legacy is...

The Creation of History in Ancient Israel demonstrates how the historian can start to piece together the history of ancient Israel using the Hebrew Bible as a source.

Understanding the history of Athens in the all important years of the second half of the fifth century B.C. is largely dependent on the work of the historian Thucydides. Previous scholarship has tended to view Thucydides' account as infallible.This book...

F. Gerald Downing explores the teachings of Paul, arguing that the development of Paul's preaching and of the Pauline Church owed a great deal to the views of the vagabond Cynic philosophers, critics of the gods and of the ethos of civic society.F...

The Book of Hiding offers a fluent and erudite analysis of the parallels between the Bible and contemporary discussions of gender, ethnicity and social ambiguity. Beal focuses particularly on the traditionally marginalised book of Esther, in order to...

Land and Economy in Ancient Palestine is a study of the economic crises throughout the Second Temple Period. It establishes that the single factor of the economy which united all aspects of life in ancient society was land.Through study of a wide variety...

It is widely recognized that Roman law is an important source of information about women in the Roman world, and can present a more rounded and accurate picture than literary sources. This sourcebook fully exploits the rich legal material of the imperial...

Since the photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls were released in 1992, there has been an explosion of interest in them. This volume explores the issue of apocalypticism in the Scrolls; how the notions of the 'end', Messianic expectation and eternal life...

The contributors in this book use the most recent research in key areas - the early settlements of Israel, early Israelite religion, Qumran, Jerusalem, early Christian churches - to show that ancient writings and modern archaeology can illuminate each...

Sacred Enigmas assesses the religious and intellectual significance of the Hebrew Bible both as a document of its time and as an important step in the development of thought. It presents the major aspects of biblical religion through detailed literary...