This book is a definitive architectural study of Roman theatre architecture. In nine chapters it brings together a massive amount of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic information under one cover. It also contains a full catalogue of all known Roman theatres, including a number of odea (concert halls) and bouleuteria (council chambers) which are relevant to the architectural discussion, about 1,000 entries in all. Inscriptional or literary evidence relating to each theatre is listed and there is an up-to-date bibliography for each building. Most importantly the book contains plans of over 500 theatres or buildings of theatrical type, as well as numerous text figures and nearly 200 figures and plates.

Nearly 13,000 years ago millions of people and animals were wiped out, and the world plunged abruptly into a new ice-age. It was more than a thousand years before the climate, and mankind, recovered. The people of Gobekli Tepe in present-day southern Turkey, whose ancestors witnessed this catastrophe, built a megalithic monument formed of many hammer-shaped pillars decorated with symbols as a memorial to this terrible event. Before long, they also invented agriculture, and their new farming culture spread rapidly across the continent, signalling the arrival of civilisation. Before abandoning Gobekli Tepe thousands of years later, they covered it completely with rubble to preserve the greatest and most important story ever told for future generations. Archaeological excavations began at the site in 1994, and we are now able to read their story, more amazing than any Hollywood plot, again for the first time in over 10,000 years. It is a story of survival and resurgence that allows one of the world's greatest scientific puzzles - the meaning of ancient artworks, from the 40,000 year-old Lion-man figurine of Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in Germany to the Great Sphinx of Giza - to be solved. We now know what happened to these people. It probably had happened many times before and since, and it could happen again, to us. The conventional view of prehistory is a sham; we have been duped by centuries of misguided scholarship. The world is actually a much more dangerous place than we have been led to believe. The old myths and legends, of cataclysm and conflagration, are surprisingly accurate. We know this because, at last, we can read an extremely ancient code assumed by scholars to be nothing more than depictions of wild animals. A code hiding in plain sight that reveals we have hardly changed in 40,000 years. A code that changes everything.

This book brings together our present-day knowledge about textile terminology in the Akkadian language of the first-millennium BC. In fact, the progress in the study of the Assyrian dialect and its grammar and lexicon has shown the increasing importance of studying the language as well as cataloging and analysing the terminology of material culture in the documentation of the first world empire. The book analyses the terms for raw materials, textile procedures, and textile end products consumed in first-millennium BC Assyria. In addition, a new edition of a number of written records from Neo-Assyrian administrative archives completes the work. The book also contains a number of tables, a glossary with all the discussed terms, and a catalogue of illustrations. In light of the recent development of textile research in ancient languages, the book is aimed at providing scholars of Ancient Near Eastern studies and ancient textile studies with a comprehensive work on the Assyrian textiles.

In Pilgrimage and Economy in the Ancient Mediterranean, Anna Collar and Troels Myrup Kristensen bring together diverse scholarship to explore the socioeconomic dynamics of ancient Mediterranean pilgrimage from archaic Greece to Late Antiquity, the Greek mainland to Egypt and the Near East. This broad chronological and geographical canvas demonstrates how our modern concepts of religion and economy were entangled in the ancient world. By taking material culture as a starting point, the volume examines the ways that landscapes, architecture, and objects shaped the pilgrim's experiences, and the manifold ways in which economy, belief and ritual behaviour intertwined, specifically through the processes and practices that were part of ancient Mediterranean pilgrimage over the course of more than 1,500 years.

This volume brings together scholarship from many disciplines, including history, heritage studies, archaeology, geography, and political science to provide a nuanced view of life in medieval Ireland and after. Primarily contributing to the fields of settlement and landscape studies, each essay considers the influence of Terence B. Barry of Trinity College Dublin within Ireland and internationally. Barry's long career changed the direction of castle studies and brought the archaeology of medieval Ireland to wider knowledge. These essays, authored by an international team of fifteen scholars, develop many of his original research questions to provide timely and insightful reappraisals of material culture and the built and natural environments. Contributors (in order of appearance) are Robin Glasscock, Kieran O'Conor, Thomas Finan, James G. Schryver, Oliver Creighton, Robert Higham, Mary A. Valante, Margaret Murphy, John Soderberg, Conleth Manning, Victoria McAlister, Jennifer L. Immich, Calder Walton, Christiaan Corlett, Stephen H. Harrison, and Raghnall O Floinn.

IDA MINERVA TARBELL (1857-1944) is remembered today as a muckraking journalist, thanks to this 1904 blockbuster expos. Originally published as a series of articles in *McClure's* magazine, this groundbreaking work highlighted the dangers of business monopolies and contributed to the eventual breakup of Standard Oil. "In this era of financial crisis compounded, and even perhaps enabled, by a dearth of investigative reporting, it is valuable to go back in time to learn from the work of great journalists with the courage to have taken on avaricious corporations and irresponsible business practices. "Perhaps no book demands our attention and respect as much as the one now in your hands. The unabridged edition, long out of print, of Ida Tarbell's study/expose of the history of the Standard Oil Company is an American classic, a model of careful research, detailed analysis, clear expository writing, and social mission. It has been hailed as one of the top ten of journalism's greatest hits." In Volume II, Tarbell explores: [ battles over oil pipelines [ the marketing of oil [ the political response to Standard's domination [ breaking up the oil trust [ competition in the oil industry [ and more. Investigative journalist DANNY SCHECHTER is editor of Mediachannel.org and author of numerous books on the media, including *Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal* (Cosimo). For more, see www.newsdissector.com/plunder. He writes in his new introduction, exclusive to this Cosimo Classics edition:

In The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus, Christian H. Bull argues that the treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus reflect the spiritual exercises and ritual practices of loosely organized brotherhoods in Egypt. These small groups were directed by Egyptian priests educated in the traditional lore of the temples, but also conversant with Greek philosophy. Such priests, who were increasingly dispossessed with the gradual demise of the Egyptian temples, could find eager adherents among a Greek-speaking audience seeking for the wisdom of the Egyptian Hermes, who was widely considered to be an important source for the philosophies of Pythagoras and Plato. The volume contains a comprehensive analysis of the myths of Hermes Trismegistus, a reevaluation of the Way of Hermes, and a contextualization of this ritual tradition.

This is the first synthesis on Egyptian enigmatic writing (also referred to as "cryptography") in the New Kingdom (c.1550-1070 BCE). Enigmatic writing is an extended practice of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, set against immediate decoding and towards revealing additional levels of meaning. This first volume consists of studies by the main specialists in the field. The second volume is a lexicon of all attested enigmatic signs and values.

"In this era of financial crisis compounded, and even perhaps enabled, by a dearth of investigative reporting, it is valuable to go back in time to learn from the work of great journalists with the courage to have taken on avaricious corporations and irresponsible business practices. "Perhaps no book demands our attention and respect as much as the one now in your hands. The unabridged edition, long out of print, of Ida Tarbell's study/expose of the history of the Standard Oil Company is an American classic, a model of careful research, detailed analysis, clear expository writing, and social mission. It has been hailed as one of the top ten of journalism's greatest hits." In Volume I, Tarbell explores: [ the birth of the oil industry [ the rise of the Standard Oil Company [ the "oil war" of 1872 [ the beginnings of the oil trust [ the first interstate commerce bill [ and more. IDA MINERVA TARBELL (1857-1944) is remembered today as a muckraking journalist, thanks to this 1904 blockbuster expos. Originally published as a series of articles in McClure's magazine, this groundbreaking work highlighted the dangers of business monopolies and contributed to the eventual breakup of Standard Oil. As modern-day muckraker Danny Schechter writes in his new introduction, exclusive to this Cosimo Classics edition. He is editor of Mediachannel.org and author of numerous books on the media, including Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal (Cosimo).

Research into the anthropogenic and taphonomic processes that affect the formation of maritime archaeological resources has grown significantly over the last decade in both theory and the analysis of specific sites and associated material culture. The addition of interdisciplinary inquiry, investigative techniques, and analytical modeling, from fields such as engineering, oceanography, and marine biology have increased our ability to trace the unique pathways through which archaeological sites progress from initial deposition to the present, yet can also link individual sites into an integrated socio-environmental maritime landscape. This edited volume presents a global perspective of current research in maritime archaeological landscape formation processes. In addition to "classically" considered submerged material culture and geography, or those that can be accessed by traditional underwater methodology, case studies include less-often considered sites and landscapes. These landscapes, for example, require archaeologists to use geophysical marine survey equipment to characterize extensive areas of the seafloor or go above the surface to access maritime archaeological resources that have received less scholarly attention.

This book surveys four thousand years of pottery production and presents totally unexpected fresh information, using technical and analytical methods. It provides a study of ancient pottery of Jerusalem, from the earliest settlement to the medieval city and brings to light important aspects that cannot be discovered by the commonly accepted morphological pottery descriptions. Thus, third millennium BCE pottery appears to have been produced by nomadic families, mb ceramics were made by professional potters in the Wadi Refaim, the pottery market of the IA.II pottery cannot be closely dated and is still produced during the first centuries after the exile. The new shapes are made by Greek immigrant potters. The book contains a chapter on the systematics of ceramic studies and numerous notes about the potters themselves. H. J. Franken is Emeritus Professor at the State University Leiden, The Netherlands.

This study presents the first comprehensive reconstruction of the 'New Jerusalem' Scroll from the Dead Sea, through integration of all the known fragments into a single entity. Secret ceremonies in the temple are discussed; an architectural reconstruction of the elements described in the scroll is presented, accompanied by computerized plans; a consideration of the tradition of planning the ideal city leads to an examination of the use of metrology, mathematics; and a number mysticism in the plan of the 'New Jerusalem'. A comparison is also made with the traditions of building orthogonal cities in Egypt, Greece, Rome and the Holy Land, as manifested in archaeological findings.>

This book uses gender as a framework to offer unique insights into the socio-cultural foundations of Buddhism. Moving away from dominant discourses that discuss women as a single monolithic, homogenous category-thus rendering them invisible within the broader religious discourse-this monograph examines their sustained role in the larger context of South Asian Buddhism and reaffirms their agency. It highlights the multiple roles played by women as patrons, practitioners, lay and monastic members, etc. within Buddhism. The volume also investigates the individual experiences of the members, and their equations and relationships at different levels-with the Samgha at large, with their own respective Bhiksu or Bhiksuni Sangha, with the laity, and with members of the same gender (both lay and monastic). It rereads, reconfigures and reassesses historical data in order to arrive at a new understanding of Buddhism and the social matrix within which it developed and flourished. Bringing together archaeological, epigraphic, art historical, literary as well as ethnographic data, this volume will be of interest to researchers and scholars of Buddhism, gender studies, ancient Indian history, religion, and South Asian studies.