With his earlier two series in Egyptology, Gerald Massey turned existing doctrine on its head to argue that not only had Egypt spawned human civilization, but that Egyptian mythology was the basis for Jewish and Christian beliefs. The culmination of his years at this particular intellectual pursuit, Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World is Massey's crown jewel. In this, the most philosophical (in both tone and concept) of his Egyptological works, Massey, ever the intrepid escort, leads a tour through thousands of years of sociological, cultural, and spiritual development, all the while pointing, with dazzling reason and persuasive prose, to a distant, common, Egyptian origin. British author GERALD MASSEY (1828-1907) published works of poetry, spiritualism, Shakespearean criticism, and theology, but his best-known works are in the realm of Egyptology, including A Book of the Beginnings and The Natural Genesis.

When Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire in 30 B.C. after the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, its vast and mysterious frontier lands had an important impact on the commerce, politics, and culture of the empire. This engrossing book -- part history and part gazetteer -- focuses on Rome's Egyptian frontier, describing the ancient fortresses, temples, settlements, quarries, and aqueducts scattered throughout the region and conveying a vivid sense of what life was like for its inhabitants.

Robert B. Jackson has journeyed, by jeep and on foot, to virtually every known Roman site in the area, from Siwa Oasis, forty-five kilometers from the modern Libyan border, to the Sudan. Drawing on both archaeological and historical information, he discusses these sites, explaining how Rome extracted exotic stone and precious metals from the mountains of the Eastern Desert, channeled the wealth of India and East Africa through the desert via ports on the Red Sea, constructed and manned fortresses in the distant oases of the Western Desert, and facilitated the expansion of agricultural communities in the desert that eventually experienced the earliest large-scale conversions to Christianity in Egypt. Elegantly written and illustrated with many handsome photographs, the book will be a treasured resource for archaeologists, classicists, and travelers to the region.

This book highlights and explains consistent differences in both the framing and content of the various pre-first millennium BC law collections of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Hatti. The differences between collections are placed in the broader background of the worldview and political make-up of the societies and individuals that created them, and their historical context.

By introducing a multifaceted approach to epic geography, the editors of the volume wish to provide a critical assessment of spatial perception, of its repercussions on shaping narrative as well as of its discursive traits and cultural contexts. Taking the genre-specific boundaries of Greco-Roman epic poetry as a case in point, a team of international scholars examines issues that lie at the heart of modern criticism on human geography. Modern and ancient discourse on space representations revolves around the nation-shaping force of geography, the gendered dynamics of landscapes, the topography of isolation and integration, the politics of imperialism, globalization, environmentalism as well as the power of language and narrative to turn space into place. One of the major aims of the volume is to show that the world of the Classics is not just the origin, but the essence of current debates on spatial constructions and reconstructions.

In Cataclysm, author Nick Gass takes geology out of the oil patch to authenticate the first twenty-five verses of the Bible. He presents a multidisciplinary exploration, implementing scientific reasoning, to explain some of the ancient history of The Middle East.

Gass discusses how the rise of science has provided a platform for interpreting ancient legends. In Cataclysm, he casts a different light on a number of historical events and considers a variety of topics:

Moses and the first twenty-five verses of Genesis

The ways in which the climate may have provided the stimulus

A different view on the migration out of Africa

The why and how of the Flood

The Garden of Eden as the first Jewish Diaspora

A Second Flood

The Land of Kush

Exploring the Bible and other ancient texts, Cataclysm provides a refreshing look at some of the world's past events and places them in a new multidisciplinary perspective.

Tacitus' Annals is the central historical source for first-century C.E. Rome. It is prized by historians since it provides the best narrative material for the reigns of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero, as well as a probing analysis of the imperial system of government. But the Annals should be seen as far more than an historical source, a mere mine for the reconstruction of the facts of Roman history. While the Annals is a superb work of history, it has also become a central text in the western literary, political, and even philosophical traditions - from the Renaissance to the French and American revolutions, and beyond. This volume attempts to enhance the reader's understanding of how this book of history could have such a profound effect. Chapters will address the purpose, form, and method of Roman historical writing, the ethnic biases of Tacitus, and his use of sources. Since Tacitus has been regarded as one of the first analysts of the psychopathology of political life, the book will examine the emperors, the women of the court, and the ambitious entourage of freedmen and intellectuals who surround every Roman ruler. The final chapter will examine the impact of Tacitus' Annals since their rediscovery by Boccaccio in the 14th century.

Despite the large number of early Greek inscribed epigrams and their historical and social importance, modern studies have focused either on the literary epigram or (especially after the publication of Hansen's Carmina Epigraphica Graeca) on the inscribed funerary epigram. The dedicatory inscribed epigram, on the other hand, has received little scholarly attention. As a result, neither a comprehensive commentary nor a study of the different features (archaeological, epigraphical, literary and linguistic) of Archaic and Classical inscribed verse dedications has appeared to date. This book aims to fill such a significant void by offering an interdisciplinary commentary on all the early Attic dedicatory epigrams, i.e. those dating from the 7th through the 5th century BCE. Since the message conveyed by an inscribed epigram can be understood only by taking into account three different semantic systems - that of art and archaeology, epigraphy, and that of language and style - at the same time, this commentary will combine a description of the morphology of the monuments on which the epigrams were engraved with an analysis of the alphabets and dialects used in the poems, while making observations on stylistic and literary data.

This book, the first of two monographs exploring Thucydides, consists of contributions by world-class scholars on political order, using the Peloponnesian War to explore the historiography and political development of the ancient world. These scholars analyze the original source material of the Athenian order and interpretations of such material.

The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society surveys the landscape of contemporary research and charts principal directions of future inquiry. More than a history of doctrine or an account of jurisprudence, the Handbook brings to bear upon Roman legal study the full range of intellectual resources of contemporary legal history, from comparison to popular constitutionalism, from international private law to law and society, thereby setting itself apart from other volumes as a unique contribution to scholarship on its subject. The Handbook brings the study of Roman law into closer alignment and dialogue with historical, sociological, and anthropological research into law in other periods. It will therefore be of value not only to ancient historians and legal historians already focused on the ancient world, but to historians of all periods interested in law and its complex and multifaceted relationship to society.

John Ludwig Burckhardt (1784-1817), Swiss by birth, travelled to London in 1806 with an introduction to Sir Joseph Banks, leading member of the African Association. Burckhardt thereafter devoted himself to the exploration of the interior of Africa, acquainting himself with the language and customs of Arabic peoples in order to pass through Islamic countries then hostile to Christians. Indeed, so proficient he became in the vulgar Arabic, and in his knowledge of the Qu'ran, that he was not only accepted as a true believer, but praised as a great Muslim scholar. In 1814 he became one of the first Christians to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca. In 1817, while at Cairo, Burckhardt contracted dysentry from which he died. He was buried as a holy pilgrim in the Muslim cemetery there. 'Travels in Nubia' was the first of several works based on Burckhardt's journals to be published by the African Society. First published in 1819, this facsimile edition of a rare work will be greatly welcomed by Arabic scholars.

Historians often refer to past events which took place prior to their narrative's proper past - that is, they refer to a 'plupast'. This past embedded in the past can be evoked by characters as well as by the historian in his own voice. It can bring into play other texts, but can also draw on lieux de memoire or on material objects. The articles assembled in this volume explore the manifold forms of the plupast in Greek and Roman historians from Herodotus to Appian. The authors demonstrate that the plupast is a powerful tool for the creation of historical meaning. Moreover, the acts of memory embedded in the historical narrative parallel to some degree the historian's activity of recording the past. The plupast thereby allows Greek and Roman historians to reflect on how (not) to write history and gains metahistorical significance. In shedding new light on the temporal complexity and the subtle forms of self-conscious reflection in the works of ancient historians, Time and Narrative in Ancient Historiography significantly enhances our understanding of their narrative art.

This book examines the organization of specialized salt production at Zhongba, one of the most important prehistoric sites in the Three Gorges of China's Yangzi River valley. Rowan K. Flad demonstrates that salt production emerged in the second millennium BCE and developed into a large-scale, intense activity. As the intensity of this activity increased during the early Bronze Age, production became more coordinated, perhaps by an emergent elite who appear to have supported their position of authority by means of divination and the control of ritual knowledge. This study explores evidence of these changes in ceramics, the layout of space at the site, and animal remains. It synthesizes the data retrieved from years of excavation, showing not only the evolution of production methods, but also the emergence of social hierarchy in the Three Gorges region over two millennia.

In the last twenty years scholarship on late antique and early medieval Ravenna has resulted in a certain number of publications mainly focused on the fields of architecture, mosaics and archaeology. On the contrary, much less attention has been paid on labour - both manual and intellectual - as well as the structure of production and objects derived from manufacturing activities, despite the fact that Ravenna is the place which preserves the highest number of historical evidence among all centres of the late Roman Mediterranean. Its cultural heritage is vast and composite, ranging from papyri to inscriptions, from ivories to marbles, as well as luxury objects, pottery, and coins. Starting from concrete typologies of hand-manufactured goods existing in the Ravennate milieu, the book aims at exploring the multifaceted traditions of late antique and early Byzantine handicraft from the fourth to the eighth century AD. Its perspective is to pay attention more on patronage, social taste, acculturation, workers and the economic industry of production which supported the demand, circulation and distribution of artefacts, than on the artistic evaluation of the objects themselves.

This volume presents a wide range of literary and epigraphic sources on the history of the world's first democracy, offering a comprehensive survey of the key themes and principles of Athenian democratic culture. Beginning with the mythical origins of Athenian democracy under Theseus and describing the historical development of Athens' democratic institutions through Solon's reforms to the birth of democracy under Cleisthenes, the book addresses the wider cultural and social repercussions of the democratic system, concluding with a survey of Athenian democracy in the Hellenistic and Roman age. All sources are presented in translation with full annotation and commentary and each chapter opens with an introduction to provide background and direction for readers. Sources include material by Aristotle, Homer, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Cicero, Tacitus and many others. The volume also includes an A-Z of key terms, an annotated bibliography with suggestions for further reading in the primary sources as well as modern critical works on Athenian democracy, and a full index.