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Books > History > World history > BCE to 500 CE
In 1869 the late Richard Henry Dana, Jr., prepared a new edition of his "Two Years Before the Mast''. In presenting the first 'author's edition' to the public, he has been encouraged to add an account of a visit to the old scenes, made twenty-four years after, together with notices of the subsequent story and fate of the vessels, and of some of the persons with whom the reader is made acquainted. The popularity of this book has been so great and continued that it is now proposed to make an illustrated edition with new material.
The fourth-century Cappadocian Fathers (Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus) are famous primarily for their contributions to Trinitarian theology. Scholars have also been interested in the Cappadocians' experiments in communal asceticism, which had a lasting impact on Christian theology and monastic vocation. Vasiliki Limberis has discovered a hitherto untold element in the history of these seminal figures. Simply stated, for the Cappadocians all aspects of Christian life were best communicated, understood, and indeed lived, through the prism of martyr piety. Limberis shows that the cult of the martyrs was absolutely central to the formation of Christian life for them and the laity. The local martyr cults were so powerful that the Cappadocians promoted their own kin as martyrs. This ensured that their families, soon after their deaths, would be imitated by the local people, and in future generations they would be honored as saints by all. Limberis documents the rich variety of ways the Cappodocians made use of the martyrs. Of particular interest are the complex rituals of the panegyris, a yearly celebration that honored the martyrs, creating social ties that spanned class barriers. Building projects also honored the martyrs, housed their loved ones, and created sacred space in their communities. Limberis calls attention to the pivotal roles played by the mothers and sisters of the Cappadocians in promoting martyr piety and examines the importance in their lives of material vehicles of sanctity such as eulogia breads and holy oil, and practices such as fasting, vigils, vows and prayers. The Cappadocians were of the generation that bridged the Church of the martyrs and the Church triumphant of the Roman state. This book shows how they reshaped martyr piety to suit the needs of this changing landscape, and made it the basis of a new understanding of Christian identity.
The Oxford History of Classical Reception (OHCREL), of which the present volume is the first to appear, is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have been responded to and refashioned by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the volumes. OHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary 'periods', the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of 'reception' as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers' engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers' own cultural context. When completed, this 5-volume history will be one of the largest, and potentially most important projects, in the field of classical reception ever undertaken. This third volume covers the years 1660-1790.
Hermann Gunkel was a scholar in the generation of the origins of Assyriology, the spectacular discovery by George Smith of fragments of the "Chaldean Genesis," and the Babel-Bibel debate. Gunkel's thesis, inspired by materials supplied to him by the Assyriologist Heinrich Zimmern, was to take the Chaoskampf motif of Revelation as an event that would not only occur at the end of the world but had already happened at the beginning, before Creation. In other words, in this theory, one imagines God in Genesis 1 as first having battled Rahab, Leviathan, and Yam (the forces of Chaos) in a grand battle, and only then beginning to create. The problem with Gunkel's theory is that it did not simply identify common elements in the mythologies of the ancient Near East but imposed upon them a structure dictating the relationships between the elements, a structure that was based on inadequate knowledge and a forced interpretation of his sources. On the other hand, one is not entitled to insist that there was no cultural conversation among peoples who spent the better part of several millennia trading with, fighting, and conquering one another. Creation and Chaos attempts to address some of these issues. The contributions are organized into five sections that address various aspects of the issues raised by Gunekl's theories.
This book explores the development of tombs as a cultural phenomenon in ancient Egypt and examines what tombs reveal about ancient Egyptian culture and Egyptians belief in the afterlife. * Investigates the roles of tombs in the development of funerary practices * Draws on a range of data, including architecture, artifacts and texts * Discusses tombs within the context of everyday life in Ancient Egypt * Stresses the importance of the tomb as an eternal expression of the self
Sacred Thresholds. The Door to the Sanctuary in Late Antiquity offers a far-reaching account of boundaries within pagan and Christian sanctuaries: gateways in a precinct, outer doors of a temple or church, inner doors of a cella. The study of these liminal spaces within Late Antiquity - itself a key period of transition during the spread of Christianity, when cultural paradigms were redefined - demands an approach that is both interdisciplinary and diachronic. Emilie van Opstall brings together both upcoming and noted scholars of Greek and Latin literature and epigraphy, archaeology, art history, philosophy, and religion to discuss the experience of those who crossed from the worldly to the divine, both physically and symbolically. What did this passage from the profane to the sacred mean to them, on a sensory, emotive and intellectual level? Who was excluded, and who was admitted? The articles each offer a unique perspective on pagan and Christian sanctuary doors in the Late Antique Mediterranean.
Brill's Companion to the Reception of Aristophanes provides a substantive account of the reception of Aristophanes (c. 446-386 BC) from Antiquity to the present. Aristophanes was the renowned master of Old Attic Comedy, a dramatic genre defined by its topical satire, high poetry, frank speech, and obscenity. Since their initial production in classical Athens, his comedies have fascinated, inspired, and repelled critics, readers, translators, and performers. The book includes seventeen chapters that explore the ways in which the plays of Aristophanes have been understood, appropriated, adapted, translated, taught, and staged. Careful attention has been given to critical moments of reception across temporal, linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries.
Sex: Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity examines theimpact that sexual fantasies about the classical world have had onmodern Western culture. * Offers a wealth of information on sex in the Greek andRoman world * Correlates the study of classical sexuality with modern Westerncultures * Identifies key influential themes in the evolution of eroticdiscourse from antiquity to modernity * Presents a serious and thought-provoking topic with greataccessibility
An updated history of classical philology had long been a desideratum of scholars of the ancient world. The volume edited by Diego Lanza and Gherardo Ugolini is structured in three parts. In the first one ("Towards a science of antiquity") the approach of Anglo-Saxon philology (R. Bentley) and the institutionalization of the discipline in the German academic world (C.G. Heyne and F.A. Wolf) are described. In the second part ("The illusion of the archetype. Classical Studies in the Germany of the 19th Century") the theoretical contributions and main methodological disputes that followed are analysed (K. Lachmann, J.G. Hermann, A. Boeckh, F. Nietzsche and U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff). The last part ("The classical philology of the 20th century") treats the redefinition of classical studies after the Great War in Germany (W. Jaeger) and in Italy (G. Pasquali). In this context, the contributions of papyrology and of the new images of antiquity that have emerged in the works of writers, narrators, and translators of our time have been considered. This part finishes with the presentation of some of the most influential scholars of the last decades (B. Snell, E.R. Dodds, J.-P. Vernant, B. Gentili, N. Loraux).
The Short Chronicle is an eyewitness report on the demise of the Sasanian and Byzantines Empires and the beginning of the Islamic period. It uses official Sasanian sources and Syriac church documents and mentions for the first time new Arab cities, including Mosul, Kufa, and Basra.
This book is written by E.A. Wallis Budge, who was fanatically interested in Ancient languages. Fatherless and leaving school at 12 he worked as a clerk for W.H. Smith and studied Hebrew and Syriac in his spare time. He became interested in learning the ancient Assyrian language, so spent his spare time in the British Museum where he was allowed to study cuneiformtablets in the office. He often walked to St Paul's Cathedral to study during his lunch break and when the organist noticed his passion for Assyrian he contacted Budge's employer, the Conservative Member of Parliament W.H. Smith, as well as the former Liberal Prime Minister W.E. Gladstone, and asked them to help Budge. They agreed to help him raise the money to attend Cambridge University, where Budge studied Semitic languages, including Hebrew, Syriac, Ethiopic and Arabic, continuing to study Assyrian on his own. Hence, this book is a work of passion, elucidating nine of the most fascinating and important Egyptian legends. These include The Legend of the Creation, The Legend of the Destruction of Mankind and The Legend of Isis and Osiris. This version comes complete with the nineteen original illustrations.
Who was Homer? This book takes us beyond the legends of the blind
bard or the wandering poet to explore an author about whom nothing
is known, except for his works. It offers a reading of the ancient
biographies as clues to the reception of the Homeric poems in
Antiquity and provides an introduction to the oral tradition which
lay at the source of the Homeric epics. Above all, it takes us into
the world of the Odyssey, a world that lies between history and
fiction. It guides the reader through a poem which rivals the
modern novel in its complexity, demonstrating the unity of the poem
as a whole. It defines the many and varied figures of otherness by
which the Greeks of the archaic period defined themselves and
underlines the values promoted by the poem's depictions of men,
women, and gods. Finally, it asks why, throughout the centuries
from Homer to Kazantzakis and Joyce, the hero who never forgets his
homeland and dreams constantly of return has never ceased to be the
incarnation of what it is to be human.
Constantine the Great is one of those rare historical figures who is nearly as controversial today as he was in his own time. Lauded, both then and now, as a military hero who ended the brutal persecutions of Christians and as the first Roman emperor to himself embrace Christianity, Constantine is just as often vilified as a destructive innovator, a coddler of heretics, and a tyrannical hypocrite with the blood of his own family on his hands. The Life of the Blessed Emperor Constantine was penned shortly after the emperor's death in AD 337 by the great Church historian Eusebius Pamphilus, bishop of C]sarea. Though criticized as mere panegyric lionizing Constantine's virtues while ignoring his flaws, Eusebius's Life is nonetheless the most substantial and detailed biography of the first Christian emperor to come down to us from antiquity. The work is also the sole source for several key episodes in Constantine's life--including the emperor's famous vision of a cross in the sky accompanied by the words, "Conquer by this."
Over the last 40 years, the study of word-order variation has become a prominent and fruitful field of research. Researchers of linguistic typology have found that every language permits a variety of word-order constructions, with subject, verb, and objects occupying varying positions relative to each other. It is frequently possible to classify one of the word orders as the basic or unmarked order and the others as marked. Moshavi's study investigates word order in the finite nonsubordinate clause in classical Biblical Hebrew. A common marked construction in this type of clause is the preposing construction, in which a subject, object, or adverbial is placed before the verb. In this work, Moshavi formally distinguishes preposing from other marked and unmarked constructions and explores the distribution of these constructions in Biblical Hebrew. She carries out a contextual analysis of a sample (the book of Genesis) of preposed clauses in order to determine the pragmatic functions that preposing may express. Moshavi's thesis is that the majority of preposed clauses can be classified as one of two syntactic-pragmatic constructions: focusing or topicalization. This meticulous yet approachable study will be useful both to students of Biblical Hebrew and to persons doing general study of syntax, especially those interested in the connection between linguistic form and pragmatic meaning.
Throughout Egypt's long history, pottery sherds and flakes of limestone were commonly used for drawings and short-form texts in a number of languages. These objects are conventionally called ostraca, and thousands of them have been and continue to be discovered. This volume highlights some of the methodologies that have been developed for analyzing the archaeological contexts, material aspects, and textual peculiarities of ostraca.
Quadratic equations, Pythagoras' theorem, imaginary numbers, and pi - you may remember studying these at school, but did anyone ever explain why? Never fear - bestselling science writer, and your new favourite maths teacher, Michael Brooks, is here to help. In The Maths That Made Us, Brooks reminds us of the wonders of numbers: how they enabled explorers to travel far across the seas and astronomers to map the heavens; how they won wars and halted the HIV epidemic; how they are responsible for the design of your home and almost everything in it, down to the smartphone in your pocket. His clear explanations of the maths that built our world, along with stories about where it came from and how it shaped human history, will engage and delight. From ancient Egyptian priests to the Apollo astronauts, and Babylonian tax collectors to juggling robots, join Brooks and his extraordinarily eccentric cast of characters in discovering how maths made us who we are today.
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