|
Books > History > World history > BCE to 500 CE
Harle focuses on the perennial issue of social order by
providing a comparative analysis of ideas on social order in the
classical Chinese political philosophy, the Indian epic and
political literature, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, the classical Greek
and Roman political thought, and early Christianity. His analysis
is based on the religious, political, and literary texts that
represent their respective civilizations as both their major
achievements and sources of shared values.
Harle maintains that two major approaches to establishing and
maintaining social order exist in all levels and types of social
relations: moral principles and political power. According to the
principle-oriented approaches, social order will prevail if and
when people follow strict moral principles. According to the
contending power-oriented approach, orderly relations can only be
based on the application of power by the ruler over the ruled. The
principle-oriented approaches introduce a comprehensive civil
society of individuals; the power-oriented approaches give major
roles to the city-state, its government and relationships between
them. The question of morality can be recognized also within the
power-oriented approaches which either submit politics to morality
or maintain that politics must be taken as nothing else than
politics. This book is a contribution to peace and international
studies as well as political theory and international
relations.
'Kosmos' is the word the ancient Greeks used for human social
order. It has therefore a special application to the Greeks'
peculiar social and political unit of communal life that they
called the 'polis'. Of the many hundreds of such units in classical
Greece the best documented and the most complex was democratic
Athens. The purpose of this collective 1998 volume is to
re-evaluate the foundations of classical Athens' highly successful
experiment in communal social existence. Topics addressed include
religion and ritualization, political friendship and enmity, gender
and sexuality, sports and litigation, and economic and symbolic
exchange. The book aims to make a major contribution, theoretical
as well as empirical, towards understanding how the social order of
community life may be sustained and enhanced.
There are few studies that deal with an overall treatment of the
Hittite administrative system, and various other works on its
offices and officials have tended to be limited in scope, focusing
only on certain groups or certain time periods. This book provides
a comprehensive investigation of the administrative organization of
the Hittite state throughout its history (ca. 1650-1180 BCE) with
particular emphasis on the state offices and their officials.
Bringing together previous works and updating with data recovered
in recent years, the study presents a detailed survey of the high
offices of the state, a prosopographical study of about 140 high
officials, and a theoretical analysis of the Hittite administration
in respect to factors such as hierarchy, kinship, and diachronical
changes.
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.
The notion of the "Silk Road" that the German geographer Ferdinand
von Richthofen invented in the 19th century has lost attraction to
scholars in light of large amounts of new evidence and new
approaches. The handbook suggests new conceptual and methodological
tools for researching ancient economic exchange in a global
perspective with a strong focus on recent debates on the nature of
pre-modern empires. The interdisciplinary team of Chinese, Indian
and Graeco-Roman historians, archaeologists and anthropologists
that has written this handbook compares different forms of economic
development in agrarian and steppe regions in a period of
accelerated empire formation during 300 BCE and 300 CE. It
investigates inter-imperial zones and networks of exchange which
were crucial for ancient Eurasian connections. Volume I provides a
comparative history of the most important empires forming in
Northern Africa, Europe and Asia between 300 BCE and 300 CE. It
surveys a wide range of evidence that can be brought to bear on
economic development in the these empires, and takes stock of the
ways academic traditions have shaped different understandings of
economic and imperial development as well as Silk-Road exchange in
Russia, China, India and Western Graeco-Roman history.
The consulate was the focal point of Roman politics. Both the
ruling class and the ordinary citizens fixed their gaze on the
republic's highest office - to be sure, from different perspectives
and with differing expectations. While the former aspired to the
consulate as the defining magistracy of their social status, the
latter perceived it as the embodiment of the Roman state. Holding
high office was thus not merely a political exercise. The consulate
prefigured all aspects of public life, with consuls taking care of
almost every aspect of the administration of the Roman state. This
multifaceted character of the consulate invites a holistic
investigation. The scope of this book is therefore not limited to
political or constitutional questions. Instead, it investigates the
predominant role of the consulate in and its impact on, the
political culture of the Roman republic.
The use of writing in the development of Greek law was unique. In
this comparative study Professor Gagarin shows the reader how Greek
law developed and explains why it became so different from the
legal systems with which most legal historians are familiar. While
other early communities wrote codes of law for academic or
propaganda purposes, the Greeks used writing extensively to make
their laws available to a relatively large segment of the
community. On the other hand, the Greeks made little use of writing
in litigation whereas other cultures used it extensively in this
area, often putting written documents at the heart of the judicial
process. Greek law thereby avoided becoming excessively technical
and never saw the development of a specialised legal profession.
This book will be of interest to those with an interest in the
history of law, as well as ancient historians.
The present volume collects current research on manuscripts written
in the demotic language, which have recently been discovered in
excavations or which can be found in museums worldwide. The
manuscripts' topics range from religion, law, and literature
through ancient Egyptian linguistics to the history of economics as
well as social history. Featured articles were first presented at
the International Conference for Demotic Studies in Leipzig.
This sourcebook includes a rich and accessible selection of Roman
original sources in translation ranging from the Regal Period
through Republican and Imperial Rome to the late Empire and the
coming of Christianity. From Roman goddesses to mortal women,
imperial women to slaves and prostitutes, the volume brings new
perspectives to the study of Roman women's lives. Literary sources
comprise works by Livy, Catullus, Ovid, Juvenal and many others.
Suggestions for further reading, a general bibliography, and an
index of ancient authors and works are also included.
This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished
career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin,
provides a wide context in which to consider the rise of "humanity"
as one of the chief modern virtues. A relative of-and also a
replacement for-formerly more prominent other-regarding virtues
like justice and generosity, humanity and later compassion become
the true north of the modern moral compass. Contributors to this
volume consider various aspects of this virtue, by comparison with
what came before and with attention to its development from early
to late modernity, and up to the present.
'Space and time' have been key concepts of investigation in the
humanities in recent years. In the field of Classics in particular,
they have led to the fresh appraisal of genres such as epic,
historiography, the novel and biography, by enabling a close focus
on how ancient texts invest their representations of space and time
with a variety of symbolic and cultural meanings. This collection
of essays by a team of international scholars seeks to make a
contribution to this rich interdisciplinary field, by exploring how
space and time are perceived, linguistically codified and portrayed
in the biographical and philosophical work of Plutarch of Chaeronea
(1st-2nd centuries CE). The volume's aim is to show how
philological approaches, in conjunction with socio-cultural
readings, can shed light on Plutarch's spatial terminology and
clarify his conceptions of time, especially in terms of the ways in
which he situates himself in his era's fascination with the past.
The volume's intended readership includes Classicists, intellectual
and cultural historians and scholars whose field of expertise
embraces theoretical study of space and time, along with the
linguistic strategies used to portray them in literary or
historical texts.
This volume brings together a number of leading scholars working in
the field of ancient Greek mathematics to present their latest
research. In their respective area of specialization, all
contributors offer stimulating approaches to questions of
historical and historiographical 'revolutions' and 'continuity'.
Taken together, they provide a powerful lens for evaluating the
applicability of Thomas Kuhn's ideas on 'scientific revolutions' to
the discipline of ancient Greek mathematics. Besides the latest
historiographical studies on 'geometrical algebra' and 'premodern
algebra', the reader will find here some papers which offer new
insights into the controversial relationship between Greek and
pre-Hellenic mathematical practices. Some other contributions place
emphasis on the other edge of the historical spectrum, by exploring
historical lines of 'continuity' between ancient Greek, Byzantine
and post-Hellenic mathematics. The terminology employed by Greek
mathematicians, along with various non-textual and material
elements, is another topic which some of the essays in the volume
explore. Finally, the last three articles focus on a traditionally
rich source on ancient Greek mathematics; namely the works of Plato
and Aristotle.
The book covers Egyptian history from the Predynastic to the late
Roman Period. It also introduces early contemporary literary
references to ancient Egypt and uses a number of theoretical
approaches to interrogate the archaeological and textual data.
This book investigates the issue of the singularity versus the
multiplicity of ancient Near Eastern deities who are known by a
common first name but differentiated by their last names, or
geographic epithets. It focuses primarily on the Istar divine names
in Mesopotamia, Baal names in the Levant, and Yahweh names in
Israel, and it is structured around four key questions: How did the
ancients define what it meant to be a god - or more pragmatically,
what kind of treatment did a personality or object need to receive
in order to be considered a god by the ancients? Upon what bases
and according to which texts do modern scholars determine when a
personality or object is a god in an ancient culture? In what ways
are deities with both first and last names treated the same and
differently from deities with only first names? Under what
circumstances are deities with common first names and different
last names recognizable as distinct independent deities, and under
what circumstances are they merely local manifestations of an
overarching deity? The conclusions drawn about the singularity of
local manifestations versus the multiplicity of independent deities
are specific to each individual first name examined in accordance
with the data and texts available for each divine first name.
Egyptologist Gerald Massey challenged readers in A Book of the
Beginnings to consider the argument that Egypt was the birthplace
of civilization and that the widespread monotheistic vision of man
and the metaphysical was, in fact, based on ancient Egyptian
mythos. In The Natural Genesis, Massey delivers a sequel, delving
deeper into his compelling polemic. Volume II provides detailed
discourse on the Egyptian origin of the delicate components of the
monotheistic creed. With his agile prose, Massey leads an
adventurous examination of the epistemology of astronomy, time, and
Christology-and what it all means for human culture. 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
Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World.
Fragmentary texts play a central role in Classics. Their study
poses a stimulating challenge to scholars and readers, while its
methods and principles, far from being rigidly immutable, invite
constant reflection on its methods, approaches, and goals. By
focusing on some of the most relevant issues that fragmentologists
have to face, this book contributes to the ongoing and lively
debate on the study of fragmentary texts. This volume contains an
extensive theoretical introduction on the study of textual
fragments, followed by eight essays on a wide variety of topics
relevant to the study of fragmentary texts across literary genres.
The chapters range from archaic Greek epics (the Hesiodic corpus)
to late-antique grammarian Nonius Marcellus as a source of
fragments of Republican literature. All contributions share a
nuanced, critical attention to the main methodological implications
of the study of fragmentary texts and mutually contribute to
highlighting the field's common specificities and limitations, both
in theory and in editorial practice. The book offers a
representative spectrum of fragmentological issues, providing all
readers with an interest in Classics with an up-to-date,
methodologically aware approach to the field.
|
You may like...
Indian Art
Robert Weinstein
Hardcover
R478
Discovery Miles 4 780
|