The present volume collects eighteen essays exploring the history of ancient Near Eastern studies. Combining diverse approaches-synthetic and analytic, diachronic and transnational-this collection offers critical reflections on the who, why, and how of this cluster of fields. How have political contexts determined the conduct of research? How do academic agendas reflect larger social, economic, and cultural interests? How have schools of thought and intellectual traditions configured, and sometimes predetermined, the study of the ancient Near East? Contributions treating research during the Nazi and fascist periods examine the interpenetration of academic work with politics, while contributions dealing with specific national contexts disclose fresh perspectives on individual scholars as well as the conditions and institutions in which they worked. Particular attention is given to scholarship in countries such as Turkey, Portugal, Iran, China, and Spain, which have hitherto been marginal to historiographic accounts of ancient Near Eastern studies.

Processes of Cultural Change and Integration in the Roman World is a collection of studies on the interaction between Rome and the peoples that became part of its Empire between c. 300 BC and AD 300. The book focuses on the mechanisms by which interaction between Rome and its subjects occurred, e.g. the settlements of colonies by the Romans, army service, economic and cultural interaction. In many cases Rome exploited the economic resources of the conquered territories without allowing the local inhabitants any legal autonomy. However, they usually maintained a great deal of cultural freedom of expression. Those local inhabitants who chose to engage with Rome, its economy and culture, could rise to great heights in the administration of the Empire.

Only recently have scholars turned their attention to Silius Italicus' "Punica," a poem the reputation of which was eclipsed by the emergence of Virgil s "Aeneid" as the canonical Latin epos of Augustan Rome. This collection of essays aims at examining the importance of Silius' historical epic in Flavian, Domitianic Rome by offering a detailed overview of the poem's context and intertext, its themes and images, and its reception from antiquity through Renaissance and modern philological criticism. This pioneering volume is the first comprehensive, collaborative study on the longest epic poem in Latin literature.

The Sunday Times Top 10 Bestseller Shortlisted for a British Book Industry Book of the Year Award 2016 Ancient Rome matters. Its history of empire, conquest, cruelty and excess is something against which we still judge ourselves. Its myths and stories - from Romulus and Remus to the Rape of Lucretia - still strike a chord with us. And its debates about citizenship, security and the rights of the individual still influence our own debates on civil liberty today. SPQR is a new look at Roman history from one of the world's foremost classicists. It explores not only how Rome grew from an insignificant village in central Italy to a power that controlled territory from Spain to Syria, but also how the Romans thought about themselves and their achievements, and why they are still important to us. Covering 1,000 years of history, and casting fresh light on the basics of Roman culture from slavery to running water, as well as exploring democracy, migration, religious controversy, social mobility and exploitation in the larger context of the empire, this is a definitive history of ancient Rome. SPQR is the Romans' own abbreviation for their state: Senatus Populusque Romanus, 'the Senate and People of Rome'.

The medical literature of ancient Greece has been much studied during the 20th century, particularly from the 1970s on. In spite of this intense activity, the search for manuscripts still relies on the catalogue compiled in the early 1900s by a group of philologists led by the German historian of Greek philosophy and medicine Hermann Diels. However useful the so-called Diels has been and still is, it is now in need of a thorough revision. The present five-tome set is a first step in that direction. Tome 1 offers a reproduction of Diels' catalogue with an index of the manuscripts. The following three tomes provide a reconstruction of the texts contained in the manuscripts listed in Diels on the basis of Diels' catalogue. Proceeding as Diels did, these three tomes distinguish the manuscripts containing texts by (or attributed to) Hippocrates (tome 2), Galen (tome 3), and the other authors considered by Diels (tome 4). Tome 5 will list all the texts listed in Diels for each manuscript in the catalogue. The present work will be a reference for all scholars interested in Greek medical literature and manuscripts, in addition to historians of medicine, medical book, medical tradition, and medical culture.

This book covers the political, diplomatic, and military history of the Aegean Greeks of the fourth century BC, raising new questions and delving into old disputes and controversies. It includes their power struggles, the Persian involvement in their affairs, and the ultimate Macedonian triumph over Greece. It deals with the political concept of federalism and its relations to the ideal of the polis. The volume concludes with the triumph of Macedonian monarchy over the polis.
In dealing with the great public issues of fourth-century Greece, the approach to them includes a combination of sources. The usual literary and archaeological information forms the essential foundation for the topographical examination of every major site mentioned in the text. Numismatic evidence likewise finds its place here.

Roman literature is inherently political in the varied contexts of its production and the abiding concerns of its subject matter. This collection examines the strategies and techniques of political writing at Rome in a broad range of literature spanning almost two centuries, differing political systems, climates, and contexts. It applies a definition of politics that is more in keeping with modern critical approaches than has often been the case in studies of the political literature of classical antiquity. By applying a wide variety of critically informed viewpoints, this volume offers the reader not only a long view of the abiding techniques, strategies, and concerns of political expression at Rome but also many new perspectives on individual authors of the early empire and their republican precursors.

The essays in this volume focus on the relationship between Josephus' Judean and Jewish identity on the one hand, and his life and writings in the context of Flavian Rome on the other. From very different points of view the various contributions to this volume, which is the fruit of an international colloquium entitled 'Josephus between Jerusalem and Rome' held in the city of Rome in 2003, shed light on the complex cultural interplay in Josephus' writings. After examining more general historiographical and literary questions, the volume proceeds to address specific issues of Josephus' presentation of Judaism and of historical 'data, ' "inter alia" about the war of 66-70 CE. A final section deals with the translation and transmission of his works.

J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz compares the personalities and the respective careers of two of the greatest of the early Christian Fathers, Ambrose and John Chrysostom. While the statesmanlike Ambrose ended his life as a pillar of the Western establishment, Chrysostom, the outspoken idealist, died in exile. However, their views and ideals were remarakably similar: both bishops were concerned with the social role of the Church, both were determined opponents of what they called the Arian heresy, and each attracted a dedicated following among his urban congregation. This similarity, Liebeschuetz argues, was due not to the influence of one on the other, but was a consequence of their participation in a Christian culture which spanned the divide between the Eastern (later Byzantine) and Western parts of the Roman Empire. The monastic movement figures throughout the book as an important influence on both men and as perhaps the most dynamic development in the Christian culture of the fourth century.

Sicker explores the political history of the Middle East from antiquity to the Arab conquest from a geopolitical perspective. He argues that there are a number of relatively constant environmental factors that have helped "condition"-not determine-the course of Middle Eastern political history from ancient times to the present. These factors, primarily, but not exclusively geography and topography, contributed heavily to establishing the patterns of state development and interstate relations in the Middle East that have remained remarkably consistent throughout the troubled history of the region.

In addition to geography and topography, the implications of which are explored in depth, religion has also played a major political role in conditioning the pattern of Middle Eastern history. The Greeks first introduced the politicization of religious belief into the region in the form of pan-Hellenism, which essentially sought to impose Greek forms of popular religion and culture on the indigenous peoples of the region as a means of solidifying Greek political control. This ultimately led to religious persecution as a state policy. Subsequently, the Persian Sassanid Empire adopted Zoroastrianism as the state religion for the same purpose and with the same result. Later, when Armenia adopted Christianity as the state religion, followed soon after by the Roman Empire, religion and the intolerance it tended to breed became fundamental ingredients, in regional politics and have remained such ever since. Sicker shows that the political history of the pre-Islamic Middle East provides ample evidence that the geopolitical and religious factors conditioning political decision-making tended to promote military solutions to political problems, making conflict resolution through war the norm, with the peaceful settlement of disputes quite rare. A sweeping synthesis that will be of considerable interest to scholars, students, and others concerned with Middle East history and politics as well as international relations and ancient history.

The Computer Working Group of the International Association of Egyptologists has been in existence since 1983. The group focuses on the efforts of Egyptologists to find creative and useful ways of using information technology to aid in the research and teaching of Ancient Egypt. This volume collects the 16 papers presented during the 2008 meeting on topics including databases, complex systems, 3D modelling, textual analysis systems, the uses of the internet for sharing photographs, and bibliography. This publication provides an essential snapsot of the present uses of IT in the study of Ancient Egypt.

Over the course of the fourth century, Christianity rose from a religion actively persecuted by the authority of the Roman empire to become the religion of state-a feat largely credited to Constantine the Great. Constantine succeeded in propelling this minority religion to imperial status using the traditional tools of governance, yet his proclamation of his new religious orientation was by no means unambiguous. His coins and inscriptions, public monuments, and pronouncements sent unmistakable signals to his non-Christian subjects that he was willing not only to accept their beliefs about the nature of the divine but also to incorporate traditional forms of religious expression into his own self-presentation. In Constantine and the Cities, Noel Lenski attempts to reconcile these apparent contradictions by examining the dialogic nature of Constantine's power and how his rule was built in the space between his ambitions for the empire and his subjects' efforts to further their own understandings of religious truth. Focusing on cities and the texts and images produced by their citizens for and about the emperor, Constantine and the Cities uncovers the interplay of signals between ruler and subject, mapping out the terrain within which Constantine nudged his subjects in the direction of conversion. Reading inscriptions, coins, legal texts, letters, orations, and histories, Lenski demonstrates how Constantine and his subjects used the instruments of government in a struggle for authority over the religion of the empire.

"The Glory of Yue" is the first translation into any Western language of the "Yuejue shu," a collection of essays on history, literature, religion, architecture, economic thought, military science, and philosophy related to the ancient kingdoms of Wu and Yue, in present day eastern China. This book consists of sixteen chapters, together with three additional chapters of explanation written by the compilers in approximately 25 CE. This translation is presented with copious annotations and explanations, linking the concepts discussed with the development of the mainstream Chinese cultural tradition, and draws on both modern Western and Chinese exegesis, as well as archeological discoveries, to elucidate this highly complex and unjustly neglected text.

Greek ethnography is commonly believed to have developed in conjunction with the wider sense of Greek identity that emerged during the Greeks' "encounter with the barbarian"--Achaemenid Persia--during the late sixth to early fifth centuries BC. The dramatic nature of this meeting, it was thought, caused previous imaginings to crystallise into the diametric opposition between "Hellene" and "barbarian" that would ultimately give rise to ethnographic prose. The Invention of Greek Ethnography challenges the legitimacy of this conventional narrative. Drawing on recent advances in ethnographic and cultural studies and in the material culture-based analyses of the Ancient Mediterranean, Joseph Skinner argues that ethnographic discourse was already ubiquitous throughout the archaic Greek world, not only in the form of texts but also in a wide range of iconographic and archaeological materials. As such, it can be differentiated both on the margins of the Greek world, like in Olbia and Calabria and in its imagined centers, such as Delphi and Olympia. The reconstruction of this "ethnography before ethnography" demonstrates that discourses of identity and difference played a vital role in defining what it meant to be Greek in the first place long before the fifth century BC. The development of ethnographic writing and historiography are shown to be rooted in this wider process of "positioning" that was continually unfurling across time, as groups and individuals scattered the length and breadth of the Mediterranean world sought to locate themselves in relation to the narratives of the past. This shift in perspective provided by The Invention of Greek Ethnography has significant implications for current understanding of the means by which a sense of Greek identity came into being, the manner in which early discourses of identity and difference should be conceptualized, and the way in which so-called "Great Historiography," or narrative history, should ultimately be interpreted.

The period from the departure of the Romans through to the coming of the Vikings saw the gradual conversion of the peoples of the British Isles to Christianity and (with the exception of Ireland) the redrawing of the ethnic and political map of the islands. The chapters in this volume analyse in turn the different nationalities and kingdoms that existed in the British Isles during this period, the process of their conversion to Christianity, the development of art and of a written culture and the interaction between this written culture and the societies of the day. Moving away from the pattern of histories constructed on the basis of later nation states, this volume takes Britain and Ireland as a whole, so as to understand them better as they were at the time and avoid anachronistic divisions from a later era. It is an approach that allows the volume to give greater weight to the important religious, intellectual and artistic developments and interactions of the period, which normally crossed national boundaries at this time.

This is the eighth volume of Babel und Bibel, an annual of ancient Near Eastern, Old Testament, and Semitic studies. The principal goal of the annual is to reveal the inherent relationship between Assyriology, Semitics, and biblical studies-a relationship that our predecessors comprehended and fruitfully explored but that is often neglected today. The title Babel und Bibel is intended to point to the possibility of fruitful collaboration among the three disciplines, in an effort to explore the various civilizations of the ancient Near East. This volume is a festschrift for Joachim Krecher, Professor of Assyriology in the Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat Munster. Krecher is best known, perhaps, for his seminal Sumerische Kultlyrik, published already in 1966. This compendium includes 17 essays by friends and colleagues, all focusing on Sumerian language and literature.