This book presents a new model for understanding the collection of ancient kingdoms that surrounded the northeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea from the Cilician Plain in the west to the upper Tigris River in the east, and from Cappadocia in the north to western Syria in the south, during the Iron Age of the ancient Near East (ca. 1200 to 600 BCE). Rather than presenting them as homogenous ethnolinguistic communities like "the Aramaeans" or "the Luwians" living in neatly bounded territories, this book sees these polities as being fundamentally diverse and variable, distinguished by demographic fluidity and cultural mobility. The Syro-Anatolian City-States sheds new light via an examination of a host of evidentiary sources, including archaeological site plans, settlement patterns, visual arts, and historical sources. Together, these lines of evidence reveal a complex fusion of cultural traditions that is nevertheless distinctly recognizable unto itself. This book is the first to specifically characterize the Iron Age city-states of southeastern Turkey and northern Syria, arguing for a unified cultural formation characterized above all by diversity and mobility and that can be referred to as the "Syro-Anatolian Culture Complex."

The ancient Israelites lived among many nations, and knowing about the people and culture of these nations can enhance understanding of the Old Testament. Peoples of the Old Testament World provides up-to-date descriptions of the people groups who interacted with and influenced ancient Israel.
Detailed accounts by specialists cover each group's origin, history, rulers, architecture, art, religion, and contacts with biblical Israel.

What are the interrelationships between the language of rhetoric and the code of imperial images, from Constantine to Theodosius? How are imperial images shaped by the fact that they were produced and promoted at the behest of the emperor? Nine contributors from Spain, Italy, the U.K. and the Netherlands will guide the reader about these issues by analyzing how imperial power was articulated and manipulated by means of literary strategies and iconographic programmes. The authors scrutinize representations from Constantine to Julian and from the Valentinians to Theodosius by considering material culture and texts as interconnected sources that engaged with and reacted to each other.

While researching for my book about the Indian Air Force Himalayan Eagle - The Story of the Indian Air Force, I came across some very interesting details about the military/warrior traditions of India that seemed at odds with the general image of a country thought to be spiritual and pacifist - the Buddha and "Mahatma" Gandhi immediately spring to mind in this context. The details were intriguing enough for me to embark upon another ambitious project - to gather together and collate the data available on this Indian warrior tradition and its resurgence in modern-day India. This work is the presentation of certain pertinent details that are available in the open sources but told in a comprehensive, objective and readable form so that an interested reader gains a better understanding of India's little-known martial and warrior history! It is a narrative of the warrior/military traditions of India going back to its pre-Vedic roots and covers the birth of the Indian warrior caste, the Kshatriyas. How these warriors dominated among the empire builders, and how their pre-eminence was superseded by civilian rule, a change in the political scene of India that was to have ramifications from the 10th to 20th century CE. The title chosen for this work may confuse those readers who are aware that the emperor Ashoka eschewed violence for pacificism as a Buddhist. The lions in the title refer to the four represented on the Ashoka pillars at Sarnath, each facing to the points of the compass and which are symbolic of the present-day warriors of the country, the Indian armed forces, guarding against intrusions from any point.

This volume approaches the broad topic of wonder in the works of Tacitus, encompassing paradox, the marvellous and the admirable. Recent scholarship on these themes in Roman literature has tended to focus on poetic genres, with comparatively little attention paid to historiography: Tacitus, whose own judgments on what is worthy of note have often differed in interesting ways from the preoccupations of his readers, is a fascinating focal point for this complementary perspective. Scholarship on Tacitus has to date remained largely marked by a divide between the search for veracity - as validated by modern historiographical standards - and literary approaches, and as a result wonders have either been ignored as unfit for an account of history or have been deprived of their force by being interpreted as valid only within the text. While the modern ideal of historiographical objectivity tends to result in striving for consistent heuristic and methodological frameworks, works as varied as Tacitus' Histories, Annals and opera minora can hardly be prefaced with a statement of methodology broad enough to escape misrepresenting their diversity. In our age of specialization a streamlined methodological framework is a virtue, but it should not be assumed that Tacitus had similar priorities, and indeed the Histories and Annals deserve to be approached with openness towards the variety of perspectives that a tradition as rich as Latin historiographical prose can include within its scope. This collection proposes ways to reconcile the divide between history and historiography by exploring contestable moments in the text that challenge readers to judge and interpret for themselves, with individual chapters drawing on a range of interpretive approaches that mirror the wealth of authorial and reader-specific responses in play.

This collection of essays sheds new light on the relationship between two of the main drivers of intellectual discourse in ancient Greece: the epic tradition and the Sophists. The contributors show how throughout antiquity the epic tradition proved a flexible instrument to navigate new political, cultural, and philosophical contexts. The Sophists, both in the Classical and the Imperial age, continuously reconfigured the value of epic poetry according to the circumstances: using epic myths allowed the Sophists to present themselves as the heirs of traditional education, but at the same time this tradition was reshaped to encapsulate new questions that were central to the Sophists' intellectual agenda. This volume is structured chronologically, encompassing the ancient world from the Classical Age through the first two centuries AD. The first chapters, on the First Sophistic, discuss pivotal works such as Gorgias' Encomium of Helen and Apology of Palamedes, Alcidamas' Odysseus or Against the Treachery of Palamedes, and Antisthenes' pair of speeches Ajax and Odysseus, as well as a range of passages from Plato and other authors. The volume then moves on to discuss some of the major works of literature from the Second Sophistic dealing with the epic tradition. These include Lucian's Judgement of the Goddesses and Dio Chrysostom's orations 11 and 20, as well as Philostratus' Heroicus and Imagines.

This book provides an updated view of our knowledge about Phrygian, an Indo-European language attested to have been spoken in Anatolia between the 8th century BC and the Roman Imperial period. Although a linguistic and epigraphic approach is the core of the book, it covers all major topics of research on Phrygian: the historical and archaeological contexts in which the Phrygian texts were found, a comprehensive grammar with diachronic and comparative remarks, an overview of the linguistic contacts attested for Phrygian, a discussion about its position within the Indo-European language family, a complete lexicon and index of the Phrygian inscriptions, a study of the Phrygian glosses and a complete, critical catalogue of the Phrygian inscriptions with new readings and interpretations.

Technical automation - the ability of man-made (or god-made) objects to move and act autonomously - is not just the province of engineering or science fiction. In this book, Maria Gerolemou, by taking as her starting point the close semantic and linguistic relevance of technical automation to natural automatism, demonstrates how ancient literature, performance and engineering were often concerned with the way nature and artifice interacted. Moving across epic, didactic, tragedy, comedy, philosophy and ancient science, this is a brilliant assembly of evidence for the power of 'automatic theatre' in ancient literature. Gerolemou starts with the earliest Greek literature of Homer and Hesiod, where Hephaestus' self-moving artefacts in the Iliad reflect natural forces of motion and the manufactured Pandora becomes an autonomous woman. Her second chapter looks at Greek drama, where technical automation is used to augment and undermine nature not only through staging and costume but also in plot devices where statues come to life and humans behave as automatic devices. In the third chapter, Gerolemou considers how the philosophers of the 4th century BCE and the engineers of the Hellenistic period with their mechanical devices contributed to a growing dialogue around technical automation and how it could help its audience glance and marvel at the hidden mechanisms of self-motion. Finally, the book explores the ways technical automation is employed as an ekphrastic technique in late antiquity and early Byzantium.